Hip: The History [Hardcover]

This book takes the reader on a remarkable journey from 17th century plantations to 21st century Williamsburg, Brooklyn. On route, we meet America's greatest hipsters- people who used language and manipulated the forces around them to transform society, from Mark Twain to Muhammed Ali, from Charlie Parker to Richard Hell. Leland draws a family tree linking the most influential cuktural movements across generations, detailing not only how the unique American experience begat our cultural icons, but how, in turn, those enlightened individuals have shaped the world around them, our world.

"Hip: A History" is sufficiently thorough and analytical to read like a textbook of American cultural history. But its much more than that. Leland's narratives put us right in the middle of some of the most provocative scenes: minstrel shows, the beats, bebops, early hip-hop and grafetti art, to name a few. You may not always agree with Leland about what is hip; that's part of the fun. But get on board for this trip across the racial, ethnic, geographic, economic and cultural divide that has brought us together and torn us apart over the last 350 years and catch a glimpse of the artists who had their fingers on the pulse of their America. Its quite a ride.

Clearly, those who say don't know and those who know don't

say; if you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know; you might

as well be loading mercury with a pitchfork. And yet there

is something called hip, and it seems to have a story.

_Hip:_The_History_, by John Leland, takes a shot at it, even

if it can't be told.

Right at the beginning, then, Leland has this fairly serious

problem which is yet part of his story, and maybe even an

assistant; and that is finding the definition of _hip_. (You

can't tell the players without a program.) He earnestly

derives the word from Wolof etymons meaning "to know" or "to

open one's eyes"; but clearly it's not ordinary knowledge of

the sort which comes from experience, or the traditions conveyed

by elders, or from assiduous study. "Hep" or "hip" was at

first a word used by Negro slaves to denote knowledge of things

the White man didn't know about, and it came by whispers and

signs and subtle gestures.

The centrality of the African experience to hip is something

Leland doesn't forget about as he traces the history of hip

from slavery days. As the still-oppressed descendants of the

slaves moved to the big industrial cities of America after

the Civil War and especially in early the 20th century, they

ran into many other un-Whites: the Irish, the Jews, the

Italians, the "Spanish" (we say "Hispanics"). The confluence

of slavery, racism, oppression, exile, rampant industrialism,

crime, drugs, unspeakable loss, linguistic and cultural Babel,

the junkpile of abandoned cultures, all the great melting pot

on the fires of Hell's Kitchen: this was where hip got started

because it was what people _needed_ to know. It was know,

and know fast, or die.

These people were all, to some extent, at odds with the dominant

culture, which was (and is) White, Protestant, conservative,

complacent, sentimental and studiously simple-minded about

cultural matters, locally rational and globally insane -- in

short, corny.

While the dominant took care to keep their distance, they did

peer through the windows of negritude from time to time --

mostly through odd agency of the minstrel show. It is now

hard to believe, but in the 19th century mostly White men

wearing Negro makeup and cavorting in vaudevillian manner on

stage were as central an experience of popular culture as the

movies or television would later become. There is a bridge

between the two, of which can see one end pretty clearly,

however: the _The Jazz Singer_, that astonishing filmic

monument where, framed by two uncompromising renditions of

_Kol_Nidre_ (a later film would give us five or ten seconds

and turn away) Al Jolson makes his way to pop stardom and,

getting ready to perform in incredible blackface, talks about

his _race_ and the nexus between the slave calls and songs

that had been woven into popular music and the ancient cries

of the Jews' liturgy. Correctly, Leland explores the movie

in detail. There are other icons further up and down the

genealogical tree of hip, of course, from Mark Twain and Herman

Melville above to bebop and the Beat Generation below, but

everything goes through _The_Jazz_ _Singer_ -- in its time.

