John Leland,
author of
Hip: The History
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John Leland’s Hip: The History is the story of an American obsession. Derived from the Wolof word hepi or hipi (“to see,” or “to open one’s eyes”), which came to America with West African Slaves, hip is the dance between black and white — or insider and outsider — that gives America its unique flavor and rhythm. It has created fortunes, destroyed lives and shaped the way millions of us talk, dress, dance, make love or see ourselves in the mirror. Everyone knows what hip is.
Leland tells the story of how we got here. Hip: The History draws the connections between Walt Whitman and Richard Hell, or Raymond Chandler and Snoop Dogg. It slinks among the pimps, hustlers, outlaws, junkies, scoundrels, white negroes, Beats, geeks, beboppers and other hipsters who crash the American experiment, and without whom we might all be listening to show tunes.
Along the way, Hip: The History looks at hip’s quest for authenticity, which binds millions of us together in a paradoxical desire to be different. Because, as George Clinton said, “You can’t fake the funk.” #
Leland pariticipates in a January 3, 2005 discussion with Jerry Jazz Musician publisher Joe Maita about how an underground idea — “hip” — has shaped American culture.
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“For something that is by definition subjective, hip is astoundingly uniform across the population. It is the beatitude of Thelonious Monk at the piano, or the stoic brutality of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, performing songs of drugs and sadomasochism as a projector flashed Andy Warhol’s films on their black turtlenecks. It is the flow of Jack Kerouac’s ‘bop prosody’ or Lenny Bruce’s jazz-out satire, or the rat-a-tat tattoo of James Ellroy’s elevated pulp lit. Walt Whitman was hip; Lord Buckley was hip; Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is too hip for her own good. Hip is the way Miles Davis talked, dressed, played or just stood — and the way Bob Dylan, after his own style, followed in kind (though both men strayed into injudicious leather in the 1980’s). The streets of Williamsburg in Brooklyn or Silver Lake in Los Angeles comprise a theme park in the key of hip. Its gaze is the knowing, raised eyebrow of Dawn Powell or Kim Gordon, bassist in the downtown band Sonic Youth – skeptical but not unkind.”
– John Leland
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JJM Writing your book, Hip: The History, was quite an endeavor. To have an opinion about who or what is hip and who or what isn’t is one thing, but to create a volume of work around it and successfully articulate its path is quite another. Was writing this book an act of hip?
JL I don’t know. It might have been an act of unhip, because it asks a lot of the questions we tend not to ask in everyday life. What is hip? How do we feel about it? Where does it come from? We don’t ask these questions because it would be unhip to ask them. So, maybe writing the book is the antithesis of being hip. I didn’t feel very hip as I was writing it.
JJM In a way, though, part of the beauty of the hipster is their constant interest in growing as an individual through enlightenment, a function your book serves.
JL I hope the book does that. I hope it is informative, and I hope it gets people to think. I want it to be provocative in that sense — to probe and provoke thought — and to question this thing that is in our lives and has strange effects on us. It affects the way we think about musicians and it affects what we listen to. It also affects the way we view the self-destruction of many of the people we look up to. It affects so many other things as well; the way we talk, the sunglasses we choose to wear, how we dress
JJM And who markets products to us as well.
JL Yes, and who markets them to us and how.
JJM In the introduction to your book, you wrote, “Clarence Major, in his study Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, traces the origins of hip to the Wolof verb hepi (“to see”) or hipi (“to open one’s eyes”) and dates its usage in America to the 1700’s. So from the linguistic start, hip is a term of enlightenment, cultivated by slaves from the West African nations of Senegal and coastal Gambia.” This has been questioned by Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, who believes that etymology is incorrect — that the origin of the word “hip” is actually unknown, but that it first appeared at the turn of the century. Finding the origins of this word couldn’t have been very easy. How did you determine the accuracy of hip’s origins?
JL Sheidlower is right in one sense, that there is disagreement among etymologists about the origins of the word. I looked at what there was, and found that the Wolof etymology made the most sense. It is sort of disappointing that Sheidlower doesn’t present any information or any evidence for his criticism and for his claim. Otherwise, I thought it was a respectful piece, and I quite liked it. I love arguing over the nitty-gritty of words, but I felt that there was an important story here, which is the influence and the transit and the changes of African elements in American life that tend to be unexamined or operate below the surface.
JJM Right, and how we borrow from it, or some would even say steal from it.
JL That’s right, and by denying the African origins of this word, we were, in a way, repeating that story.
JJM What elements form the foundation of hip?
