Well I count you as hipster from your photo, favourite music etc. But I count you as one of the good ones (as opposed to the shallow ones I complain about). Yes there are people who are just alternative but not necessarily a 'hipster' and wouldn't describe themselves or be desacribed as such, because they wear the 'wrong' clothes or like the 'wrong' music...
I mean the full-on hipsters, think the VBS and Vice magazine crowd. Vice can be funny, but it's so vacuous and hateful. I'm actually a very positive person despite how this is making me sound (it's just that we talk about the government and ethics a lot here!). They own a venue in London which is like hipster-mecca. There you find the guys who (I think) brought skinny jeans back into fashion years ago (which was fine, good to not be tripping over all the time), but now are suddenly all wearing boat shoes (!) as their latest craze, whch is beyond me. So they are differentiating themselves, by wearing the same shoes as rich yachting types? I don't get that, it's mindless. But then, I have a love-hate relationship with this crowd, because I like the music and I like the girls
. I'd just rather be hanging out with the guys from the Woodstock video if I could. I love that spirit of freedom and optimism that they seemed to have back then (am I being nostalgic?).
It seems to me that these are the modern subcultures spawned by the Beats and the hippies that have retained some of the old countercultural ideas: hipsters, alt-folk, trancers, greens, goths, pagan/new age, the fetish crowd, travellers, junkies(?), metalheads, skate/snowboard, maybe rockabillys and posh-hippies (some of the rich are hippy in a retro way). I've made some of these labels up! And I know we're not meant to label, but it makes things easier... in reality many people are a mixture. Actually it's hard to draw the line with what culture is and isn't ideologically too close to mainstream to be counted because the Beats and the hippies did change society in some ways. And there are so many subcultures now, that in the megacity in which I live I have only one favourite bar that I feel is 'me', then a few others where I can get on with the crowd but don't particularly 'belong', then all the other places I avoid. And it keeps on splintering... teenagers today have a lot more names for different groups than there were when I was their age. Society has become highly individualistic and culturally specialised.