Hipster (1940s subculture)
Encyclopedia
Hipster, as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados
of jazz
, in particular bebop
, which became popular in the early 1940s
. The hipster adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following: dress, slang, use of cannabis
and other drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humor, self-imposed poverty and relaxed sexual codes.
rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replace hep. Clarinetist Artie Shaw
described singer Bing Crosby
as "the first hip white person born in the United States."
Subsequently, around 1940, the word hipster was coined to replace hepcat, and hipsters were more interested in bebop
and hot jazz than they were in Swing, which by the late 40s was becoming old-fashioned and watered down by "squares" like Lawrence Welk
and Guy Lombardo
. In the 1940s white youth began to frequent African-American communities for their music
and dance
. These first youths diverged from the mainstream due to their new philosophies of racial diversity and their exploratory sexual nature and drug habits.
Hipster is listed in the short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk," published in 1944 with the album Boogie Woogie In Blue by pianist Harry Gibson
, who performed as Harry the Hipster. The entry for hipsters defined them as "characters who like hot jazz."
In his book Jazz: A History (1977), Frank Tirro defines the 1940s hipster:
Marty Jezer, in The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945–1960 (1999), provides another definition:
In Lennie Tristano
's view, the hipsters' relation to bebop was anything but positive: "the supercilious attitude and lack of originality of the young hipsters constitute no less a menace to the existence of bebop."
’s 1957 pamphlet, entitled "The White Negro," has become the paradigmatic example of hipster ideology. Mailer describes hipsters as individuals "with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm."
, describe this new philosophy as based on "the twentieth century reinvention of ... homosocial and homosexual fascinations." In gay
communities it is widely regarded as fact that gay culture was popularized, especially among men during this period.
Fan (person)
A Fan, sometimes also called aficionado or supporter, is a person with a liking and enthusiasm for something, such as a band or a sports team. Fans of a particular thing or person constitute its fanbase or fandom...
of jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
, in particular bebop
Bebop
Bebop differed drastically from the straightforward compositions of the swing era, and was instead characterized by fast tempos, asymmetrical phrasing, intricate melodies, and rhythm sections that expanded on their role as tempo-keepers...
, which became popular in the early 1940s
1940s
File:1940s decade montage.png|Above title bar: events which happened during World War II : From left to right: Troops in an LCVP landing craft approaching "Omaha" Beach on "D-Day"; Adolf Hitler visits Paris, soon after the Battle of France; The Holocaust occurred during the war as Nazi Germany...
. The hipster adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following: dress, slang, use of cannabis
Cannabis (drug)
Cannabis, also known as marijuana among many other names, refers to any number of preparations of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug or for medicinal purposes. The English term marijuana comes from the Mexican Spanish word marihuana...
and other drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humor, self-imposed poverty and relaxed sexual codes.
History
The words hep and hip are of uncertain origin, with numerous competing theories being proposed. In the early days of jazz, musicians were using the hep variant to describe anybody who was "in the know" about an emerging culture, mostly black, which revolved around jazz. They and their fans were known as hepcats. By the late 1930s, with the rise of Swing, hipHip (slang)
Hip is a slang term meaning fashionably current and in the know. Hip is the opposite of square or prude.Hip, like cool, does not refer to one specific quality. What is considered hip is continuously changing. The term hip is said to have originated in African American Vernacular English in the...
rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replace hep. Clarinetist Artie Shaw
Artie Shaw
Arthur Jacob Arshawsky , better known as Artie Shaw, was an American jazz clarinetist, composer, and bandleader. He was also the author of both fiction and non-fiction writings....
described singer Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby was an American singer and actor. Crosby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation....
as "the first hip white person born in the United States."
Subsequently, around 1940, the word hipster was coined to replace hepcat, and hipsters were more interested in bebop
Bebop
Bebop differed drastically from the straightforward compositions of the swing era, and was instead characterized by fast tempos, asymmetrical phrasing, intricate melodies, and rhythm sections that expanded on their role as tempo-keepers...
and hot jazz than they were in Swing, which by the late 40s was becoming old-fashioned and watered down by "squares" like Lawrence Welk
Lawrence Welk
Lawrence Welk was an American musician, accordionist, bandleader, and television impresario, who hosted The Lawrence Welk Show from 1955 to 1982...
and Guy Lombardo
Guy Lombardo
Gaetano Alberto "Guy" Lombardo was a Canadian-American bandleader and violinist.Forming "The Royal Canadians" in 1924 with his brothers Carmen, Lebert, and Victor and other musicians from his hometown, Lombardo led the group to international success, billing themselves as creating "The Sweetest...
. In the 1940s white youth began to frequent African-American communities for their music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
and dance
Dance
Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting....