JL The main element is the peculiar enlightenment of the outsider. Again, I go back to that word, “hipi” or “hepi,” meaning “to see or to open your eyes,” which comes from the Wolof tribe of West Africa. Who uses this word first? It is the ultimate outsider group, the enslaved Africans, who use it to communicate with one another in the presence of the mainstream population — the white people. It then gets borrowed and stolen and used by white people for their own purposes. They in turn are parodied by the Africans for their own purposes. So, what is hip in all this? It is the enlightenment of the outsider, and that sense of borrowing and crossing over into knowledge that you are not supposed to have or use. Those are the basic building blocks of hip.
JJM What is the difference between “cool” and “hip?”
JL The terms are used pretty interchangeably, so it is almost pedantry to think there is a difference between them. They do have different roots. If we say that “hip” comes from this word meaning “to see” or “to open your eyes,” it is a kind of enlightenment. “Cool” is a behavior arising from that, or hiding it. Robert Farris Thompson at Yale traces across these African linguistic spectrums and found that “cool” is a kind of non-reactive behavior.
JJM While reading your book, I constantly tried to define what and who is or isn’t hip. Frankly, some of the people you define in your book as being hip — Lou Reed, for example — are not particularly hip from my view of the world. So, making this determination seems all so arbitrary and probably based on our own personal childhood experiences. Do you remember who you considered to be hip when you were a kid, and do you still look for the characteristics these people had in who you consider to be hip today?
JL I think the folks I named as my heroes, the anti-hero type, Joe Pepitone, Walt Frazier, Muhammad Ali, Joe Namath, were who I considered to be hip.
JJM Sure, these guys had characteristics that many of us would consider hip. In fact, do you remember when Namath’s hair got so long that it used to hang out the back of his helmet, and how cool that looked?
JL Yes.
JJM Okay, but what I mean to ask is, was there anyone on the playground of your school, for example, who may have dressed differently or had certain characteristics you would now define as being hip, and how important are those people to us when we define who is hip in the wider culture?
JL Very important. They should always be the ones who we think of as being hip, rather than the public figures I write about. Celebrities are convenient subjects because I can talk about Lou Reed, for example, in a way I can’t talk about Pete Brock, a boy I went to grammar school with who I thought was pretty hip. Yes, public figures are useful in telling this story because most people — no matter where they are — know who Lou Reed is, but we cross paths with people in our everyday lives who are easily defined as “hip.” They are real people we work with or live down the street from but who never have time to talk to us because they are too busy doing something cool we wish we could a part of. There are certainly instances where many of the people we considered to be hip in our junior high school never got beyond that peak. That was as hip as they ever got.
JJM You wrote, “If hip has a gender, it is female.” Can you explain that?
JL I want to be careful to not make generalizations about the female sex when I answer this. The idea of femininity is a kind of construct we all deal with. What is “hip?” It is something to be looked at, which is a feminine quality. I am not saying that women are to be looked at, but I am saying that femininity makes most sense when it is looked at and appreciated. Hip has a mystique to it, and it speaks with double meaning. Hip is comfortable with the idea of image as value, and that is a part of this construction of femininity that we have, and it is opposed to the way we think of masculinity.
JJM You wrote, “The hip felicities — the uncapped solos of bebop and hip-hop, the gnostic blur of the Lost Generation and the Beat generation, the indie purism of Chapel Hill or Olympia, the altered consciousness of the drug culture — all built on the principles they threw down.” The “they” you refer to are Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Melville. How did these writers lay down the intellectual framework of hip?
JL Think about some of the things they said about nonconformity as a formal ideal; they believed in respect for the individual rather than the collective needs. Also, there was a sense of eroticism in their work, and they valued nature and independence. They felt America had its own rough-hewn street language, and they valued that over the formal language.
JJM The church was so important in that era. You suggest that the sermons of the nineteenth century served to inspire hipsters.
JL The preachers of the nineteenth century worked the frontier. Because they traveled from town to town, they were often the people who brought information and news to communities. They created a transition from the upright, puritan style with which the nation had begun, to a more flamboyant, individualistic, highly emotive style that has informed American arts ever since.
JJM What was the first outpost for Bohemia?
JL As far as I can tell, it was a beer hall on lower Broadway in New York called Pfaff’s. Walt Whitman hung out there, and the New York Saturday Press publisher Henry Clapp and his circle of friends also hung out there. One imagines them smoking French cigarettes there — which of course they didn’t — but they did discuss things like radical politics, sexual revolution, and humor, and combining all of those elements.
