The essay is followed by the lyrics to Cab Calloway’s “Hep! Hep! The Jumping Jive” and “Are You Hep To The Jive?”
1. Apologia
It was perhaps inevitable that an app has
been developed that will locate for travelers the nearest “hipster”
neighborhood. A number of sites had
already compiled travel guides toward the same end, taking into account an
area’s median age and the availability of bike trails but primarily “the
density of hipster-friendly businesses,” meaning such things as “coffee shops,
craft breweries, record stores, organic markets.” [1]
From the point of
view of a septuagenarian one-time resident in the Haight-Ashbury, it seemed
that a group hardly distinguishable from those unashamedly consumption-oriented
squares called yuppies in the eighties, were, with the simple addition of a few
days of stubbly beard (now tolerated in the office) and a taste for Ethiopian
food, transformed into hip people. Of
course, this verbal shift parallels the replacement of the underground papers
of the sixties in which the radical visual style matched the politics with
consumer-oriented free (advertising-supported) weeklies that like to describe
themselves as “alternative.” [2]
Yet I feel I must
rise in defense of the older meaning of the word, however useless such arrière-garde
defenses, for, just as the introduction of a new word may signal formulation of
a new meaning, loss of a definition is generally accompanied by the loss of the
concept that underlies the word, and I lament the loss of the old hipster.
2. What’s hip? Who’s a hipster?
The source of
this meaning of hip is in fact unknown, though several unsatisfactory origins
have been suggested. Some have proposed
that the word referred to the posture of opium smokers reclining on one
hip. In the 1960s many jumped to accept the
attractive but apparently highly speculative etymology of David Dalby that the term derived from the
Wolof meaning “to open the eyes, to see clearly.” [3]
Apparently the
earliest written usage is in a story about “the great blizzard of 1899” in
which a Washingtonian is quoted as saying, “And as soon as I get out I’m hep
that the water’s froze. What do you think of that?” [4] It appears then in a cartoon in 1902 and in
novels in 1904 and 1914. [5] By the late
1930s it had attained sufficient currency to be listed in slang dictionaries. [6]
Far more
significant, though, in terms of disseminating the word widely was the
popularity of two musicians, Cab Calloway and Harry “the Hipster” Gibson. In
the late thirties Calloway was one of the most popular bandleaders in the
country, well aware from the outset of the fascination that jive talk held for
the general population. His “Minnie the Moocher,” a huge hit, was full of such
slang. [7] In 1938 he published a
booklet titled Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary
[8], which remained, until the publication of Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiography Really
the Blues (1946) [9], the best guide to hip language.
A great showman
who practiced exaggerated mugging and wore attention-getting costumes, Calloway
recognized the exotic appeal of Harlem slang.
Calloway’s 1939 song “Hep! Hep! The Jumping Jive” mixes nonsense
syllables (including the graceful lyric line (“Palomar, shalomar, Swanee
shore”) with a two-syllable refrain (“hep hep”) and a call to “dig your jive on
the mellow side,” suggesting good times partying.
The use of argot
itself implies transgressive associations, most dramatically recreational drug
use. References to cocaine and opium and
the artificial paradise of getting high fill “Minnie the Moocher” (though
Calloway was careful to excise them from his dictionary). Hip slang arose from the confluence of
everyday Black culture, musicians’ shoptalk, and drug-users’ cant. These three worlds overlapped in part, but
they also shared an important characteristic.
Each sought through the codes of a subcultural patois to reinforce their
identity with their own group and to exclude outsiders. The assertion of membership as an insider,
the possessor of valuable secrets inaccessible to others, is the essence of the
concept of hip.