. These first youths diverged from the mainstream due to their new philosophies of racial diversity and their exploratory sexual nature and drug habits.
Hipster is listed in the short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk," published in 1944 with the album Boogie Woogie In Blue by pianist Harry Gibson
Harry Gibson
Harry "The Hipster" Gibson was a jazz pianist, singer and songwriter.Gibson played New York style Stride piano and boogie woogie while singing in a wild, unrestrained style. His music career began in the late 1920s, when as the young Harry Raab, his birth name, he played stride piano in Dixieland...
, who performed as Harry the Hipster. The entry for hipsters defined them as "characters who like hot jazz."
In his book Jazz: A History (1977), Frank Tirro defines the 1940s hipster:
To the hipster, BirdCharlie ParkerCharles Parker, Jr. , famously called Bird or Yardbird, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer....
was a living justification of their philosophy. The hipster is an underground man. He is to the Second World WarWorld War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
what the dadaDadaDada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
ist was to the first. He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and overcivilized to the point of decadence. He is always ten steps ahead of the game because of his awareness, an example of which might be meeting a girl and rejecting her, because he knows they will date, hold hands, kiss, neck, pet, fornicate, perhaps marry, divorce—so why start the whole thing? He knows the hypocrisy of bureaucracy, the hatred implicit in religions—so what values are left for him?—except to go through life avoiding pain, keep his emotions in check, and after that, "be cool," and look for kicks. He is looking for something that transcends all this bullshit and finds it in jazz.
Marty Jezer, in The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945–1960 (1999), provides another definition:
The hipster world that Kerouac and Ginsberg drifted in and out of from the mid-forties to the early-fifties was an amorphous movement without ideology, more a pose than an attitude; a way of "being" without attempting to explain why. Hipsters themselves were not about to supply explanations. Their language, limited as it was, was sufficiently obscure to defy translation into everyday speech. Their rejection of the commonplace was so complete that they could barely acknowledge reality. The measure of their withdrawal was their distrust of language. A word like cool could mean any of a number of contradictory things—its definition came not from the meaning of the word but from the emotion behind it and the accompanying non-verbal facial or body expressions. When hipsters did put together a coherent sentence, it was always prefaced with the word like as if to state at the onset that what would follow was probably an illusion. There was neither a future nor a past, only a present that existed on the existential wings of sound. A Charlie Parker bebop solo—that was the truth.
The hipster's world view was not divided between "free world" and "Communist bloc", and this too set it apart from the then-current orthodoxy. Hipster dualism, instead, transcended geopolitical lines in favor of levels of consciousness. The division was hip and square. Squares sought security and conned themselves into political acquiescence. Hipsters, hip to the bomb, sought the meaning of life and, expecting death, demanded it now. In the wigged-out, flipped-out, zonked-out hipster world, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Truman, McCarthy and Eisenhower shared one thing in common: they were squares
...[T]he hipster signified the coming together of the bohemian, the juvenile delinquent, and the
negro.
In Lennie Tristano
Lennie Tristano
Leonard Joseph Tristano was a jazz pianist, composer and teacher of jazz improvisation. He performed in the cool jazz, bebop, post bop and avant-garde jazz genres. He remains a somewhat overlooked figure in jazz history, but his enormous originality and dazzling work as an improviser have long...
's view, the hipsters' relation to bebop was anything but positive: "the supercilious attitude and lack of originality of the young hipsters constitute no less a menace to the existence of bebop."
Racial roles
The new philosophy of racial role reversal was transcribed by many popular hipster authors of the time. Norman MailerNorman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
’s 1957 pamphlet, entitled "The White Negro," has become the paradigmatic example of hipster ideology. Mailer describes hipsters as individuals "with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm."
Sexual roles
Some scholars, such as Eric LottEric Lott
Eric Lott is an American Professor of English and social historian.Lott received his Ph. D. in 1991 from Columbia University. He has been a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Virginia since 1990....
, describe this new philosophy as based on "the twentieth century reinvention of ... homosocial and homosexual fascinations." In gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....
communities it is widely regarded as fact that gay culture was popularized, especially among men during this period.
A complex pattern of sexual relations emerged among the men—which, in a rather self-consciously literary fashion, they sometimes regarded as resembling the affair of Rimbaud and VerlainePaul VerlainePaul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
. Like Rimbaud, they endorsed "the systematic derangement of the senses"—through intoxicants, meditation, and other forms of intense experience ("kicks")—as a means to reach states of expanded awareness.
External links
- "A Portrait of the Hipster" by Anatole BroyardAnatole BroyardAnatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic and editor for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays and two books during his lifetime...
, a critical dissection of the hipster phenomenon from 1948. - "The White Negro" by Norman MailerNorman MailerNorman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
from 1957.