I liked parts of the review of John Leland's new book Hip: The History by John Strausbaugh in the Book World last Sunday... I'm cutting the opening paragraph and some of Strausbaugh's summary towards the end, because I like the definitions (by his unnamed friend) in the former and some of the sociological clarifications and foresight in the latter. Yeah.
A cool friend of mine likes to say, "Hip is to fashion as cool is to style." To him, hipness and fashion are superficial, ephemeral and easily merchandized; cool is innate, and style is timeless. You can buy what's hip, but you can't buy cool. Some of the coolest people you meet are hopelessly out of fashion, have no idea what's considered hip at the moment and couldn't care less. Hipness is public; it does you no good to be hip if nobody's around to appreciate it. There are legions of hipsters, wearing their identical fashions, listening to the same music, reading the same blogs, crowding together in the hippest neighborhoods in their towns. But there are no coolsters, just cool individuals. Cool needs no outward validation...
Hip operates on the margins of society and among its outcasts and outlaws -- poets and painters, gays and lesbians, blacks and Jews, gangsters and gangstas, dope fiends and dropouts. They come together to form inner circles of ultimate hipness, but Leland argues that hip would die if stuck in those hermetic, elitist confines. Luckily, he says, the hip always attract the hipsters, the idlers and the slumming media who broadcast the gospel of the new to the rest of society. Thus what's hip today is absorbed and becomes tomorrow's fashion -- not just in the sense of punk's ripped jeans or hip-hop's XXL t-shirts, but in cultural and intellectual trends as well. Consider, for instance, the way hippie ideas percolated throughout mainstream Baby Boom culture, or the recent transit of gays and lesbians from pariahs to prime time. Leland argues that hipness couldn't thrive without the interest of the mainstream and sees the long and edgy relationship of hip to advertising, fashion and the media as a symbiotic one, cyclically feeding newness to the larger society while goading the hip to move on to further frontiers.
This leads Leland to the perhaps inevitable conclusion that the mainstream's avid pursuit of the hip has now pushed us into a "post-hip" age when "nearly everybody is hip . . . . The squarest of American institutions, from gardening annuals to Army recruitment ads, now market themselves in two strengths: hip and hipper." And when hip became square, and vice versa, hip "passed from hip to 'hip.' The inverted commas say, 'We're both too hip to care about this hip stuff, but, you know, isn't that pretty hip?' " Uber-hipster that he is, Leland has read too many premature death-of-rock books to get caught carving hip's tombstone, so he hedges his bets, predicting that we're merely at the terminus of one long cycle of hip. The hip will rise again, he assumes, on some new margin of society.
I also learned, btw, that "hip" has nothing to do with pelvises or Elvis Presley, but comes from an African word (I believe "hepi") meaning something that gives light, or a new vision (it was the New York Times Book Review from last Sunday that gave that exact info, and I don't have it here hannndy).
A cool friend of mine likes to say, "Hip is to fashion as cool is to style." To him, hipness and fashion are superficial, ephemeral and easily merchandized; cool is innate, and style is timeless. You can buy what's hip, but you can't buy cool. Some of the coolest people you meet are hopelessly out of fashion, have no idea what's considered hip at the moment and couldn't care less. Hipness is public; it does you no good to be hip if nobody's around to appreciate it. There are legions of hipsters, wearing their identical fashions, listening to the same music, reading the same blogs, crowding together in the hippest neighborhoods in their towns. But there are no coolsters, just cool individuals. Cool needs no outward validation...
Hip operates on the margins of society and among its outcasts and outlaws -- poets and painters, gays and lesbians, blacks and Jews, gangsters and gangstas, dope fiends and dropouts. They come together to form inner circles of ultimate hipness, but Leland argues that hip would die if stuck in those hermetic, elitist confines. Luckily, he says, the hip always attract the hipsters, the idlers and the slumming media who broadcast the gospel of the new to the rest of society. Thus what's hip today is absorbed and becomes tomorrow's fashion -- not just in the sense of punk's ripped jeans or hip-hop's XXL t-shirts, but in cultural and intellectual trends as well. Consider, for instance, the way hippie ideas percolated throughout mainstream Baby Boom culture, or the recent transit of gays and lesbians from pariahs to prime time. Leland argues that hipness couldn't thrive without the interest of the mainstream and sees the long and edgy relationship of hip to advertising, fashion and the media as a symbiotic one, cyclically feeding newness to the larger society while goading the hip to move on to further frontiers.
This leads Leland to the perhaps inevitable conclusion that the mainstream's avid pursuit of the hip has now pushed us into a "post-hip" age when "nearly everybody is hip . . . . The squarest of American institutions, from gardening annuals to Army recruitment ads, now market themselves in two strengths: hip and hipper." And when hip became square, and vice versa, hip "passed from hip to 'hip.' The inverted commas say, 'We're both too hip to care about this hip stuff, but, you know, isn't that pretty hip?' " Uber-hipster that he is, Leland has read too many premature death-of-rock books to get caught carving hip's tombstone, so he hedges his bets, predicting that we're merely at the terminus of one long cycle of hip. The hip will rise again, he assumes, on some new margin of society.
I also learned, btw, that "hip" has nothing to do with pelvises or Elvis Presley, but comes from an African word (I believe "hepi") meaning something that gives light, or a new vision (it was the New York Times Book Review from last Sunday that gave that exact info, and I don't have it here hannndy).
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What is that from?
"Some of the coolest people you meet are hopelessly out of fashion, have no idea what's considered hip at the moment and couldn't care less." I must be one hip motherfucker.