The Hipster’s Epigone

 

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 words hip and hipster have conveyed a number of well-attested meanings over the years.  Apart from the basic anatomical signification of the body part and the fruit of the wild rose (from two different old Germanic roots), the word was used in the nineteenth century to mean, according to the OED “to affect with hypochondria, to render low-spirited.”  During Prohibition a hipster was one carrying a hip-flask and in the thirties a wild dancer (with lively movements of the hips).  Such usages have no part in the principal twentieth century definitions suggesting one in the know, an insider who can see what others cannot.

     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

      As language is always in the process of evolution, every individual in a lifetime will notice changes in usage and lexicology.  Naturally, then, every generation of elders is likely to consider some innovations improper.  There is a considerable history both of writers denouncing the degradation of language in their own day and of satire ridiculing old people clinging to outmoded usages.  Those with a taste for pedantry are particularly prone to such lexical conservatism.  A glorious example is H. W. Fowler’s impassioned and lengthy objection to the use of meticulous to mean closely attentive to detail on the basis of its derivation from Latin metus (“frightened”).  His demonstration that the current definition is not Classical is buttressed by the accusation that it arose first in France.   Of course, such reasoning, however sound it may be, cannot influence the development of the word.  (Fowler also considered asset “a false form”, individual “often a colloquial vulgarism”, and elevator “properly used only of a grain hoist”.) [21]

     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?