JJM Physical gathering places are very important to hip, whether it be Pfaff’s, or the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas used to hang out, or Minton’s, where bebop was born.
JL Yes, and people also needed a place where they could run a tab. {Laughs} I am sure that has something to do with the stability of location. I don’t know if places extend tabs now.
JJM Why do you refer to the forties and fifties as the “Golden Age of Hip?”
JL It was the era of the beats and the beboppers, when so much energy was being created. Their crossing of paths was really interesting. The beboppers brought more resources to American music than any population before them.
JJM The beboppers created art outside the mainstream that writers of the period admired…
JL Yes. Two very distinct, powerful, alluring, educated, artistically adventurous, late-modernist populations — the beat writers and the bebop musicians — created their art during the repressiveness of the post-War/Cold War years, which worked as a foil for them. All the elements for hip were right.
JJM The beat writers’ admiration for the work of black artists during the Cold War era differed greatly from the white admirers of the Harlem Renaissance artists, didn’t it?
JL Yes, very strongly. They were much closer to them, and much more romantically attached to them. They weren’t looking for jazz musicians to revitalize the center of society, they were looking to them as an “out” from the center of society.
JJM The differences are pretty striking. During the Harlem Renaissance, people like James Weldon Johnson felt that black Americans could achieve intellectual parity through the creation of literature and art “inside” mainstream society, whereas the bebop musicians, as you mentioned, looked at advancing through the creation of art considered “outside” the mainstream.
JL One of the big differences between the fifties and the sixties is that during the sixties, there was hope of revitalization, whereas in the fifties, there was not. Beats felt that the center of society was corrupt and decaying. They were reading Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and they believed there was this collapse in the center. So, rather than save the center, it was time to get off the ship, and in jazz, they found another ship to jump in.
JJM The civil rights movement provided such a breeding ground for hip, and the actions of Martin Luther King was an impetus for many whites — including myself — to not only appreciate their work, but to also join their fight in our own way. Yet, you placed no real emphasis on politicians or leaders of the civil rights era as models for hip. Why not?
JL It’s a funny thing. The civil rights movement of the sixties was so effective, in part, because it was so incredibly square. Its leaders were nicely dressed preachers who were so upright and honest that, in our eyes, they clearly had justice on their side. They were not rebel renegades, instead, they were really the conscience of America. Think of the students that integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and think of Rosa Parks — they were unblemished, upright American citizens. King himself was an unblemished individual, as pure as you can be. So, that is one reason I placed so little emphasis on them. The black power movement was, in some ways, more hip-related.
JJM You mean personalities like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton
JL Yes.
JJM Well, they certainly fit into your theory concerning the mingling of outlaw behavior and hip, and especially how the outlaw is one person removed from the hipster. When I was a kid during the sixties, I remember being faced with certain choices that put me on the edge of being an outlaw, and they were choices people I considered to be models of hip were making all the time. For example, should I pick up this rock and throw it at the bank as part of my protest? Or, should I move to Canada to avoid the draft? Whether that sort of thinking is part of hip is something one could argue, and perhaps there was more opportunity for these kinds of choices during that era than there are now
JL I don’t know. I keep thinking that we will get back to that, but it hasn’t happened.
JJM Pulp fiction and the private eye were early models of mass hip…
JL Reading all of these books was one of the best parts about writing this book. The private eye was a character who lived by his wits and talked his own talk. This language that had never been spoken before was suddenly coming out of the mouths of characters like Phillip Marlowe, Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and Race Williams. They were hard-boiled detectives who were such an American invention, and so very different from the Sherlock Holmes-type characters. They were under-spoken men in action, and their translation into film noir of the thirties and forties just spread their hip archetype into the masses in ways that wouldn’t have been possible without their ambiguously moral personas.
JJM You wrote about pulp fiction, “On the whole, pulp objected less to women than to male roles the drabness of the domestic hubby, or the foolishness of the lover who sacrifices everything for a little action. For the hard-boiled detective, home and hearth seemed as deadening as a corporate career. The threat to hip was not women but domesticity.”
JL That is a running theme of the book, that many things seem overtly sexist — much of pulp, for example, is very close to sexism — but the hipster has less a fear of women than a fear of domesticity, that they will be trapped within the confines of a consumer economy. That has been behind so much of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls the male revolt in America, which took place for most of the last century. It expresses itself often in terms that are either misogynistic, or looks exactly like misogyny, but I don’t think misogyny is at the heart of it.