Further
popularization of the term occurred with the performances of a white musician,
Harry “the Hipster” Gibson who would tell his audience, “Gather round, all you
hipsters,” and soon embraced the name himself with the song “Handsome Harry The
Hipster.” [10] While performing the most extreme facial mugging in American
show business prior to Jim Carrey Gibson muted the drug references, saying
of his persona only that “he digs those mellow kicks.” [11] Though
Gibson was only briefly a nationally known performer – he did appear in the
film Junior Prom in 1939, but his song "Who Put the Benzedrine in
Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?" (1946), while enjoying a modest succès de
scandale, also caused him to be banned from radio play. While hip was reaching a wider audience
beyond Blacks, dopers, and jazz musicians, it retained associations of
counter-cultural, even criminal values. [12]
In the
nineteen-fifties America as a whole heard about hip through the popular
magazines’ coverage of the Beat writers and, to a lesser extent, the jazz
milieu. The term was also debated on the
margins of intellectual life, and controversy arose in the intellectual
quarterlies. Significantly, proponents
and critics agreed to a large extent on the term’s meaning, differing only in
the associated value judgment.
In Norman
Mailer’s “The White Negro” [13] Mailer
described “the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if
our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war,
relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a
slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled
(at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no
research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry).” Mailer begins his essay with a quotation from
a popular journalist [14] who says that a hipster “is rarely an artist, almost
never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival
roustabout or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich Village.” In order to live more intensely, according
to Mailer, “the hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro,
and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” In his rewriting of DuBois’ double
consciousness, he notes “the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living
on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.” He seeks “to encourage the psychopath” in
himself, a psychopathic personality that Mailer notes ominously, “may indeed be
the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality.”
The most direct
riposte to Mailer’s enthusiasm was Norman Podhoretz’s piece “The Know-Nothing
Bohemians" [15] the title of which reveals at once the level of
vituperation leveled against the Beats in the fifties. [16] To Podhoretz, Kerouac and the Beats were
totally nihilistic, sometimes verging on violence. To him the hip are “spiritually
underprivileged and the crippled of soul—young men who can't think straight and
so hate anyone who can.” Not only are
they “anti-intellectual,” and “primitive,” with “an inability to express
anything in words” and a “hostility to intelligence,” more shocking yet, they
are “attracted to criminality” and Podhoretz conjures up reason to associate
Kerouac with attacks on a homeless man and a nine-year-old.
The view of the
hipster as an inarticulate impulsive juvenile delinquent is evident in late
1950s popular culture. Feiffer’s Huey
character appeared first in Sick, Sick, Sick (1958) as a cool, jiving
antithesis to the neurotic Bernard and Geets Romo, Del Close’s character in How
to Speak Hip (1959) manifests his hipness in the difficulty of
communicating with his square interlocutor.
Such a pose held a certain allure, even some commercial possibilities. By the late fifties, tourists could be
certain of spotting a genuine bohemian since Wally Hedrick [17] was hired by
Vesuvio’s across the alley from City Lights to sit in the front window decked
out in beard and beret daubing a canvas. In New York In 1959, Fred McDarrah established
the Rent-a-Beatnik service to provide colorful party guests, even Black ones including
Ted Joans and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka).
The cooptation
and dilution of the idea of the hipster advanced wholesale during the
sixties. “Hippie,” which had originally
been a pejorative diminutive referring to younger aspirants to the scene. [18] Though in fact the social scene in the
Haight-Ashbury included all sorts of elements from the psychopathic through the
petty criminal to the striving artist and the college student just passing
through, their image was dominated by flowers, daisies, and soap bubbles. The Summer of Love replaced the feral cunning
of the fifties hipster with ingenuous naiveté.
The crowds clogging
Haight Street and Telegraph Avenue might have been called heads or freaks but
most often hippies resulting in a power vacuum about the semantic territory of
the word hipster. Meanwhile with the
general social reversion to avarice as a career goal came the inappropriate
nineties coinage eco-hipster, or green hipster. The notion, if not the term, doubtless
originated among marketing departments seeking a cachet among young consumers. Closely related is the concept of bobos, or
bourgeois bohemians, a term oxymoronic in both English and French. [19] Whereas voluntary poverty had been widespread
among earlier counter-cultures, this group indulged in conspicuous consumption
so long as it called attention not only to one’s means but also to one’s
taste. Preserving the semantic element
of a discerning insider, the word here applied to purchasing choices. Though the “green” element of this newly
defined group drew on the radical revolutionary allegiances associated with
some earlier hipsters, this new grouping adopted a far more cautious political
line, in particular never suggesting the fatal entanglement of capitalism with
the impending ecological disaster.
