Authors: Glenn O'Brien
“As he was the illegitimate son of the Lost Generation, the hipster was really
nowhere.”
—Anatole Broyard
In “The White Negro” Norman Mailer explained the hipster as a result of existentialism hitting the melting pot. Mailer’s hipster is a white man who removes himself from the culture into which he was born because of existential dread. Dread from the A-bomb’s threat of mass extinction or the corporate world’s mass identity extinction.
“One is Hip or one is Square . . . one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”—Norman Mailer, “The White Negro”
The hipster is cool because he is detached, or semi-detached. He is independent. He is non-invasive and self-contained. A group of hipsters might be called an archipelago.
Cool isn’t something invented recently. It was probably cool in the caves where the original underground cats dwelt. When the tribe was having a war dance, the cool one wasn’t dancing, but he might have been playing a drum in the corner. Syncopated.
Cool cannot be faked. Someone trying to be cool is generally more uncool than somebody who is not trying at all.
Cool is like grace. It can be sold but not bought.
Cool is provisional. Cool wants to think it over and get back to you.
“There is a cool spot on the surface of Venus three hundred degrees cooler than the surrounding area. I have held that spot against all contestants for five hundred thousand years.”—William S. Burroughs
“Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”—Thomas Jefferson
“By 1948 it began to take shape. That was a wild vibrating year when a group of us would walk down the street and yell hello and even stop and talk to anybody that gave us a friendly look. The hipsters had eyes.”—Jack Kerouac
“All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends . . . waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man’s era to a close in a blaze of radiation—all these would now step forward and say their piece.”—Diane di Prima
As the Beats got exposure, their bohemian enclaves supplied the big city with some excitement, and gave youth somewhere to rebel to. It was hang in the enclave or hit the road—and it was no coincidence that the Genesis of Beat was
On the Road.
Already the scene was not a place but a trip.
To the latter day hipsters of my baby boom generation hipness was redefined as a kind of religion, a trans-apocalyptic cult that burned cool, that fluoresced around us, threatening to erase official history in a spontaneous rhythmic carnal uprising, a revolution of the mind, an eruption of eros, and enlightenment. It was where we came in.
The whole scene morphed from cool detachment to swirling total immersion, from nihilism to nirvana.
It became a spectrum of otherness: Hippies and Yippies, Panthers and Diggers and Merry Pranksters.
We weren’t Americans anymore. The hipster had become a cosmopolite, an organism that occurs in most parts of the world. The hipster feels at home or not at home everywhere equally.
But finally every hipster is the citizen of himself.
“The hipster has usually been associated with being a number, a hot card, something oddly independent, responsive to whatever circumstance he finds himself in, disaffiliated but sovereign to whatever turf he finds himself wise to.”—Richard Prince
A funny thing happened on the way to nirvana. Handfuls of demonstrators turned into “the armies of the night.” The counterculture grew so large it became a sort of co-culture. The success of the hip changed the trip. It was no longer Route 66 but the Interstate, no longer boxcars but tour jets.
For true believers in rebellion as a conspiracy against fascist control and the status quo, the end of the twentieth century proved a disappointment as the counterculture was absorbed nearly whole by the mechanisms of consumer culture. The radical ideas of the sixties went into business for themselves. It wasn’t only that boundary-breaking genres were co-opted. They were embraced and enthusiastically marketed to such an extent that it was increasingly difficult to maintain a serious posture of opposition. Fashion raided the archives of the underground and began selling a simulacrum of rebellion.
The crazed hippies intent on destroying the system sold like hotcakes. Cool hotcakes. They became product despite themselves, to spite themselves.
But sometimes a simulacrum gives you a taste and you want more. You want the real thing. The appearance of rebellion could still supply a frisson to bored youth who saw the youthful antics of predecessor generations as exciting.
There was little to revolt against except ennui, but that was something.
The young began dressing like pictures they had seen of rebels past, rebels who seemed to be having a wild time that was no longer accessible.
Today if you use the term hipster it’s usually referring to a kind of look. The online urban dictionary actually says “The ‘effortless cool’ urban bohemian look of a hipster is exemplified in Urban Outfitters and American Apparel ads which cater toward the hipster demographic.”
I had noticed the new class hipsters but I didn’t pay them much mind except to admire their fedoras, beards, and tattoos. Looking or simulating interesting may be the first step toward being that way. They certainly looked more interesting than the power-suited yuppies of the eighties, but their focus seemed more about craft beers and artisanal cheese than more profound cultural involvement.
Then I was browsing at a bookstore in Berlin and I came across a book the title of which intrigued me:
What Was the Hipster?
It had been put together by a bunch of young Brooklynite intellectuals, apparently neither bearded nor tattooed. The book’s premise was that the hipster was a fairly recent phenomenon and that it was over, and in retrospect it wasn’t anything that anyone would have genuinely wanted to be anyway. I found that puzzling as I had always wanted to
be a hipster from slightly before the moment that I figured out what a beatnik might be.
I realized that the word had changed meaning while I was dozing in the sun or strolling on a golf course. According to the leader of their panel of experts, Mark Greif: “. . . the contemporary hipster seems to emerge out of a thwarted tradition of youth subcultures, subcultures which had tried to remain independent of consumer culture, alternative to it, and been integrated, humiliated, and destroyed.”
“Oh wow!” I thought, in the words of Maynard G. Krebs, the cat who had me playing bongos when I was twelve. Humiliated and destroyed by consumer culture! Not again! This generation sure went down in flames a lot easier than the hippies and the punks.
Finally I figured out what these guys were talking about. One of their definitions of this new hipster was “rebel consumer”—“the culture figure of the person, very possibly, who understands consumer purchases within the familiar categories of mass consumption . . . like the right vintage T-shirt, the right jeans, the right foods for that matter—to be
a form of art.
