Hipster (1940s subculture)
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Hipster, as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados of jazz, in particular modern jazz, which became popular in the early '40s. The hipster adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following: manner of dress, slang terminology, use of cannabis and other drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humor, self-imposed poverty, and relaxed sexual codes. Early hipsters were generally white youths adopting many of the ways of urban blacks of the time, but later hipsters often copied the early ones without knowing the origins of the culture.
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[edit] History
Etymologically, the words hep and hip may have been derived from hipi, a word in the West African language Wolof that means “to see”.[1] The word was used in many African communities of the Diaspora since their time of transplantation from their original locale.
In the early days of jazz, musicians were using the hep variant to describe anybody who was "in the know" about an emerging culture, mostly black, which revolved around jazz. They and their fans were known as hepcats. By the late 1930s, jazz and its variant Swing, had become popular among squares, the jazz culture became watered down, and hip rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replace hep. Clarinetist Artie Shaw described singer Bing Crosby as "the first hip white person born in the United States."[2]
Subsequently, around 1940, the word hipster was coined to replace hepcat, and hipsters were more interested in bebop and hot jazz than they were in the older Swing music, which by the late 40s was becoming old-fashioned and watered down by "squares" like Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo. During the 1940s white youth began to frequent African-American communities for their music and dance. These first youths diverged from the mainstream due to their new philosophies of racial diversity and their exploratory sexual nature and drug habits. Hipsters belonged roughly to the same economic class as the African-Americans they emulated, while Beats tended to belong to the middle and upper classes; defining hipster styles were thus "straight-edge" and dandified, while the beats--often college students "slumming it"--wore sandals and ragged clothes.
The first printed dictionary to list the word hipster is the short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk," published in 1944 with the album Boogie Woogie In Blue by pianist Harry Gibson, who performed as Harry the Hipster. The entry for hipsters defined it as, "characters who like hot jazz". This short glossary of jive expressions was also printed on playbills handed out at Gibson's concerts for a few years. It was not a complete glossary of jive, as it only included jive expressions that were found in the lyrics to his songs. The same year, 1944, Cab Calloway published The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary of Jive, which had no listing for hipster). Given that Hepster is Calloway's pun on Webster, it appears that hepster pre-dates hipster.
Frank Tirro in his book Jazz defines the 1940s hipster:
To the hipster, Bird was a living justification of their philosophy. The hipster is an underground man. He is to the Second World War what the dadaist was to the first. He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and overcivilized to the point of decadence. He is always ten steps ahead of the game because of his awareness, an example of which might be meeting a girl and rejecting her, because he knows they will date, hold hands, kiss, neck, pet, fornicate, perhaps marry, divorce-so why start the whole thing? He knows the hypocrisy of bureaucracy, the hatred implicit in religions-so what values are left for him?-except to go through life avoiding pain, keep his emotions in check, and after that, "be cool," and look for kicks. He is looking for something that transcends all this bullshit and finds it in jazz.
Marty Jezer, in his book, The Dark Ages: Life In The U.S. 1945-1960 defines the 1940s hipster:
The hipster world that Kerouac and Ginsberg drifted in and out of from the mid-forties to the early-fifties was an amorphous movement without ideology, more a pose than an attitude; a way of "being" without attempting to explain why. Hipsters themselves were not about to supply explanations. Their language, limited as it was, was sufficiently obscure to defy translation into everyday speech. Their rejection of the commonplace was so complete that they could barely acknowledge reality. The measure of their withdrawal was their distrust of language. A word like cool could mean any of a number of contradictory things--its definition came not from the meaning of the word but from the emotion behind it and the accompanying non-verbal facial or body expressions. When hipsters did put together a coherent sentence, it was always prefaced with the word like as if to state at the onset that what would follow was probably an illusion. There was neither a future nor a past, only a present that existed on the existential wings of sound. A Charlie Parker bebop solo--that was the truth. The hipster's world view was not divided between "free world" and "Communist bloc", and this too set it apart from the then-current orthodoxy. Hipster dualism, instead, transcended geopolitical lines in favor of levels of consciousness. The division was hip and square. Squares sought security and conned themselves into political acquiescence. Hipsters, hip to the bomb, sought the meaning of life and, expecting death, demanded it now. In the wigged-out, flipped-out, zonked-out hipster world, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Truman, McCarthy and Eisenhower shared one thing in common: they were squares. ...the hipster signified the coming together of the bohemian, the juvenile delinquent, and the negro.
Lennie Tristano explains his view of hipsters' relation to bebop:
"the supercilious attitude and lack of originality of the young hipsters constitute no less a menace to the existence of bebop."[3]
Another author who describes the 1940s hipster concisely is Paul Douglas Lopes in his book Rise of a Jazz Art World, and the relevant pages can be found online.[4]
As hipsters became older they invented the then pejorative, hippy, to refer to the younger hipsters, the affluent young baby boomer's children. Under the spelling hippie, the name was then embraced as the cultural identity, and thus became cool in its own right.
[edit] New philosophies of role reversal
[edit] Racial roles
The new philosophy of racial role reversal was transcribed by many popular hipster authors of the time. Norman Mailer’s 1957 pamphlet, entitled “The White Negro” [5], has become the paradigmatic example of hipster ideology. Mailer describes hipsters as individuals, “with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm.” [6]
[edit] Class roles
In literature both Bird and Lawrence Ferlinghetti both described the longing for changing classes in order to gain enlightenment.[7][8]
[edit] Sexual roles
Some scholars, such as Eric Lott, describe this new philosophy as based on "the twentieth century reinvention of [the] ... homosocial and homosexual fascinations".[9] In the Gay communities it is widely regarded as fact, that gay culture was popularized, especially among men during this period.
“A complex pattern of sexual relations emerged among the men--which, in a rather self-consciously literary fashion, they sometimes regarded as resembling the affair of Rimbaud and Verlaine. Like Rimbaud, they endorsed "the systematic derangement of the senses"--through intoxicants, meditation, and other forms of intense experience ("kicks")--as a means to reach states of expanded awareness.” [10]
[edit] Term revisited
- Main article: Hipster (contemporary subculture)
The word hipster has been rejuvenated in recent decades. An early appearance or the reemergence of the word hipster was in April 14, 1994 in the Camel Cigarettes Confidential Internal Report.[11] . In this report, Camel created the stereotype that is applied to today's modern hipsters: "These 'hipsters' entire social lives revolve around nightclubs, cafes, fashion, and music." This report was nearly ten years prior to Robert Lanham's The Hipster Handbook and the book is just a response to a marketing ploy which adapted into modern culture.
Although etymologically the word hipster is derived from an African source, recently, the word blipster has been used to describe black individuals who are in the recently formulated market demographic of hipster.
[edit] References
- ^ Prentiss Riddle: Language: Hip means "enlightened" in Wolof
- ^ Marcus, James, "The First Hip White Person." 2001. Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved 2008-03-02
- ^ Google Book Search: The Rise of the Jazz Art World
- ^ Google Book Search: The Rise of the Jazz Art World
- ^ The White Negro: Norman Mailer's racial bodies - Jewish - Critical Essay | MELUS | Find Articles at BNET.com
- ^ The White Negro
- ^ Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Junkman's Obligato," in Coney Island of the Mind (Norfolk, 1958) , pp. 57-58.
- ^ Frank Tirro, "Jazz" (1940)
- ^ cited by Andrea Levine "The White Negro: Norman Mailer's racial bodies - Jewish - Critical Essay", Melus, Summer 2003. Retrieved on 13 April 2008.
- ^ Beat Generation on glbtq.com
- ^ Trend Influence Marketing [1]