An easy slide
from such eco-hipsters to the contemporary usage of the bare term hipster occurred
around the turn of the twenty-first century.
In the early months of 2000 several journalistic treatments of the
gentrification of Williamsburg referred to the area’s popularity with “arty”
types not using the term hipster, but the term’s application was soon clear
with the publication in February of 2003 of The Hipster Handbook by
Robert Lanham. [20].
Today many
dictionary definitions retain only trace elements of the earlier meanings. In Merriam
Webster’s a hipster is still a bit of a rebel, “someone who rejects the
established culture; advocates extreme liberalism in politics and lifestyle,”
while for Merriam Webster that element has vanished: “a person who is unusually
aware of and interested in new and unconventional patterns (as in jazz or
fashion).” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the
most up-to-date definition appears in Wikipedia whose entry is quite
clear. “The 21st-century hipster is a
subculture (sometimes called hipsterism) that is defined by claims to
authenticity and uniqueness yet, ironically, is notably lacking in authenticity
and conforms to a collective style. The
subculture embodies a particular ethic of consumption that seeks to commodify
the idea of rebellion or counterculture. Fashion is one of the major markers of hipster
identity. Members of the subculture
typically do not self-identify as hipsters, and the word hipster is often used
as a pejorative for someone who is pretentious or overly concerned with
appearing trendy or fashionable in a non-mainstream way.”
3. My Hipster, Ma Bohème
I am, then, well
aware that, as writers have more often realized than teachers, the criticism of
new and popular verbal usages is fruitless. [22] I persist, nonetheless, hoping not to halt
the semiotic drift but to flesh out the older sense of hip and hipster,
lovingly preserving this ghost of a word if only as an exhibit in the museum of
the mind.
Still, were I to
locate a sweet spot in the hipster history, a definition that fills an
otherwise vacant place in the lexical structure and, more importantly, one that
appeals to me, a signification unfortunately now faded, I would select one
close to that suggested by Anatole Broyard in 1948 essay in Partisan Review,
“A Portrait of the Hipster,” [23] which, even as it took the hipster seriously,
describing him as an “underground man,” bearing both the burden and the freedom
of being “of the minority,” also foresaw its cooptation in the very
intellectual sympathy that led to both Broyard’s essay and to mine. “The hipster—once an unregenerate
individualist, an underground poet, a guerilla—had become a pretentious poet
laureate. His old subversiveness, his ferocity, was now so manifestly
rhetorical as to be obviously harmless. He was bought and placed in the zoo. He
was somewhere at last—comfortably ensconced in the 52nd Street clip joints, in
Carnegie Hall, and Life. He was in-there...he was back in the American womb.
And it was just as hygienic as ever.”
I am well aware
of the problems associated with hip as an aesthetic category [24], yet it
remains for me a significant and novel twentieth century artistic concept. For
all his topicality, all the talk of Hiroshima and Auschwitz and existential
Angst, the hipster is surely the mid-twentieth century successor to a legion of
earlier artists who claimed to know more than their fellows: shamans, prophets,
and seers. To me the hip will always penetrate lies, the vicious claims of all
forms of prejudice, most prominently racism, and the lethal lure of war, that
old love-killer misogyny, the lies of criminals in high places, and the
spirit-killing programming that teaches people that the way to joy is possessions.
That sort of hip had its start in Black peoples’ certainty that society was
based on fraud, musicians’ winking certainty that art trumped money, and
dopers’ intuition that everyone else was as hooked as they but simply didn’t
know it, yet that people could still almost miraculously salvage their corrupt and
materialistic society through art, beauty, and spiritual ambition. If those
insights are lost, a new counter-culture will likely be required to restore the
species to a path of progress.
1. The app is called Where
Is Williamsburg? The travel guide I
mention is for rent.com.
