"So Indie"

Hot Topic is a retail chain with revenues over $750 million a year.  They specialize in clothing and accessories for the youth market.  Have you ever actually been inside these stores?  They are filled with all sorts of weird gothic bizarreness alongside geeky stuff like video game and comic book characters.  You can buy a ‘vampires suck’ t-shirt or a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers hoodie.  This dichotomy between the dark metal-goth-punk stuff and the nerdy stuff is strange.

Hot Topic is making a killing off of teen angst and geek chic.

I am not angsty or Gothic enough to understand the dark stuff, but the nerdy stuff angers me.  Hot Topic takes the things that I love and cheapens and degrades them.  How many people were out walking around wearing Watchmen t-shirts, before the movie came out, who had never read the comic?  There is something wrong with that.

These people were celebrating characters they knew nothing about simply because they were going to be popular.  Not that there is anything wrong with wanting people to think that you are cool and popular.  I have seen Saved by the Bell I know the cool kids get to hang with Zack and AC Slater.  My problem is Hot Topic is trying to portray themselves as anti-establishment and rebellious when in fact, they are as cookie cutter as the kids from Saved by the Bell.  Hot Topic used to sell t-shirts that said “you laugh cause I’m different.  I laugh cause you’re all the same.”  You would see legions of vaguely Gothic kids wearing these shirts, almost as if it was the uniform of rebellion.  Picture 100 people yelling “I am different!”  all wearing the same clothes, shoes, and having the same haircut.  How can you extol non-conformity by making everyone conform?

For us gamers we can get beyond the whole rebelliousnessity, but Hot Topic ropes us in with nostalgia.  Where else can you get an old school NES shirt to let everyone know how much you like the original Zelda?  What is weird is you see people wearing shirts for fads that had passed by the time they were born.  People who don’t even know what an Atari cartridge looks like are wearing Space Invaders hats.  It is like Hot Topic is capitalizing on some strange and false nostalgia.   What does a 15 year old know about Vanilla Ice and ‘Ice Ice Baby?’  I am pretty sure Mr. Robert Van Winkle’s time in the spotlight had faded away long before these kids were even born.   Although if they are fans of his later albums or his time on the Surreal Life then it becomes okay.

I have several Captain America T-shirts.  I wear them with pride because I think Captain America is awesome.  He is far and away my favorite super hero.  I managed to get Ed Brubaker to sign my Captain America omnibus.  I think that I can safely say that I am a big fan.  I see people who have no idea who Steve Rogers even is wearing Captain America shirts.  I am not saying you have to have read every Captain America comic to wear the t-shirt, but I think if you have no idea who the character is then you are just trying to make a mockery of something others love.

Eventually it all gets down to the fact that I am getting tired of people trying to be ironic.  Yes, I see that you are wearing a NES shirt. Your nostalgia coupled with your hipness is an overwhelming combination.  Now if you actually play NES and you love it, and you want everyone to see that you are a fan, that is cool.

But if you have never actually played a NES game in your life, and you wouldn’t be caught dead playing one by the kids at your lunch table, and you just think that you are being ironic and cool…  Well, I have some news for you.  You are not cool.  You are not hip.  You are not ironic.  At best, you are a poser.

This might seems crazy, but why can’t people actually like the stuff that they actually like?  Why are so many people pretending to love something they don’t even care about?  This is not specific to Hot Topic. You can see this phenomenon all over the intertrons.  When did everyone get so caught up in these strange attempts at irony?

I blame Chuck Norris and Bacon.  Maybe not those 2 specifically but the type of phenomenon they represent. They were both things that it became uncool to like, Chuck Norris because he was your dad’s action hero, and Bacon because it coated your arteries in delicious bacon grease.  As people began telling Chuck Norris jokes and constructing AK 47′s out of Bacon they weren’t saying ‘I think Chuck Norris is Rad and Bacon is delicious,’ they were mocking the kind of people that like those kind of things.  As time went on and more people started talking about it,  it became cool to talk about Chuck Norris or to tell people that you like to eat Bacon Explosions and the original irony became lost in the phenomona.

This type of thing seems to happen more and more and seems to be most pronounced among us gamers.  It is like we aren’t even sure what it is we like because we have gotten our heads so spun around with the things we are making fun of that we have forgotten the things we genuinely like.  Think about this the next time you are talking trash about Halo 2 or joking about ‘would you kindly?’  How much of your opinion is truly yours and how much of it is a construction based on what others are saying?  In a way our attempts to be ironic and cool are killing our ability to think for ourselves.

In the end, I don’t even hate Hot Topic because it promotes non-conformity by making everyone look exactly the same.  I don’t even hate Hot Topic because they promote the saddest kind of make believe irony possible.  I hate Hot Topic because they are making a mockery of what people love.  Hot Topic isn’t selling Transformers T-shirts for people who love Transformers, they are selling shirts to the people who are making fun of the type of people who love Transformers.

Maybe I am just a bitter old man like this guy.  What do you think?  Am I wrong for hating Hot Topic?  Does anyone know where I can get a t-shirt with Captain America punching Darth Vader in the face?

Tags: Captain America, hot topic, merchandise, retailers, Saved By the Bell

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 10:18 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.