US Hipsters ‘Invading Berlin’
The New York Times reported this week how ‘Brooklyn Bohemians are invading Berlin’s techno scene’, in the latest report on Berlin’s underground party scene by America’s increasingly euphoric mainstream media.
Noting how ‘the number of Americans living in the German capital has more than doubled in the last 10 years’ the Times singled out ‘an increasingly powerful cadre of New Yorkers around the club community and electronic music scene’ as driving the cultural phenomenon.
“They are not just living the bohemian dream, revelling in the city’s libertine dance floors and cheap rents,” said the Times, “but taking over sleepy venues, creating their own parties and leaving a significant imprint on the city’s musical program.”
While the American artists featured in the Times’ report all appeared to fit reasonably seamlessly into Berlin’s multi-national nightlife community, a report by the Dallas Observer also this week, suggested more mainstream US revellers could find themselves struggling to assimilate.
Describing how ‘electronic music’s recent surge in popularity comes with serious side effects for underground-party aficionados’, the Observer’s reporter Sarah Stanley-Ayre castigated EDM fans for taking selfies and sexually molesting strangers in a report on ‘Underground Dance Party Etiquette’.
“I had just come in from enjoying a cigarette somewhere around 3 a.m. this past Sunday morning, carefully dancing in the direction of the DJ booth, when I was confronted by an obstacle,” she complained, recalling a bunch of non-hipster revellers who formed a ‘drug-addled conga line’.
“A strange wall of bodies draped over one another in a straight line, dividing the entire dance floor in half.”
US movie director Spike Lee, meanwhile, launched a heartfelt attack on ‘motherfuckin’ hipsters’ pricing out locals from Williamsburg and its surrounding Brooklyn urban areas and then imposing their lifestyles on long standing residents.
“There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud,” the director of Do The Right Thing told an audience at the Pratt Institute for a lecture marking African American History Month.
“My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not (loud),” he added.
“He doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic.” (http://nym.ag/1jzbbJ3 )
Jonty Skrufff: https://twitter.com/djjontyskrufff
