THE SAME DIFFERENCE

Ever see that guy who braided his hair into an unsolvable maze for no apparent reason? He wore a shirt that he stitched together from his mum’s old dish rags and despite it being 30 degrees outside, he flaunted a scarf delicately woven with the shoe laces of the homeless. His trousers were legless but did just enough not to detract attention away from the fact he walked around on stilts. His outfit was complimented by a Titleist golf visor and an airplane seatbelt. You see, this guy was a true original. Hopelessly alone and bereft of friends, but undeniably unique.

Such originality is hard to find but people’s bizarre obsession with being different leads them to take extraordinary measures to ensure success. ‘So I found this really chic coffee place. It’s in an old shed at an abandoned farm that was converted into a café by this one eyed Vietnamese barista. You have to drive 30 miles to get there but it’s so worth it. She only uses reindeer milk and serves her chai lattes from old US military helmets. It’s a pretty holistic vibe, you know?’

Actually, I don’t. Whatever happened to coffee being about one spoon or two? ‘Ah, everyone was at it. Did you hear of this new Starbucks place? Instead of sizes being small, medium and large, they use like, some sort of foreign language to differentiate. It’s pretty out there man’. But alas, Starbucks saturated the market and their flat white was no longer desirable. Hipsters were calling their drug dealers looking for rare South American beans that had spent the longest time maturing in a pile of horse shit. You could give most of these connoisseurs a cup of decaf and they’d drink it as long as it sounded Italian and was sourced in a place that didn’t exist.

You can’t be alternative and trendy because today, that’s just called being a person. Like that bar that nobody knows about but everyone goes to. ‘What is it that makes drinking from a jam jar taste so much better?’ Absolutely nothing, you idiot. The urge to be different is ironically making us all the same. There’s more alternative people in the world today than ‘normal’ people. It doesn’t make sense. If you were authentically unique, you wouldn’t have to desperately flood your Instagram to prove it.  You’re fooling nobody with that manufactured ‘natural’ pose of you vacantly staring into the abyss. I can hear you through the photograph asking your mate if they’ve taken the picture yet. Just get the photo of you pretending to hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa like everybody else and piss off.

There’s nothing wrong with conforming on a small scale. That reputation you’re trying to uphold doesn’t actually apply outside your own bubble. Take music for example. It should be a pretty personal thing. Who didn’t love Kings of Leon ten years ago? Their first two albums were a fresh, rebellious sound and they were revered by all lucky enough to have listened. Queue big hits like ‘On Call’ and ‘Sex On Fire’ and they could be heard across mainstream radio the world over. They lost the majority of their original fan base as a result.  Why? ‘Because I heard them first and now everyone likes them. Such sell-outs. Some dick sung one of their songs in an X-Factor audition for Christ sake.’ Ok, so maybe their music did go to shit but more likely, they became too popular for the alternative market. Could you imagine, now God forbid, but if Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk smash hit was to revive old school soul so that teenagers today could appreciate such an iconic period in music? Wouldn’t that be the worst? The idea of James Brown in the running for Christmas Number One doesn’t bare thinking about, right?

We’re weird like that. I’ve got a friend that kidnapped a blind spoon playing busker and now openly refuses to let him out of his basement for fear that someone else might hear his sound. Why can’t we appreciate what we like as individuals? If lots of other people like it too, then we have things in common. ‘What’s good for the goose’ and all that jazz. If you’ve set the trend and now it’s become globally accepted, why bail? We are becoming possessive to the point of absurd.

The average life cycle from secondary school sees a boy enter the unknown and quickly conform. He wears a Canterbury tracksuit and drinks water from a protein shake bottle even though he’s never been to the gym. By the age of 14 he’s discovered girls and surprisingly, they don’t all like rugby players. He joins the drama society, grows out his hair and learns the guitar. Hiding behind his black leather trench coat for too long, he acquires a Nirvana tee online and presumes Dave Grohl’s their lead singer. He leaves school a confused, pubescent mess. He enters college without any of his friends and out of pure insecurity, he totally reinvents himself once more. He takes up smoking, but not a pack of tailors. He rolls his own whilst attempting to nurture his transparent facial hair. He signs Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ out of the library and positions himself front and centre in the cafeteria waiting to be noticed. And of course, he will be. Why? Because there’s a million other people just like him in the world that also think they’re somehow, different.