Hip: The History

[BeBop]

Anyone read this? I'm inclined to pick it up during my next visit to an English-speaking country.

What is hip? Defining the indefinable

Historical lineage connects Emerson to Miles to Grandmaster Flash

- Reviewed by Jennie Yabroff

Sunday, October 17, 2004

Hip

The History

By John Leland

ECCO/HARPERCOLLINS; 405 PAGES; $26.95

In a recent post on Gawker.com, the culture and media gossip blog, the editor took the New York Times to task for using the word "hip" or "hipster" 10 times in yet another article announcing the death of formerly happening Williamsburg. By this logic, the only thing less hip than Williamsburg itself is writing about how unhip the Brooklyn neighborhood has become.

Such is the paradox of hip: Most of us know it when we see it (or hear it, or meet someone who embodies it) yet to even utter the word negates its possibility.

Accordingly, a person who truly possesses hip (as opposed to a Williamsburg-dwelling, trucker hat-wearing, Pabst Blue Ribbon-drinking, vintage T-shirt collecting, greasy hair-flaunting hipster) would never read a book such as John Leland's "Hip: The History." Luckily for Leland, this leaves him a fairly large audience for his entertaining and lucid examination of the impossible-to-define phenomenon, which, as the author himself admits, may not actually exist.

Leland, a reporter for the New York Times and former editor in chief of Details, is both authoritative and endearingly dorky. He has a weakness for goofy wordplay and outdated slang that makes him sound like a dad forming a "W" with thumbs and forefingers and saying "whatever," much to his teenager's chagrin. But his earnest enthusiasm makes him a trustworthy tour guide to the byways of American self-expression.

Beginning with the slave spirituals of the early 17th century, Leland hunts hip by tracing the evolution of American music through minstrelsy, the blues, bop and finally to jazz, then forging onward through punk, rap and trance.

Music is not his sole concern. Writers, philosophers, filmmakers, poets, artists, cartoonists, actors, comedians and Internet hackers get name-checked along the way. Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Terry Southern, Mark Twain and Richard Pryor come onstage for extended solos. But music, and specifically the kind made in the middle of the last century by men named Coltrane, Davis, Gillespie, Parker and Monk, is "Hip's" true subject, and the presence of other figures is justified because of the way they either anticipated or were influenced by jazz.

Jazz musicians are, for Leland, the alpha and omega of hip. He forgives them their drug abuse, their misogyny, their willful nihilism and even Miles Davis' unfortunate predilection for head-to-toe leather. Whether you agree with Leland's contention that jazz is the wellspring from which all contemporary forms of American creativity spring forth, or you simply find "Kind of Blue" nice background music for reading the Sunday paper, Leland's exegeses on the practitioners of the form effectively mix insightful analysis with dishy anecdote.

He sees ties to Emerson and Thoreau's ideals of nonconformity in the new music Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and others were playing in Harlem in the 1940s, writing that "these players rained musical, political, sartorial, chemical and attitudinal changes, in different proportions for everybody who encountered them." He also tells us about the night Davis met Parker onstage at Chicago's Argyle Show Bar, when Parker was so high he staggered offstage to urinate in a phone booth.

Gossip and hyperbole aside, Leland's most interesting argument for the primacy of jazz concerns the way the music bends and reshapes time to its needs. Discussing jazz's influence on cartoons, he writes, "In the 1920s and 1930s, as animation was finding its stride, jazz was blossoming as the sound of American urban modernism. Jazz splintered time into discontinuous fragments, beginning it anew with each rhythmic return. Cartoons frolicked with the shards."

True hipsters, Leland writes, seek "grace in the imperfections of the present." Jazz-lover Jack Kerouac took Thelonious Monk's edict of "no revisions" to mean striving for a "jewel center of subject of interest at moment of writing," while Allen Ginsberg described his poem "Howl" as a "jazz mass." (Monk, hearing Ginsberg's impassioned nonsequiturs, apparently nodded and said "makes sense.") Decades later, DJs such as Grandmaster Flash, who innovated the seamless musical loop, "could freeze the music in this moment of transition," locating it "perpetually on the road" in the exact same way "a jazz performance does not move toward a goal or tell a linear story."

Referencing the anecdote about Parker, so high at the Argyle that he fell asleep on the bandstand, Leland writes, "You can wake up in any part of a jazz piece without needing to know what came before; what matters is the flow of the present moment."

Looked at this way, it does all make a sort of sense, or at least more sense than any definitions of hip having to do with wearing (or, more accurately, refusing to be caught dead in) a trucker hat. If hip is found in Emerson's nonconformity and the Beats' slack Zen and the Internet's alternate reality, the soundtrack to all of these nonlinear, nontraditional philosophies might be the "stop-time" of jazz, wherein Coltrane "could juggle a beat for 24 bars or 24 minutes."

It's hard to imagine advertising execs thinking an Ornette Coleman jazz solo with a complicated time signature and no catchy chorus will sell many sneakers, though, which may explain both why the music has resisted commercial co-optation and why it no longer has the cultural currency it once did. In one of the book's most interesting chapters, titled " 'It's Like Punk Rock, But a Car': Hip Sells Out," Leland discusses the commoditization of hip. He goes beyond easy formulations like hip + the marketplace = square, arguing that commerce and hipness share a relationship of mutual exploitation.

While the Gap's appropriating Jack Kerouac's image (and airbrushing his cigarette) to sell khakis is just sad, Volkswagen's borrowing of Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" turned a whole new generation on to the little-known singer, and in the end, probably sold more Nick Drake records than Volkswagens, which can't be entirely bad.

Jennie Yabroff is a writer living in New York City.

[jlhoots]

If you like this, see if you can find The Hip: Hipsters, Jazz & The Beat Generation.

Published 1986 by Faber & Faber.

Written by Roy Carr, Brian Case & Fred Dellar.

Very cool!