Hitchhiking in France

     I don’t know if there was ever a golden age of hitchhiking, but I do know that it was challenging in Europe even forty years ago. When Patricia and I arrived in Luxembourg in the fall of 1970 on Icelandic Airlines, often in those days the cheapest transatlantic flight, we barely caught our breath, so eager were we to plunge into the uncertainties of the road. Ignoring the considerable charm of the small country where we had landed, the very morning after our arrival we stationed ourselves on what we, though mapless, figured might be a road that would eventually lead toward Paris, put out our thumbs, and waited for our adventure to begin. The adventure was not, however, at all swift to meet us. After several hours had passed, Patricia contrived to cut my hair with the surpassingly dull scissors attachment on our old multi-tool knife. We waited. The sun climbed. In spite of her craftsmanship, the poor tool with which she had worked may well have made my appearance more alarming yet. At any rate, we found ourselves waiting still. The sun had passed its meridian by the time some Algerians picked us up and, when they heard how long we had been by the side of the road, commented, “People are afraid of Charlie Manson.” (His trial had been sensational news a few months earlier.) This initial ride was our first taste of the great-hearted North African hospitality we were to enjoy so much in the months to come. The next morning I shaved. We kept moving, albeit in fits and starts.
     Some days later we selected a spot near the Cité Universitaire in Paris, heading, we hoped, toward the land of the troubadours and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. As in Morocco, Amsterdam, and Ibiza, we felt as though we were working through the itinerary of the hip version of a Cook’s Tour. Every utility pole in the area was covered by the comments of travelers like ourselves, not infrequently lamenting the lack of a ride. One said “What kind of a shithole is this?” though another counseled “When you feel down think where you are and where others are. Love and peace, Jane, Miranda, and Sher September 1970.” Many of our predecessors had, it seems, enjoyed ample leisure to linger in Paris and philosophize a bit before departing, and yet they had all eventually moved on, and we did as well, pausing in Lyons for a few days before heading further south.
     Hitchhiking puts more than the traveler’s schedule at risk. Part of its charm is marginality. In America and elsewhere, while it may be tolerated, it invariably attracts suspicion. From our post on the on-ramp of the autoroute, we saw the cops coming. Though we dropped our thumbs out of respect, the gesture was useless. We were apprehended, questioned, and driven to the local station where the officers diverted themselves, going through our backpacks thoroughly, inspecting each item and then passing it around their circle. They took the most curious interest in our belongings. The excuse may have been to search for cannabis or weapons or poached truffles, but they seemed to be simply passing the time of day on a slow afternoon. I am afraid their rewards were few. One was delighted to come upon some condoms which he held in the air, brightening the entire mood and attracting a flurry of witty comments. Finding a recorder, a gendarme asked Patricia to play, and she managed to pipe out a creditable version of the Marseillaise. We now had the officers on our side, but not until all were thoroughly bored did they issue a ticket, assess a fine, and kindly drive us back to the on-ramp to continue awaiting a ride.
     It was by then deep into the afternoon and we were pleased when, after a relatively short interval, a dark and gleaming luxury car, as though just arriving out of a dream, pulled to the side and the inviting door opened. We were not only on our way; we were in a factory-fresh Mercedes, just purchased by our driver, a small middle-aged Greek business owner with the pencil moustache of a leading man of the twenties or a villain of the thirties. To break in the new engine, he had decided to drive from his home in Germany to Spain and back. He was accompanied by an employee, the pleasant and strapping young fellow who had waved us in. The worker’s family lived in Barcelona, and the pair meant to stop there before turning around and heading back.
     We appreciated the car’s fine suspension system as we cruised through southern France. The entire side of an outbuilding set among vines was painted with the visage of Louis Pasteur along with his enthusiastic recommendation of wine as not only the “healthiest” but also the most “health-giving” of drinks. Our sightseeing was punctuated by increasing outbursts of imperial irritability from our driver who exercised the last full measure of capitalist privilege, while the younger man was quietly compliant and submissive, patient as well, as the day wore on.
     Among our host’s displays of ill-temper, he fulminated now and then against the hippies. In the fall of 1970 none were more aware than we that the crest in the masses now considering themselves in some way counter-cultural had coincided with a strength in the dollar, modest airfares, and a re-imagining of the old post-university Grand Tour, resulting in what must have struck Europeans as unseemly crowds of shabby semi-indigent young American tourists with backpacks. (Later, when we took a ferry to Ibiza, our cheap seats were in a large lounge where a Franco government channel played for hours on the television, warning the righteous Catholic Spaniards about the corruption that dissolute young addicts were bringing to their country. Patricia and I stood to the side while the other passengers, a working class bunch returning home for the Christmas holidays after working on the mainland, seemed to stare sullenly at the screen, glancing now and then at the American suspects before their eyes.)
     Like the Falangists, the Greek could not stand hippies. His vituperation didn’t settle down for a good ten minutes after passing another hitchhiking couple. I wondered why he had consented to pick us up (even more or less shorn) and decided that it must have been to acquire two new subordinates whose place in the divine order was beneath even his workers who, after all, had at least some connection to his own interests. Secure in the knowledge that his new underlings were not quite of the filthy sort that would soil his leather upholstery, he could proceed down the road in his new car, comfortably provided with cushions of every sort of superiority.
     It occurred to me that I might experience a crisis at the border. In my passport picture I had long hair and a beard. It seemed more likely than not that the border official would comment on the change in my appearance, perhaps even question my identity. Should our volatile host he see the picture what effect might it have? (Just to overdetermine the case, in addition to my mane, I sported in the picture a necklace and a handmade Paisley vest.) Might we find ourselves stranded in the middle of the night at some chilly high pass in the Pyrenees?
     As it happened, the border guards hardly glanced at our passports and we glided through into Catalonia, but the boss’s irascibility had been increasing along with his fatigue. He told the Spaniard he had to keep talking to keep the driver awake. If he couldn’t think of anything to say, he should sing. Even this stimulation proved insufficient. Suddenly he decided he had had enough. Pulling abruptly to the side of the road, he announced that we would sleep there, though we were within an hour of Barcelona. There was no discussion. We tried to settle down.
     Within a very few minutes we heard snores arising from the Greek, plangent roars that seemed to strive toward greater volume with each breath. Peeking back toward our rear seat, the Spaniard saw our eyes were open. He grinned. His eyes jumped from his employer to us and sparkled merrily. He began grimacing satirically. He could be browbeaten all day, but now it was the boss who looked ridiculous. He began pulling faces, then mimicking the snores with comic exaggeration. We gratified him with obvious amusement, making common cause against the rich man, the rich man who quite abruptly came to, realized he was being made a figure of fun, and, without a word, started the car again.
     He drove silently into the dark city. Though he had been offering us the hospitality of his worker’s house all day, telling us we would have some brandy, some snacks, a special bottle of wine, now those notions had vanished. He pulled to a curb in a neighborhood darker than a film noir.
      “Out! Out now!” he ordered. We obeyed, trying to exchange a warm parting look on the Spaniard to show that we were on his side, though we were relieved to be leaving his boss’s company. The Greek screeched away, and we pondered our situation. We had no idea whether we were near the city center or in the suburbs. There were few lights and less traffic in a neighborhood of large old buildings divided into flats around inner courtyards. Unsure what our next move should be, we considered our options. Unexpectedly, the Greek’s car came hurtling down the street and slowed as it cruised by us. It did not stop. We walked a way at random, looking for some sign of an open business or at least another human from whom one could ask directions. The Greek came creeping by again, unwilling either to abandon us or to aid us.
     As he sped around the corner, I recalled another traveler’s saying that in Spain there still were night watchmen who patrolled such precincts, carrying the huge eighteenth century keys that opened the massive, ornately carved street doors. One could summon such a person, I had been told, by clapping. So I clapped and heard the sound echo somewhere far back in the darkness. I clapped again, only half-heartedly, when I was gratified at the sight of an ancient approaching watchman, wearing what looked like robes of woolen blankets, who kindly directed us to a railroad station, always a reliable location for cheap hotels. Our route lay through the produce market, where now, an hour before daylight, the workers were setting up for the day’s trade. Their faces seemed like caricatures, lit by many small kerosene lanterns, and they were drawn to us like flies to discarded candy as we stumbled by the spectacle and exchanged a few words, but the produce was an apparition of perfection. By the time we arrived at the Park Hotel where a desk clerk was still awake the sun was coming up and I found it difficult to appreciate the comfort of a bed due to my annoyance at paying for a night which was already virtually over.
     Chance had whisked us swiftly through southern France. Tomorrow we would visit Gaudí’s Park Guell and recall Orwell’s descriptions of factional fighting between the building on the Ramblas; we would eat calamari alla romana and discover a few days later that condoms were illegal (though available) in Spain where Franco still was to linger another few years. Our utter stranding while hitchhiking in Algeria was months in the future as was our fortunate falling in with a genial crew when they gave us a ride in Austria. We would have Christmas in Ibiza, spend six weeks in the cafes of Fez, and suffer losses by theft, doubtless to our fellow Americans, at the Amsterdam Youth Hostel where people puffed chillums openly and Jimi Hendrix played through the speakers. But we could guess none of that nor did we try. We lay in a cheap Spanish hotel – secure in youth -- welcoming the approach of an obscure future.

