Patrick Stickles grew up in Glen Rock, New Jersey, [not directly] across the Hudson River from New York City, Stickles moved from New Jersey to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where his beard and Army surplus jacket blend in much better than they did in Jersey.
The official lyric video flashes a picture of Norman Mailer, a writer from Long Branch, New Jersey, who later moved to New York.
Norman Mailer wrote a famous essay in 1957 called “The White Negro” that (arguably) introduced the idea of the “hipster” into popular culture
He opens it by suggesting that subcultures flourish in cities because people need their sense of identity more – even more in the face of post-war atomic threats – essentially that, if a city got nuked, all its residents would be even more anonymous to someone examining the rubble years later
“For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would he counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked..”
RE: the first verse:
Patrick Stickles grew up in Glen Rock, New Jersey, [not directly] across the Hudson River from New York City, Stickles moved from New Jersey to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where his beard and Army surplus jacket blend in much better than they did in Jersey. The official lyric video flashes a picture of Norman Mailer, a writer from Long Branch, New Jersey, who later moved to New York.
Norman Mailer wrote a famous essay in 1957 called “The White Negro” that (arguably) introduced the idea of the “hipster” into popular culture
He opens it by suggesting that subcultures flourish in cities because people need their sense of identity more – even more in the face of post-war atomic threats – essentially that, if a city got nuked, all its residents would be even more anonymous to someone examining the rubble years later
“For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would he counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked..”