Paradoxes (w update!): Cobb Coffee Shop has a reputation amongst the students of my acquaintance as the 'hipster' coffee shop.* This is also the place that once played Usher's "Love in the Club" at 1:00pm on a Monday. Unless "playing Bob Dylan and David Bowie on the regular" = "hipster," my students are pretty clearly wrong.
*So far as I can tell, it's Grounds of Being. But I'm old: what do I know?
UPDATE: I take it all back. They're playing the flying song from The Big Lebowski
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
5 comments:
Both reputations are true. I think it has more to do with the staff themselves than the music they select. Plus, isn't part of being a hipster about being ironic?
At Cobb I sat next to two students who were earnestly discussing Catch-22. I was worried my eyes were going to roll all the way back in my head.
You may be right about the ironic possibility; I hadn't considered that.
Cobb's always been hipster. I thought it had something to do with how much less that job paid than the library ones. Like, you worked in the library to make money, but in Cobb to see and be seen. Also, it's a well-established fact that coffee tastes better if prepared by a hipster.
It's not the patrons; it's all the employees, as Phoebe says. Mere mortals like myself and even confirmed squares like Social Thought grad students frequented it (b/c $1 coffee), but that;s not what made it hipster.
This should be interpreted as part "when I was a whippersnap" old man rant and part hipster-baiting as someone who sort of qualified as one in college and could out-snob the people at Cobb so hard if it really came down to it. Dylan-and-Bowie is a lazy, lazy shorthand for "I'm cool," especially [hipster baiting] when they're best-of compilations. You might as well listen to REO Speedwagon.
On the other hand, they were playing some excellent soul today.
I also find these dynamics interesting because they are radically different than the other universities I've spent significant time at. This really is a strange place.
Post a Comment