JJM I don’t think so either. Even though Jack Kerouac said, “Pretty girls make graves,” I am sure that comment was meant to communicate that it is important to be careful about what you commit to. Commitments are threats to the hip lifestyle, and what they valued in their lives was time. This approach to life left women out, in a way, because if their man was living this way — without commitments to work or home — she was going to have to be the responsible one.
JL Right. The significant thing Kerouac is saying is that domesticity is a grave, and secondarily that pretty girls are a temptation toward domesticity. I don’t think he sees women as the problem themselves. So much of the pursuit of hip comes at the expense of whoever is willing to take responsibility, and that often meant women — especially during the beat period, when men were running around, often leaving children behind. Their women were willing to bear that weight.s a vehicle for hip?
JL The chapter on cartoons is my favorite, and it was the most fun to write. They got to undo all the rules that hip wanted to break. They got to sass authority, and they got to bend the rules of gravity and gender and ethnicity. Everything could change in the course of a seven-minute cartoon, and the early animators, especially, took advantage of that. It was wide open to ideas. The behavior or Felix the Cat, for example — he truly was a cat. He was a hip cat. He got to do all the things audiences would not have accepted from a real life character. Bugs Bunny is a classic example; he was smarter, wiser, and more enlightened in a hip sense than anyone else in his cartoons, and that is why he prevails. That he does so with style makes him lovable forever, and that he does so with the persona of a great New York ethnic is even more appealing.
JJM So many racial stereotypes were played out in cartoons
JL Yes, minstrelsy was such an important part of cartoons because it was the model that existed for the cartoonist to build on. Minstrelsy was not merely a blip in American popular culture, it was actually one of the foundations of it, and it was one of the forms — stereotypes included — that the earliest cartoonists had to draw on. In the production of early black and white cartoons, it was easier to make a black figure visible than it was a white figure, as you can imagine, so the technology lent itself to African American figures from the start. But, that was just a template that the animators had to work with, and at times they did so lovingly, and at other times in a spirit of ridicule. Early animators like the Fleischer Brothers were still trying to understand where they fit in ethnically in America, and how ethnicity worked in America, and one place for them to explore these questions was in their cartoons.
JJM The connection between hip and dangerous drugs is indisputable
JL The two tend to go together rather than one being the cause of the other. I don’t think the use of drugs itself is a hip act, but there is a population that wants more from life, more enlightenment and forbidden knowledge, and a disproportionate percentage of those people will experiment with drugs to attain this. A number of these people will become romantic figures in a way that Charlie Parker and Kurt Cobain did, which ultimately inspired an allegiance of imitators.
JJM You wrote, “What dope offers, and what unites these disparate types, is a suspension of responsibility, a fuckup’s version of grace.”
JL One of the stories I tell in my book that always gets me is that of the saxophonist Frank Morgan performing on stage when he hears that Charlie Parker has just died. He calls a break, he and his band go backstage, and they shoot up. He said they were going to do it anyway, but they decided that is how they wanted to pay tribute to Parker.
JJM The marketing of hip is fascinating. When did marketers begin treating hip as a consumer choice?
JL The advertising business went for this revolution in the early sixties. Thomas Frank writes really well about this in his book, The Conquest of Cool. There was a recognition among the marketers of the goods corporate America produces that all the things that hip wanted — nonconformity, individualism, swift revolution in style — were the same things the market wanted as well. They became reasons to buy new things. As early as the twenties, the Greenwich Village bohemian Floyd Dell said that bohemia had a commercial element to it, and that the things hip wanted were commercial things. Dell wrote, “The American middle class had come to the end of its Puritan phase; it had its war profits to spend, and it was turning to bohemia to learn how to spend them.”
JJM Blues singers were among the first images of hip to be commercially exploited.
JL Yes, it’s a funny thing, because these singers were itinerant performers who sang all kinds of songs. They sang everything from Tin Pan Alley tunes to popular folk songs of the day, but when they got into the recording studio, they became blues singers rather than the wide-ranging entertainers that they were. Blues fans still don’t know what to make of Robert Johnson’s recording of “Hot Tamales,” because it doesn’t ring true to their idea of what a blues singer does. But a performer like Johnson might have had all sorts of pop tunes or Tin Pan Alley songs in his repertoire; it is just that the record industry needed images to sell records, and the blues singer worked very powerfully as an image.
