Recently I've been thinking about a little item we ran back in May under our In the News heading: the cool-hunting site BuzzFeed named Minnesota the "most hipster state." Clicking through to the page reveals that  BuzzFeed 's rationale for this declaration is both really odd--tongue-in-cheek, actually--and kind of suggestive.

First of all, there was BuzzFeed's curious use of web metrics. They actually ranked states on the basis of the number of searches for the term "hipster" that emanated from them. Minnesota, with a population of about 5.2 million, led the nation in searches for the h-word during some unspecified period of time, with 100--compared to 94 searches from the state of New York, which is home to more than three times our population and which, as BuzzFeed points out, contains a hipster HQ, the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Oregon, Minnesota's amicable rival in various Green domains, including bike-friendliness, was a weak third, with 77.

This method for determining hipsterhood is a wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind of a thing. One Facebook commenter on the page pointed out that a large percentage of the "hipster" searches were for the Twin Cities saloon-hunting site Thrifty Hipster, suggesting that many in the sample might be more interested in cheap booze than the cultural edge. Another suggested--and this is more to the point--that "if they have to Google 'hipster' anything, then they probably are NOT a hipster."

Minnesota Hip: Pro and Con

The comments go on to praise Minnesota as a genuine hipster haven and disparage it as smug and/or dull. The very concept of hipster is debated and debunked, amusingly: "Do all hipsters *know* that they are hipsters?" asks a commenter. "Is that a prerequisite to hipster-ism? Or are people searching for hipster definitions [just to figure out] if that lanky, skinny-jean'd, Buddy Holly-glasses-wearing, PBR-drinking fellow riding a fixie is a hipster? Clearly, this issue is far from settled."

All in all, the comments reveal our always-perilous sense of self-worth out here, our sensitivity to coastal judgments, and our home-brewed version of hipster irony, which is mostly at our own expense. They also ask whether hipsterdom, however you define it, is essentially a pose. Is the kid in the Buddy Holly glasses or the Louise Brooks haircut a genuine social leavening agent, an authentic experimenter, a maker of something new, or merely a member of a "coveted demographic?"

Our Icons

The BuzzFeed folks, as if suddenly taking the whole thing at least somewhat seriously, add to the page a number of proofs of Minnesota's hipster cred:  the booted and plaid-jacketed Lumberjack Look for men, prized in Williamsburg and quite natural in our climate; our healthy theater scene; our farmers' markets; our Bicycling magazine-endorsed bike culture; the movie Juno; and, of course, the music, from Dylan to Soul Asylum to Atmosphere.

It's a familiar list of what a reasonably intelligent and unprejudiced youngish New Yorker might actually know or have read about us. It's a fine list but familiar; I wish we were also famous for the largest Liberian community in America, our wonderful Indian devotional singer Pooja Goswami Pavan, the amazing Mexican and pan-Latin nightclub El Nuevo Rodeo, and a few other things nobody could imagine existing in Minnesota. Are those things hip? I leave it to you to decide.

The Real Issue

But the BuzzFeed list gave me some real food for thought when I mentioned it to our super-savvy co-publisher, Sarah Weimar. She singled out the Lumberjack Look and the farmer's markets and the  bike thing and said, "You know, in those areas we've become hip just by being ourselves."

Sarah's right, of course. We practically invented lumberjacks and their look, starting in about 1850 with the young Maine timbermen who founded Minneapolis; our farmer's markets, and the strong food co-op movement that preceded them, are natural expressions of our rural heritage; and our bike culture evolved naturally and organically over a number of years via a very Minnesota combination of governmental, nonprofit, and private initiative (we'll be telling that story in an upcoming issue).

A Mini-History of Hip

And as for the hip factor, well, here's the thing about it: It has tended to swing between rural and urban polarities since it first emerged in the postwar years. The Beats and the jazz-influenced culture of cool that surrounded them were urban to the core. The hippies morphed the word hip, and the idea, in a playfully rural direction, founding communes in remote places; urban hippies needed big green spaces like Central Park or the part of Golden Gate Park that fronted the Haight for their love-ins. Then punk and hip-hop re-urbanized the cultural edge.

And today? Well, it's complicated. There's certainly no single "counterculture"--how antique the very word sounds. There are hundreds of ways to express alienation and imagine alternative futures, ranging from the in-the-streets violence of the anti-globalist anarchist movement to a whole rainbow of musical subcultures to the tech- entrepreneurial world of restless innovation.

And all, with the possible exception of hard-core anarchism, seem to have found their way rather comfortably into our culture of commodification. But there are both posers and genuine visionaries, opportunists and real culture-changers, in most of these subcultures, and that's been the case since Allen Ginsberg left his job at an ad agency and became both a great poet and a great self-promoter, the first mass-media star of bohemia.

The Practical Is Cool

But nobody can doubt that one major trend in the culture of innovation is a swing back to the rural pole: it has to do with environmentalism's spread throughout the culture, and with a return to the land and to something of the self-sufficiency of our rural ancestors. Urban farming, urban chicken-raising, the crafts boom, restaurants that are linked to local farmers, the farmer's market phenomenon--all are on the cutting edge of our culture right now, from New York to the Bay Area and beyond.

Perhaps it's an instinctive hunkering-down earthward as we face uncertain economic times. Certainly it's paired with technology in fascinating new ways. And it's a natural part of our Minnesota heritage and reality that we are coming to embrace. As Minneapolis restaurateur extraordinaire Kim Bartmann told me when I interviewed her a while ago, many sophisticated Twin Citians who might have soft-pedaled their rural or small-town roots ten years ago are open and proud about them these days.

Our particular fusion of the forward-looking and the down-to-earth is very much in tune with the cultural moment. The practical is cool. One of our hottest ad shops right now, mono, proudly peddles its brass-tacks philosophy and lack of hierarchy--while coming up with amazing tech-driven campaigns for major national clients. Another ultra-hip marketing outfit we've covered, the two-man Element 6 Media, are as literally down-to-earth as you can get--they stamp snow and dust with their clients' logos, and let YouTube carry the message. They're Europeans, but they've internalized our blend of the simple and the smart.

So, in  a certain sense, the "edge" has come to us. Many people in the country at large, including the tech-savvy and future-minded, are realizing that being of the moment, belonging to the 21st century, no longer means "evolving" up and away from the life-world of our forebears. Their world is seeping into and enriching our world, one community garden, one green roof, one heirloom vegetable at a time. As we in Minnesota work to get, and stay, on the edge of innovation in areas like software and med-tech and design, we should also take heart from the fact that the green past has become an integral part of some of the best visions of the future--and we are uniquely qualified to take a leading role in making those visions real. It's hip, it's unhip, it's way beyond both.

Jon Spayde is Managing Editor of The Line.


Photos, top to bottom:

The certifiably hip ad guys of mono fuse simplicity and tech-driven wizardry.

Josh Klauck of the Angry Catfish Bicycle+Coffee Bar epitomizes two-wheel cool.

Beth Fisher, chef at the very farm-friendly Wise Acre Eatery, on a trip to a farmer's market.

The Community Peace Gardens on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis.

All photos by Bill Kelley