But hip, being the underknowledge of the underground, like

water and the Tao flows everywhere and stays nowhere. For

one generation it's popular music, for another it's the

studiously unpopular Modern Jazz or Harry Partch. Sometimes

it's being aware, at least of where to score, and sometimes

it's being totally on the nod, turned on, tuned it, and dropped

utterly out. For awhile it's the artists who are "ahead of

their time", but of course, the notion of an avant-garde, the

idea that some artists are ahead of their time, requires that

Art be going somewhere, so that these artists can get there

first; that is, it requires Art to be progressive in an

old-time, optimistic, 19th-century, bourgeois sense. It turns

out to be one of the squarest ideas imaginable.

The idea began to be seriously weakened after the fractures

of the Sixties left Modernism and Bebop (as two examples) out

on an evolutionary limb. We are in the realm of the Postmodern,

where progress vanishes into a maze of twisty paths. And

after progress vanishes, we have only the random strut of

fashion; and as hip becomes fashionable, so fashion becomes

hip. Its sign is reversed; now, instead of being special

knowledge held by a few, it becomes what everybody knows all

the time, if they want to. Giant shiny corporate machines

run hot to pour out glossy magazines, television programs,

clothes and shows to tell you how to be hip. Hip sells things

to the masses. Maybe this is the death of hip: what is

everything is nothing. If so, its span was not long, a bit

over a hundred years.

At the beginning of the book, Leland tells the reader to check

the index to see if his name is there, and apologizes if it's

missing: "Somehow," he says, "it fell through one of the many

holes in this book." He's not being so ironic; after the

Sixties, there must have been millions of people who thought

they were cool, and the sort of people who are likely to pick

up this book will be mostly from their ranks, like you and

me, dear reader, even if we now have to buy our jeans in the

Relaxed Fit style.

Of course there are as many holes in the book as in the rusty

remains of your old microbus. Yet the book covers a lot of

ground in a small space and hits many of the greater phenoms

and icons. It is made of heavy metal. Maybe Leland could

have spent a bit less time trying to explain what hip is,

philosophically and logically, and just showed it happening,

but, as I said, part of the story is this very trying to come

to grips with its elusive and now perhaps vanishing nature

before it completely disappears. Or is it to be secretly

reborn under the present rising sign of violent, triumphant

fundamentalist corniness? Is this part of the story which is

yet to be told, indeed, yet to be lived?

"Be there or be square."

In Hip: The History Leland offers up nothing less than an alternate history of the development and importance of American pop culture to understanding America as a whole. In doing so he makes us rethink the familiar (Bugs Bunny, Miles Davis, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman) in light of the common thread of "hip," which he refuses to define too simply. At the heart of the book is an attempt to rethink the complex interplay of black and white culture throughout American history, its effect on the arts, commerce, and background noise of our lives. Leland does not overlook the destructiveness of this story in the history of America, but he's out to show how productive the tensions have been as well. And it's not the only story he has to tell: the book sheds light equally on writers in the nineteenth century (Emerson and Thoreau among them), musicians in the early, middle and late twentieth, computer geeks in the last twenty years, and, of course, the jewfro.

The book is ambitious in the best sense of the word and invites, even compels argument from its readers, many of whom will know bits and pieces of this story but will almost certainly not have put all these pieces together in this way. And, while it is magisterial in its breadth, Leland's many years as a professional magazine and newspaper writer lend it a refreshing and easy style. He can be humorous and convincing seemingly at will, and despite the book's length (300+ pages), he does not waste words: it's really a fun read.

Is this book for you? Well, if you're a forty-something like myself and you're looking at this review, then you've probably thought about a lot of this stuff on your own. This is one smart read, and I at any rate came away educated AND entertained even about things I had thought long and hard about before. If you're a teen or a twenty-something for whom this search is new, this book will open your eyes to a whole range of moments in American history in a non-condescending, reader-friendly way. Leland thinks the history of pop culture is NOT a sidelight of American culture: it's at the heart of it. And he's pretty convincing.

Oh, and the black and white photos are GREAT.