Finding the Hipster Connections

Join me on this great journey through the fabled and whimsical lands of the hipsters...

You might think hipsters are randomly dispersed and have no correlations to each other (because that wouldn't be cool), but then you would be fiercely mistaken. If you thought that. So. Here I shall unfold connections between the following subjects:

-Phantom Planet
-BlackBlack
-M83
-Sixteen Candles & Pretty in Pink & Breakfast Club
-The Cobrasnake

Get ready to have your mind blown. Alright, it's actually not that big of a deal at all. But this has taken years of Cobrasnake.com-stalking to figure out so I'm quite proud. In an embarrassed sort of way, anyway.

So once upon a time, about four or more years ago, I discovered this lil' website called The Cobrasnake, where Mark "the Cobrasnake" took pictures of hipsters in their prehistoric forms and posted them online. Prehistoric because it was before the threshold point that took place somewhere around 2006/2007 when the hipster style spilled out from Cinespace and such underground hipster-infested night clubs into the hungry mouth of the mainstream. The mainstream, that vicious beast, got tired of the "boho" (eww, remember that?) hippy style and also tired of the later quasi-boho Rachel-Zoe/anorexic-coke-addict/denim-mini-loose-top-vest-huge-sunglasses combo... and devoured the new hipster trend. And, behold, seas of neon wayfarers and bright skinny jeans took over the streets. This is not really important to the aforementioned "connections"... it's just background. To add richness.

So, back to those early prehistoric days... before Cory Kennedy's dirty hair ever graced our eyes... there was this odd girl on the Cobrasnake. She had a young face, kind of pretty in an awkward model sort of way, and she was incredibly lanky and such. Here she is, back in the day, the giantess in the middle:



Notice also a younger Mark the Cobrasnake there in the far left, with a huge jewfro. Nice. Watch that picture carefully because that's the hipster style before hipster was a widely used slur. It still had the annoying sporty vibe...but it was more innocent, don't you think? More prehistoric hipster styles can be found where that picture came from:

Polaroid Scene

... which was Mark's website before he started the Cobrasnake. Luckily he hasn't removed it, so we can indulge in comparing and contrasting old hipster vs. new hipster.

But I digress. AGAIN. Ugh, it's so hard for me to stay on track sometimes. So, this was around the time that I obsessively read Elle Girl (RIP), aka the most amazing magazine to ever exist. Anyway, the magazine had some sort of young talent feature spread and in the section for bands, they featured a lil' band called BlackBlack. It featured Alex Greenwald, the singer in Phantom Planet, whom I recognized back then- probably because they sang the theme to the OC. Or something. Then with him was a girl about my age (back then) with short hair, and an older girl WHO WAS THE AWKWARD GIRL FROM THE COBRASNAKE. Mhmm, connections. Remember, keep track. The mini-article said that Alex, the Phantom Planet singer guy, was dating Diva Dompe (real name I think is probably Diva Haskins. Who knows.) aka lanky Cobrasnake girl. And the young girl was Lola Dompe or Lola Haskins- Diva Dompe's little sister. All three of them created this sorta-band BlackBlack. Sorta because Alex was already in Phantom Planet so how serious can it be, right? Here they are, all three of them together:



And here are only Diva Dompe and Alex Greenwald, in case you're still skeptical:



Oh, look! A hipster picnic in the background. Yay.

Something sweet about the pseudo-band is that they like to dress up in different themes for their performances:



Not so sure what the theme is in that one... Lola is wearing a flower heandband in the background. Oh- by the way- Lola is the drummer, Diva is the guitarist/singer, and then I don't even know what Alex does. Is he also the guitarist/singer? I don't remember and I can't bother to look through the Cobrasnake archives to find out. It was enough to find the photos I'm posting now!

About... maybe three or four years ago, I was watching some indie video show on TV (believe it or not, there are two- which no one knows about because they play at like 3 am (yay Tivo!)- they are Subterranean on MTV2 and The Dive on Fuse. So I was watching one of those and a video by an indie band called M83 started, and who should be featured in it but DIVA DOMPE, lanky cobrasnake girl herself, Alex Greenwald, her boyfriend, and little Lola too! And what do you think, of course you can see the video for yourself, right here. It's called ""Don't Save Us From the Flames" and I actually quite liked it, although it was pretty strange:



See, she just kept popping out at me, it's not my fault! It's like I was meant to find all these connections! Or something.

But that is not where the story ends. Oh no. So these people have kept showing up on the Cobrasnake throughout the years. They are Cobrasnake fixtures. Here are some pictures from just a few weeks ago-

Diva:



Lola:



But it's still not over. So recently- like two weeks ago- I was innocently scrolling through Stereogum, minding my own business, when this post showed up about a new M83 music video for the song "Graveyard Girl". I was intrigued, so I started watching it, and imagine my surprise...



Yes, that is Lola! That is Lola in that video and so not only does he put Diva in his first video, but now he puts the young Lola in his new one, and he makes me feel like a stalker. Damn him. So yeah, that's the connection web right there. Oh, the Pretty in Pink/Sixteen Candles/Breakfast Club thing is because that's the theme in the "Graveyard Girl" video with Lola. By the way, both girls are simply gorgeous in their respective videos. That's totally outside of my general tone in this post, but I've just got to put that out there!

One final touch to this long and pointless story- Lola and Diva are the daughters of Kevin Haskins, the drummer in the classic British rock group Bauhaus. Their mom (his wife) is named Pamela Dompe. I just found that out now from his Wikipedia. Well now we know where the Dompe/Haskins confusion comes from.

And that is the end of the epic journey. I hope you learned something. Because I sure didn't. Ha ha.