2. To be fair, a few
of these journals (the Chicago Reader and the Bay Guardian, for
instance) have provided investigative reports and arts criticism beyond
features on movies, television shows, food, and merchandise. During its long decline even the Village
Voice sometimes pleasantly surprised its readers.
3. This etymology,
though rejected by most linguists, has survived and spread through secondary
books such as J. L. Dillard’s Black English (1972). It is repeated in John Leland’s Hip: A
History (2004). Dalby had ingeniously
suggested African origins for a number of other terms current in his own day’s
slang, most of which are not accepted by other authorities.
4. The Washington
Times (Washington, District of Columbia), 12 Feb., 1899.
5. T. A. Dorgan
featured a character “Joe Hip,” “Son of old man Hip.” The 1904 novel by George V. Hobart, called Jim
Hickey: A Story of One-Night Stands (the title refers to musical jobs) --
preserves a great deal of slang used among musicians. The 1904 novel, Rex Beach’s The Auction
Block, was made into a film in 1917.
6. Examples include
Jack Smiley’s Hash House Lingo (1941) in which hipster is defined as “a
know-it-all” and the glossary for Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues (1946)
in which a hipster is “a man who’s in the know, grasps everything, is alert.”.
7. “Minnie the
Moocher” was the first recording by an African-American (and the first
categorized as jazz) to sell over a million copies. Calloway went on to be the first of his race
to have a national radio show. He
appeared as well in films including both features such as International
House (1933) and short films for Paramount such as 1934 Cab Calloway’s
Hi-De-Ho, as well as in cartoons including three Betty Boop
animations. Like Dr. John and Screamin’
Jay Hawkins Calloway was a crossover artist bringing a version of African-American
culture attractive to white listeners.
8. Republished in an
expanded version the next year as Professor Cab Calloway’s Swingformation
Bureau.
9. Co-written by
Bernard Wolfe.
10. Recorded in 1944,
but composed years earlier.
11. He was busted a
number of times, including once with Billie Holiday in a Florida hotel room in
1956 when he was her accompanist at the Ball and Chain.
12. Those unfamiliar
with the forties popular music scene may be surprised to learn that a listing
of the top eighty records of 1946 included tunes by Charlie Parker, Dizzy
Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Django Reinhardt. See https://playback.fm/charts/top-100-songs/1946.
13. Dissent,
fall 1957. Perhaps equally influential
were the columns Mailer wrote for The Village Voice, such as the lists
comparing hip and square.
14. “Caroline Bird,
Born 1930: The Unlost Generation,” Harper’s Bazaar, Feb. 1957.
15. Partisan
Review, spring 1958. After a leftist
youth, Podhoretz became an agent of reaction.
The Partisan Review was, of course, funded by the CIA as part of
its effort to counteract the influence of leftist intellectuals. Podhoretz himself worked for the USIA in the
sixties, at a time when collaboration with the government was unpopular among
artists and scholars.
16. A certain
fascinated repugnance is evident not only in literary reviews but also general
interest magazines such as Time and Life. For a detailed general perspective see Anna
Lou Jessmer, Containing the Beat: An Analysis of the Press, Coverage of the
Beat Generation During the 1950s, available at https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1425&context=etd.
17. Hedrick, a
pioneering artist in conceptual and performance modes, had founded the Six
Gallery where the historic poetry reading occurred in 1955.
18. In my first
memory the word meant something teeny-bopper.
Both hippie and beatnik were scornful labels popularized by the
decidedly non-hip Herb Caen.
19. among the
satirical reactions see David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class
and How They Got There (2000) and the French cartoon book Bienvenue à
Boboland (Welcome to Boboland, 2008).
20. Stories appeared
in "The Bedford Files," Time Out New York (TONY) (February
3–10, 2000) and in "Brooklyn Nights Turn Brighter," The New York
Times (February 11, 2000).
21. See the entries
for these words in Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I think as well of the elderly British
teacher I met in my youth who denounced the word television as “a monstrous
bastard” because it combined elements derived from both Greek and Latin. He had spent his career in India, always more
conservative of British standards than the U. K.
