Hip: The History

Rating:
Summary: so great!
Review:
i loved this book. it's fascinating, it's brilliant but easily readable. i learned so much and the ideas are still swirling in my head -- they stuck with me.

Rating:
Summary: Quite A Ride
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Be there....
Review: 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."

Rating:
Summary: DK
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: One Big Hombre
Review: It takes a mighty mighty man to stand up to Peter Frampton in 2005.

Rating:
Summary: I'm unhip and I loved "Hip: the History"
Review: 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.