"What is Hip?"
Entering the door into a Liberal Arts land of college English lovers with few other brave, curious onlookers, Professor Weaver, the leader, asks us the question, "What is hip?"
The group answers in the call-and-response tradition brought to us from a long forgotton empire.
The group answers in the call-and-response tradition brought to us from a long forgotton empire.
My immediate answer is, "I am not hip and if I am, it is by default."
Then a florescent image flashing in the driver's seat of my most judgmental vehicle, the 2011 Frontal Lobe, spoke and the 20/100 Occipital Lobe, complete with black rimmed corrective lenses, graciously gives me one image:
This is it.
The essense of hip.
Why this guy?
He is the face of every grown-up man and woman.
He is the still budding boy and girl who I have found living in the
live, Indie-Rock, steaming stew pot of concert goers and record store junkies.
After my first week of hard earned education and paper reading, I've kicked this image out of his polyester chaise lounger, made him trim the hair out of his eyes, and freed his junk by taking him shopping for pants that fit, functioned, and did not offend grandmas and/or 24 year old virgins.
"Free The Junk."
It's the hip thing to do.
11 p.m. Mountain Time, USA
It's officially here.
I give you...
The Hipster. A poem
You see
de "Niggers" couldn't write in dem days
Language
slaves Bent and Coded.
Pink man, a Honky
Emulated black.
Black tried on white.
Black English,
Rich and Deliberately Ambiguous.
Entwining freedom and sorrow,
Words didn't mean one thing or another,
They meant
What the speaker said they did,
Irony and Humor
Joy and tragedy,
Dance and Song,
A missing element,
In white America
Erotic encounters,
From terror to mutual affection,
Everything,
But a Balance of Power.
The Place of Cultural Exchange,
Was Often The Pillow.
Any lady will tell
The father in everybody’s household
But her own.
Mulatto children,
She seems to think,
Drop from the clouds.
Africans absorbed,
The Western Cult of Individuality.
A wild hustler,
The Trickster,
Was shared by a nation
Built by mavericks and runaways.
A group
Pulls together
Against the outside world.
Pure Africa or European
Receded into a Cycle of Mutual Influence
Minstresly:
The central vein
Of American popular culture.
Given from those crude outpourings
Of Racial Fantasy.
This company,
A colored man appearing before
A white audience
May be instrumental
When removing prejudice.
A Recognition of Humanity
Replaces Ritual Negation.
Put on your smile and
Obedient “black” mask for
Slave owners.
African Americans began
This Racial Pantomime.
White performers’ mold
The mask of race.
Love and Theft
The way we talk
Or sing
Involves not just white caricatures of blacks,
But black parodies of whites.
This is
American popular culture.
We are not bound by out pasts,
With The Promise of Reinvention.
The Ripeness and Rot
Of the Mississippi Delta with its muddy soil
Is the
Cradle of the Blues.
Presley’s record
Looked forward to the modern,
With outrageous commerce in celebrity and image,
Movement of sex from private to public,
Explicit play of white and black music,
The question of theft.
Modernity in the Delta,
Is zooming by
When you’re not looking.
Preacher and sinners squabble,
With Rhythm.
Early slave cultures in Africa ,
Gave away secrets
Even as it harbored them.
It remains a
Universal language.
A free man
Could sing his own song,
Tell his own story.
Emerging individualized music
From folk ballads to
The Blues.
An act of
Spontaneous creation
By Rebel Geniuses.
Charley Patton,
Pursues booze,
Devil music,
And appreciative women.
Blues musicians were
Folk Antiheroes
In a landscape of their own invention.
An early profile
Of the hipster:
Ditching plantation work,
Living by their wits,
Transforming themselves into image.
A layered language developed,
A signal of sorrow and transcendence
In the same breath.
An admired outlaw,
Showing disdain of proper black society,
They boasted the
Illicit Enlightenment.
I constructed this poem as a personal reflection of the most important points to hit on regarding the idea of hip. It is a super duper summarized version of
Chapter One: in the beginning there was rhythm
Slavery, minstrelsy and the blues
It comes from the book titled:
Hip: The History
By John Leland
Check it out. Or stay tuned until next Wednesday night when I may or may not summarize Chapter 2 in the form of a poem. Ask your hip friend which form of media I’ll use to convey answers to hip questions.
He may know before I do.
Yes. I like this.
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