22. One may easily
compile a list of canonical authors who use double negatives, sentences
beginning with conjunctions, and the like.
23. Partisan
Review, June 1948.
24. See “The Legacy
of the Beats” on this site.
1939 Hep!
Hep! The Jumping Jive
Hep hep
De-boodle-de-ack,
de-boodle-de-ackasaki
Hep hep
Oh, rang-tang, te-dah-dah
Hep-hep
Gonna tell you 'bout the jumpin'
jive
Hep hep
Jim, jam, jump, the jumpin' jive
Hep hep
Cats gonna beat out this mellow
jive
Hep hep
Beat it out on the mellow side
Boy
Whatcha gonna say there, gate?
Oh, boy
Whatcha gonna say there, gate?
Palomar,
shalomar, Swanee shore
Let me dig that jive once more
Boy
Lay it right on down to the gator
Oh, boy
Lay it flat as a gator
Now, can't you hear those hep cats
call?
Yeah
Come on, boys, let's have a ball
The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin'
jive
Makes you dig your jive on the
mellow side
Hep hep
Hep hep
The jim, jam, jump is the solid
jive
Makes you nine foot tall when
you're four foot five
Hep hep
Hep hep
Now, don't you be that ickeroo
Get hep, come on and follow
through
Then you get your steady foo
You make the joint jump like the
gators do
The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin'
jive
Makes you like your eggs on the
Jersey side
Hep hep
Hep hep
The jim, jam, jumpin' jive
Makes you hep hep on the mellow
side
Hep hep, hep hep
Hep hep, hep hep
The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin'
jive
Will make you dig your jive on the
mellow side
Hep hep
Hep hep
The jim, jam, jump, the solid jive
Makes you nine foot tall when
you're four foot five
Hep hep
Hep hep
Now, don't you be that ickeroo
Get hep, come on and follow
through
Then you get your steady foo
You make the joint jump like the
gators do
The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin'
jive
Makes you like your eggs on the
Jersey side
Hep hep
Hep hep
The jim, jam, jumpin' jive
Makes you hep hep, on the mellow
side
Hep hep
Hep hep
Now, I've told you 'bout the
jumpin' jive
The jim, jam, jump, the jumpin'
jive
I know you dug this mellow jive
Oh, you dig it on the mellow side
Are You Hep To The Jive (1940)
Are you full of pep? (Yes, yes,
yes)
Are you hep-a-hep-a? (Yes, yes,
yes)
Are you full of step-a
What do ya know, gates?
Are you in know, or are you a
solid bringer-downer?
Listen here, jack
Take it slow you can learn just
what I mean
Are you hep to the jive? (yes,
yes)
Are you hep to the jive? (yes,
yes)
Are you hep, are you hep, are you
keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?
Do you lace your boots high? (yes,
yes)
Are you fly, are you fly? (yes,
yes)
Do you dig, do you dig, do you swing
on the gig, are you hep to the jive?
Do you get in the in the grove?
(yes, yes)
Does the beat make you move? (yes,
yes)
Do you send yourself jack and then
trilly on back and you know that it's smooth?
Oh, are you hep to the jive? (yes,
yes)
Are you hep to the jive? (yes,
yes)
Are you hep, are you hep, are you
keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?
Are you hep to the jive? (yes,
yes) (dah-doo-dah)
Are you hep to the jive? (yes,
yes) (dah-doo-dah)
Are you hep, are you hep, are you
keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?
Do you lace your boots high? (yes,
yes) (dah-doo-dah)
Are you fly, are you fly? (yes,
yes) (dah-doo-dah)
Are you hep, are you hep, are you
keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?
Do you get in the in the grove?
(yes, yes)
Does the beat make you move? (yes,
yes)
Do you send yourself jack and then
trilly on back and you know that it's smooth?
Are you hep-hep-hep to the jive?
(yes, yes)
How do you dig-dig-dig-dig the
jive? (yes, yes)
Are you hep, are you hep, are you
really in step, are you hep to the jive?
