A How-To for scoring a hipster lover.

New Red Letter Daze columnist Noah Plaue contemplates the Catch-22 of being a hipster.

Attention music listeners: If you have more Animal Collective on your iPod than you do Bruce Springsteen, if you can name ten shoegaze bands, if you were into Vampire Weekend way before anyone else was, then you, my friend, are most likely a music snob. And let me make one thing clear — you need to reform your ways.

Over break I visited friends in New York City, where I had previously lived for five years. During that time I rarely schlepped out to Queens from my Brooklyn apartment — with one big exception: the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Museum summer parties. This time, I decided to take in the museum sans hipster-packed, alcohol-sopped outdoor rave. This trip made me wonder, though, whether beer-goggles were needed to appreciate the often vapid beauty — or more often, politicized disparagement of beauty — that crowds the contemporary art scene.

We are now entering an era in which the average pedestrian holds as much influence on the trends of tomorrow as does the next rising fashion designer, celebrity or pop culture phenom. Fashion trends are covered through a vast web of blogs, maintained by a vast range of writers — both young and old, famous and virtually unknown. This an era governed by modernism and “street cred” — a sort of je ne sais quoi merit system monitored by popular opinion.