Bouncing from bar to bar in the Mission District gives you a strange sense of being on top of what is cool. The somewhat grungy streets are balanced out by the exotic dive bars that either serve $8 cocktails or $3 PBRs on tap. The bars look aged and lived in but they still remain a haven to twenty-somethings. The jukeboxes blare old Misfits tunes, country music, or a death metal prattle. “Slumming it” seems to be an appropriate term as you walk by welfare hotels on the way to your favorite bar and slip into your preferred clique.

Then the people-watching begins. Scoping out who is hot and not and what category they can fit into is a pastime of every social scene and the Mission bar scenes are no different, where “hipster” seems to be tossed around like hard balls on a pool table. But what is a hipster? Is it a new breed or social category? Is it an identity? Is it a way to slam the guy next to you with less (or better) style? We went out on the streets to find out what the hipster whisper is all about.

Down at Pop’s on 24th Street they say:
Chandra Williams, 22: “In recent times, hipsters have become this thing where you pay a lot of money either to look like trash or you pay very little money to look like trash. So you might have paid $200 for your mangled jeans that are already messed up. There’s nothing wrong with it, I kind of like it. The 16th and Mission look, y’know?
A hipster is a person who listens to “mainstream underground” music.”

Cole Sanchez, 20: “It’s like ‘I just have really neat style and jeans that everyone seems to agree on. We just come here and put our noses in the air.’ I think a lot of hipsters roam the streets. Throw their style for everyone to see.

How much money does a hipster drop on Levi jeans? Or nice sneakers? They can be filthy dirty with holes in them. Like they look awesome and you found them on the street and were brave enough to put them on, but really you spent five days doing everything you can to make them look like that.”

Sarah Sandusky, 22: “It’s an interesting word; a lot of connotations with it. It’s good and bad. It’s hip and trendy. It’s cool. I mean they are cool. They know their shit.”

Sofia Midon, 22: “I was misled by the term hipster for a really long time.
It’s a really expensive bike… really skinny, because when you spend all your money on a bike, you usually don’t have any money to eat.

There’s the older hipsters, which are the hamburger-eyes kind of guys, long hair, photographers, sort of making money doing their art. Most hipsters are artists. Or nonprofits. They’re really into nonprofits.”

At the party across the street they say:

Cameron Jeffries, 22: “They wear double-breasted jackets. I’d like to think that hipsters carry around a microphone with scarves like Steven Tyler, but I don’t think they actually do that. But they should. Yeah, Steven Tyler, but with ‘Obiwan’ cords. ‘Obiwan’ cords, double-breasted jackets, and Steven Tyler.”

Rhiannon Theurer, 26: “Not to sound really asshole-ish, but it’s really me.
It’s this whole thrift-store fairy la-la land. You could buy your clothes at department stores, but they’re very expensive. So why not buy your clothes at thrift stores where they’re really cheap and you can get the same thing? I feel that hipster is both something I hate but could totally be me. Nobody, is like, dude, I’m a hipster.”

Ryder Johnson, 23: “It’s more realized today, now that coolness has become everydayness. It’s an inane way of saying ‘we have nothing real to say, so we obsess.’
It’s more this elitist, subtle thing. Almost more… insidious.”

Meanwhile, over at the Kilowatt on 16th Street:

Melanie Nigh, 27: “It’s trying to fit into a scene. Just to be part of something that you can’t figure out what you want to be a part of. The normal hipster scene is disgruntled about something. I think half of it is an image and half of it’s a feeling, but I think they’re disgruntled because they don’t know what they feel.”

Maureen Matherly, 29: “What it really means is one who is open-minded, but through time the definition has gotten skewed and I don’t think it means what it originally meant. I think it means someone who is open to the new and exciting and the hip, a genre, not necessarily one type of person.”