JJM Yes, the marketing of music and musicians has always been at the front lines of hip. The record industry’s marketing of jazz as art on their album covers was particularly effective with me. What I find fascinating is how hipsters keep ahead of the marketers who sell hip trends, and how the marketing of these icons may affect their image. For example, does Miles Davis continue to be hip once he has been on an advertisement for The Gap, and how does this kind of exposure affect his appeal among hipsters?
JL Well, Miles Davis is pretty indestructible. He has done the worst things and survived them — if he can survive the album We Want Miles, he can survive an ad for The Gap. There has always been that population who thinks they can buy “hip” in the store, even though they never could. To that extent, the game hasn’t changed all that much. Hip is not about what you can buy or what you can wear, it is about what you know or how you work the language of fashion or slang or style. It has always involved a creative act, not a consumptive act.
JJM It was interesting to read the chapter in the book about how the Internet has transformed the boundaries of hip. How important is the culture of the Internet to a person’s ability to express hip?
JL The important thing the Internet has brought is the end of the idea that there is an “inside” and an “outside.” The Internet just flattens everything out — every passion, every avocation, every fetish, and every age group, all work in exactly the same way.
JJM Regarding those choosing to work for an Internet start-up company, you wrote, “To work for the new media companies that were opening this frontier was to be part of the undermining of old authority.”
JL That’s right. In the early nineties, people were leaving blue chip companies in the fields of banking, law, journalism, and leaving behind promising educations to work for themselves, or in tiny little Internet start-up companies. You didn’t need the old network to get money, and you didn’t need the college degree. Basically, the Internet didn’t require you to have the things that the old gatekeeper did.
JJM The Internet has opened up a tremendous avenue for people who you describe as “Boho Entrepreneurs.”
JL Yes, it has.
JJM What cities best reflect the values of hip in today’s culture?
JL I hope it is a place I don’t know about — towns that are bubbling up in cool ways I have yet to discover. There are some pretty obvious places for hip, New York being one of them — although the cost of living is so high that it has chased a lot of the riff-raff out, and it has forced people to work so incredibly hard just to be able to afford their homes that it doesn’t allow much time for hip. I believe Toronto is becoming a very hip place. The life there is a little bit slow, and it has an immigrant population from all over the world. The film industry there has added a lot of creativity to the city. I would look at that as a coming town.
JJM Canada is a nonconforming country, also.
JL Yes, that’s right. Other places I like a lot are Chapel Hill, Austin, Seattle and Portland.
JJM I see it in Portland everywhere, and from the traveling I do around the country, there seem to be pockets of hip of varying degree just about everywhere.
JL Yes.
JJM We are now in the midst of a very conservative political era where the climate for hip may be pretty hostile. Of course, that may just mean there is a vast breeding ground for nonconformity. What is your sense about the immediate future for hip? Is this a good time for it?
JL Hip is still in greater danger from its friends than its enemies. I think that the incredible corniness of something like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy must create a lot of confusion to a person, as does the support of the major record companies — now these global international conglomerates — for anything that is a little bit off-beat. Despite the recent election, I don’t think we are in an artistic, repressive crackdown. Hipness is still threatened more by its friends than by its enemies, more by MTV than by the president.
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“At its most pure, hip is utterly mongrel. Which is to say, purism has no place in hip. Instead, hip comes of the haphazard, American collision of peoples and ideas, thrown together in unplanned social experiment: blacks, whites, immigrants, intellectuals, hoodlums, scoundrels, sexpots and rakes Born in the dance between black and white, hip thrives on juxtaposition and pastiche. It connects the disparate and contradictory.”
– John Leland
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Hip: The History
by John Leland
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About John Leland
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
JL I loved sports as a kid, and I grew up in the late sixties/early seventies, which was really an anti-hero period. The players I liked were the anti-hero athletes like Joe Namath, Joe Pepitone, Muhammad Ali, and Walt Frazier. I loved the Corleone family in The Godfather, and if there was anyone I wanted to grow up to be, it was Michael Corleone, the Al Pacino character.
JJM The sports figures you mentioned could be classified as “hip athletes,” couldn’t they?
JL Yes, they could.
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John Leland is a reporter for the New York Times and former editor in chief of Details, and he was an original columnist at SPIN magazine. Robert Christgau of the Village Voice called him “the best American postmod critic (the best new American rock critic period),” and Chuck D of Public Enemy said the nasty parts of the song “Bring the Noise” were written about him. He lives in Manhattan’s East Village with his wife, Risa, and son, Jordan.
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John Leland products at Amazon.com
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This interview took place on January 3, 2005
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If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945 – 2000 author Martin Torgoff.
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Other Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
# Text from publisher.