Hippie

     Even now, at the head of the page, I find the word most annoying. Though I went to San Francisco in the summer of 1967, though for some months I actually lived at the corner of Haight and Ashbury (in an apartment, though I would not be surprised to meet someone who lived in the actual intersection), though I sport beads and a Paisley vest handmade by my lover in my first passport picture, though I remain profoundly influenced by ideas of “hip,” I cannot stand that diminutive term. (The word passed into common usage after Herb Caen began using it in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen had also invented the equally obnoxious and derisive “beatnik.”)
     Not that “hippie” has no place. In my own memory, before I saw the word in print, I heard it used to describe young teens who aspired to be hip and were just becoming acquainted with the scene, not so different from the sort of person who might have been labeled a “teenybopper” in the context of musical taste. As such the word had a useful niche, but failed to describe the counter-culture in general. Despite my distaste for “hippie,” I had no good alternative. In the sixties “hip” served for some uses, though sounding slightly broad and old-fashioned. I do recall both both “freak” and “head” (referring, naturally, to “pothead”) having some currency, but neither seems really adequate.
     Born in 1946, I grew up reading the Beats, attending Paul Carroll’s poetry series at Second City, seeking out Old Leftists, and learning about Dada. In university I participated in the literary magazine and attended performance events and shows staged by friends. In spite of loose talk about “the sixties,” during my senior year at an institution with tens of thousands of students, I felt I knew the local counterculture: far-out intellectuals, dopers, artists, radicals, anarchists, yogis, sandal-makers, and singers. Virtually everything innovative seemed linked to this crowd. Forward-thinking professors and faculty artists made alliances with the hip youth. Just as Kenneth Kenniston’s studies indicated that, for the most part, student protesters were the very same who had been at the top of their high school classes, many of those participating in middle and late 60s youth culture struck me as unusually thoughtful and productive. Why, even LSD trips were assimilated only through hours of analysis based in part on Scientific American articles and anthropology studies seen in the light of esoteric Buddhism. I was taken aback just a few years later when I heard of people dropping acid to go to a concert or party.
     Thinking I knew the scene in my major Midwestern university, I was surprised and I believe I recoiled when in the spring of 1967, a crew of slightly younger celebrants tripped across the university quadrangle, blowing soap bubbles in celebration of Buddha’s birthday.
     These new folks seemed to be violating canons of cool, while on the national scene, it was obvious that Peter Max was instantly kitsch, Tim Leary at best an entertaining con man, and, late in the day, cooptation seemed fully accomplished when Hair premiered, claiming to be a “tribal, love-rock musical.” Its tunes can now be heard in elevators while the really radical grass-roots theater has vanished to limbo along with underground movies. In 1967 when I made it to the Haight, the kids who liked rock and roll and smoking pot, however genial, had little in common with the people I had known at college who preferred electronic music, Tibetan folksong, or, at any rate, down and dirty blues. Only a few months later the Diggers, who ought to have known, were to proclaim the death of hippie on Haight Street.
     Still, it certainly seemed as though the movement, however vaguely defined, had something to say about every area of life: not merely art and politics, but also interpersonal relations, cuisine, and living room design. How many apartments did I enter with a huge cable spool for coffee table, beaded curtains, and Indian bedspreads? I remember a slightly older poet’s reminiscences of San Francisco only a few years before I (and a horde of my cohort) hit town. He described how he and his friends would often get stoned and eat “phony-burgers,” made with supermarket hamburger buns, ketchup, onions, mustard, pickles, everything but the meat. A few years later no one would have dreamed of eating Wonder buns; every kitchen held brown rice and vegetables.
     I won’t aim here to define hip beyond a few sketchy outlines. Hip is a form of twentieth century Romanticism, celebrating the unconscious, the natural, the ecstatic while striking a counter-cultural pose with bohemian habits and left politics. Hip participates in the double vision DuBois analyzed in African-Americans, also evident in kitsch, camp, and other modern forms of irony. Susan Sontag located the essence of camp in her 1964 essay as occurring in the gap “between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice,” in other words, between signifier and signified.
     Authentic hipness requires the pose at least of a vision sharper and more piercing than others’. That’s what makes it so annoyingly elitist. One can always take irony around yet another turn. In contrast to this off-putting and esoteric claim, hippie was accessible to all, its wardrobe available not in military surplus or Salvation Army stores, each individual his own invention, but in standardized sets at Sears.