Hip: The History

I was in Berkeley when Tower of Power recorded "What is Hip?" Like John Leland, my kids would correctly never have seen me as hip - just an interested bystander. Last week a Mexican friend asked me, "Why has the US developed, or more exactly, enjoyed such increases in income and wealth, while Mexico still seems to be stuck?" Oddly, John Leland seems to have important parts of the answer. The openness of hip, the synergy with the main culture, the drive and attraction of change and freedom to focus on the present helped create an environment that invited change. The way Leland reminds us of our evolution from farm to factory to urban life and the way his key groups, south-to-north African Americans, Eastern Europe to East Coast (and LA, too) Jews, built on change must surely be an unsung part of our development story. That's not what Leland is trying to write about; it's just that his digging into this world of freedom and complex interrelations must surely be a new way to think about how we have been not just lucky but shored up by OG's (his original gansta's, Whitman, Melville, Samuel Clemens et. al.) through Miles Davis and right down to Dennis Hopper and YES, Jeffrey Sachs, prophet of the Millenium Development Goals (you have to look hard to find him in the book). As my friend Lional Barber once said about far less effective dips in the pool of America's real past, "More, more."

When I finished reading "Hip: The History" I actually began to re-read parts of it for fear that all the wonderful and funny anecdotes and historical bits would begin slowly creeping out of my memory. If ever there is a thrill in reading it is when you can feel yourself trying to hold on to what you're reading, even SLOWING the pace at which you read just so the imprint is more indelible on your mind. But more than excelling as a sum of its parts, this book really stands out as a tremendous voyage of intellectual curiousity. Did "hip" really start with those that Leland refers to as the O.G.s (original gangsters) of hip: Emerson, Wilde & Thoreau? Is there truly some connective throughline between Walden Pond, Be-Bop, and the likes of Tupac Shakur? If, like me, you're the kind of person that doesn't mind if there turns out to be no water on Saturn's moon -- you're just happy that somebody bothered to check it out -- then you're in for a real treat with this book. Mind you, in the end I wound up agreeing with the historical connections Leland asserts, but I almost feel that that's just icing on the cake for what is truly an enjoyable exploration into a phenomenon that marks our culture as no other. The author's style is at once literate and funny and ultimately really entertaining. His research is fascinating, the book is filled with riveting and laugh-out-loud anecdotes, and unlike many books that talk about race in America, here you will find cogent, thoughtful and enlightening insights into "what's-up-with-that?" subjects like white homeboys in the 'burbs and the curious relationship of Jews and Blacks in America. Enjoy.

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.

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 tre