Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture

Abstract

Abstract While hipness is most often thought to be an ineffable quality of individual style, this article proceeds from the idea that hipness is a sensibility that for the past half‐century has structured art and thought in various recognizable ways. What drives changes in hip style is a conception of the individual's alienation from society—alienation due to a clash of sensibility and perception rather than any specific political wrong. This clash is rendered in the representational archetypes of the hipster and the square, or, more abstractly, in the schema of asymmetrical consciousness that defines their relationship. While hip culture changed dramatically in the 1960s, its structuring tropes of ironic displacement are variously manifest in Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," and Ken Nordine's "Sound Museum." Acknowledgements This essay was written with the support of the Stanford Humanities Fellows Program. I would like to thank my colleagues in that program, and especially Seth Lerer, its director, for their help and encouragement. I would also like to thank the graduate students participating in the Berkeley Colloquia in the Musicologies, where an early version of this paper was first read. Also, thanks to Helen Ford, Lee Konstantinou, and Graham Larkin for their comments and ideas at various stages in the preparation of this essay. Notes 1. Milt Gabler and John Benson Brooks, "What's a Square?," from Avant Slant (One Plus 1 = II?): A Twelve Tone Collage, Decca DL 75018, 1968, LP. 2. Indeed, scholars have most comprehensively understood hipness as prestige: the best recent writing on counterculture has concentrated on the problems of consumption and competitive prestige within hip subcultures. See especially Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: How Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: Harper Collins, 2004); and Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Other significant academic studies of hipness include Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Andrew Ross, "Hip, and the Long Front of Color," in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989), 65–101; Ingrid Monson, "The Problem of White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse," Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3 (1995): 396–422; John Leland, Hip: The History (New York: Ecco, imprint of HarperCollins, 2004); and Philip Ford, "Somewhere/Nowhere: Hipness as an Aesthetic," Musical Quarterly 86, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 49–81. 3. Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, "Introduction," from The Cannonball Adderley Sextet in New York, Riverside RLP 9404, 1962, LP; reissued as Riverside 9404, 2005, compact disc. 4. LeRoi Jones, "Milneburg Joys (Or, Against 'Hipness' As Such)," Kulchur 3 (1961): 41; Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997), 261–62. 5. Quoted in Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told by the Men Who Made It, eds. Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955; reprinted Dover, 1966), 405. 6. I am referring to the observer effect that is central to the uncertainty principle theory of the German quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976). 7. Malcolm Gladwell, "The Coolhunt," New Yorker, March 17, 1997, 78–88. In his recent novel Pattern Recognition, William Gibson has also treated the figure of the coolhunter, which he further described as a "dowser in the world of global marketing" with a "violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace." William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2003), 2. 8. Thomas Frank, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," in Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler, eds. Tho