”
That rang a bell and it sounded like Richard Prince’s fault. I had seen the hip career choice change from rock musician or painter, to DJ or curator. Life had become a matter of selecting among ready-mades. Greif concludes his essay: “The 2009 hipster becomes the name for that person who is a savant at picking up the tiny changes of consumer distinction and who can afford to live in the remaining enclaves where such styles are picked up on the street rather than, or as well as, online.”
I could actually dig that analysis. It took me back to the early nineties when I was asked the definition of Alternative Music, then a principle category in music, and I replied “mainstream.” I had once asked Madonna why her music was categorized as Pop while Elvis Costello’s was Alternative and she said, “Because he’s not good looking.”
The scary thing about this project is that you begin to realize that the underground as we used to know it really doesn’t exist anymore except in our nostalgia for it. Burroughs was always quoting Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountains, the founder of the assassin order, the first terrorist: “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
And never was this more true. Or permitted. Marketing has simply turned the forbidden, the underground, the enemy even, into something marketable. What once made artistic products underground was either censorship or cultural disapproval enforced by the guardians of the marketplace. If a book or a band was too outrageous it wasn’t considered for production. But in the digital age the gatekeepers are out of business.
Lately I sensed that something else was stirring out there. Every now and then a group of Occupy others march past my house and I can’t help cheering out the window.
The underground seems to be trying to come around again. I can dig that and I sincerely hope that these cool artifacts aid and abet a cool front moving in.
I don’t mind if it starts out totally fake, with a beard and a tattoo and a copy of Kerouac carried for effect. Hey I started with Maynard G. Krebs and his goatee and it worked for me.
“Work?!”
In a way this volume is a compendium of orphans.
It’s not really an anthology as much as a sampler. A few tasty morsels from the bebop scene, some ancient history of the pre-wiggers, the Beats both beatific and downtrodden, some gonzo and gonzoesque journalism, even a bit of punk picaresque. It’s really a louche
amuse bouche
and possible textbook for Outlier Lit 101.
My guiding principle in selecting was filtered randomness. My only agenda was to provide a primer and inspiration for future thought crime and written rebellion. This volume is by no means
definitive in terms of the writers selected or the examples chosen. It could have been almost entirely composed of different authors, except for a few prime mover usual suspects. I may have given shorter shrift to the greener, more Big Sur Zen garden end of the spectrum in favor of urban grit, but that can easily be rectified—get with Gary Snyder and he’ll do the rest.
What is collected here is just a little taste to whet cool appetites.
Glenn O’Brien
New York 2013
Really the Blues—
Mezz Mezzrow’s memoir of the early days of jazz, cowritten with novelist Bernard Wolfe—came out in 1946 and was an instant countercultural classic. Henry Miller applauded its “unadulterated joy.” For Allen Ginsberg it was “the first signal into white culture of the underground black, hip culture that preexisted before my own generation.” Hip came out of jazz and no hepcats put more effort into attaining and practicing hipness than the white players on the jazz scene. Mezzrow was a reed man better known as a weed man. At one point “the mezz” meant the highest quality weed. He was so hip, when he was sent up to Rikers Island he told the judge he was black so he could be locked up right. In this episode Mezz recounts the struggle of Chicago musicians—including such legends as Eddie Condon, Frank Teschemacher, Joe Sullivan, and (briefly) Gene Krupa—to make it in New York. The propulsive jive-talking prose remains irresistible.
I’d rather drink muddy water, Lord,
sleep in a hollow log,
I’d rather drink muddy water, Lord,
sleep in a hollow log,
Than to be up here in New York,
treated like a dirty dog.
J
ACK
TEAGARDEN
sang that lament on a record of ours called
Makin’ Friends,
and it should have been the theme-song of the Chicagoans. The panic was on. When we bust in on our pals we found
them all kipping in one scraggy room, practically sleeping in layers. They should of had the SRO sign up. Eddie Condon was out scooting around town with Red McKenzie, trying to scare up some work. There wasn’t a gas-meter between them all, and they couldn’t remember when they’d greased their chops last. “Wait’ll you get a load of this burg—don’t lose it,” Tesch mumbled in his signifying way, cocking his sorrowful eyes over those hornrimmed cheeters.
They’d had a job all lined up when they first breezed in, but when they made the audition the boss got one earful of Chicago music and yelled “Get those bums out of here!” That was how jazz hit the tin ears of Tin Pan Alley. After one week at the Palace, where they played slink-and-slump music behind a team of ballroom dancers, they all holed up in this cubby, singing those miss-meal blues like Doc Poston had predicted. They picked up on some vittles once today and then again the day after tomorrow.
Well, we all laid around in that fleabag-with-room-service for a couple of gripy weeks, and then, through a fiddle-stroker who was crazy about hot music, I landed a job in a roadhouse called the Castilian Gardens, out in Valley Stream, Long Island. Gene, Eddie, Sullivan and Billings made a beeline for the suburbs with me. Soon Gene left for Chicago. Then we eased our guitar player out and moved in Eddie with his long-necked banjo; next the piano player quit, by request, and Sullivan took over his place; finally our tenor sax player said, “Milton, Tesch needs to be in this band, and I can go with a straight dance band, so I’ll gladly leave if only you’ll teach me how to play jazz,” so in a few days we began to sound like something. Talk about infiltration tactics—we just surrounded that band from within. The trumpet player quit soon after because he didn’t know a single tune we played, as we kept reminding him, and right after that our leader got a bigtime offer somewhere, so he turned the whole band over to me. The boss wouldn’t hire Tesch, and I couldn’t get Gene and Bud back from Chicago, but still, out of seven men we were left with four and three of them were Chicagoans, so the band didn’t sound so bad.