What is hip? It’s a worthwhile question to ponder, especially these days. The terms “hip” and “hipster” pop up everywhere, and one wonders where they came from, what the story is behind tousled hair, hornrimmed glasses, vintage t-shirts, and record collections. John Leland, a reporter for the New York Times, thinks he knows what hip is. In a new book, “Hip: The History,” this long-time hipster insider creates a vast, inter-connected web of hipness, tracing its roots back through bebop, Beat poetry, the blues, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Unfortunately, it’s a dense, exhaustive process, and by the book’s end that strange animal “hip” remains as elusive as ever.
Let it not be said, however, that Leland doesn’t know his stuff. The preface gets things rolling with a knowing wink at the too-cool illuminati. Apologizing to those who didn’t make the book, Leland says, “Somehow…your matted coif or ironic eyeglasses, your collection of white-label vinyl or Bukowski first editions, fell through one of the many holes in this book.” And shortly afterwards: “If all the hipsters omitted from these pages were gathered together, they could fill the back room of Max’s Kansas City from now until the next Velvet Underground reunion.” Leland has obviously spent considerable time in the bush, observing hipsters in their natural habitat, marking down their traits and social rituals.
Before you know it, however, we’re plunged into a bizarre socio-economic history of the United States, with deep forays into the slave trade, plantation culture, and Northern factory life. We realize the stage has to be set for the blues, big-band, and minstrelsy, but Leland goes about it in an awkward fashion, often appearing to rationalize injustice in terms of how much “hipness” it produced. Sentences often start out, “But as offensive as [minstel] shows were…,” or, after describing slave brutality, “But there was also a level of intimacy…” This apologetic language will no doubt irk many.
The book’s other great problems are pacing and editing. It starts out in somewhat chronological order, but soon devolves into a slapdash collection of people and places. By the time you get to page 200, you’re expecting to hear about Elvis, punk or anything post-1960, but Leland is rehashing Raymond Chandler, Walt Whitman and Jewish minstrel shows yet again. The 1960s, one of the most obviously volatile and “hip” eras in United States history, are barely touched upon. The Sex Pistols are not mentioned at all. It’s almost as if Leland is not content to explain the more well-known subject matter-he has to constantly one-up his audience by delving into uber-obscure hipness.
The main point of the book-“What is hip?”-is also frustratingly vague. To be sure, plenty of definitions are given-about three per page, in fact. Examples: “Hip is an ethos of individualism, but it tends to grow in cliques. It has an epidemiology.” “Hip shapes itself to economic needs. It forms a kind of consumer avant-garde, not necessarily the first to buy the new product but the first to shape the desire.” “Hip entails an acceptance of the imperfect-the lo-fi, uncombed or unpolished.” By the end of the book, however, we’re still left without an objective criterion for hipness. It’s obvious what’s unhip-bland consumerism, conservatism and the unthinking homogenization of the herd. But hipness itself seems confined to what John Leland says it is.
Leland does make some good points-that music is never a simple case of “white men stealing the blues,” that modern marketing and advertising understand hip better than many hipsters do, that Miles Davis is really, really cool. His research is thorough and his quotes juicy. But the book ends where it began, with his assertion that the word “hip” comes from the Wolof word “hipi,” to open one’s eyes. So to be hip is to be enlightened, but enlightenment is a slippery term.
If you ask me, it’s fun and interesting to learn about all these hip cats and chicks, but personal taste always trumps anyone else’s definition of “cool.” Cheap Trick and George Jones might not be considered hip by the upper echelons of the trendy, but I love ’em all the same. In other words, don’t put all your faith in the critics and insiders. Open yourself up to new musical experiences and you won’t have to seek out the hip; the hip will find you.