The wages of hip

Defining what’s hip and what’s not is one of the most enduring games of the last three quarters of a century.  One of the things that made hip hip was that you had to be hip to get to decide what was hip, so it was, all of it, a completely inside game.  Take blue jeans, for example.  For well over a century, blue jeans were working men’s pants.  It was the Levi Strauss company that in 1873 patented riveting the front and rear pockets to jeans, so when loaded with a thick wallet or a pair of pliers or a fistful of nails, they wouldn’t tear away from the rest of the fabric.  Jeans were constructed of thick, dyed denim fabric, and people bought them so they could be worn to do any sort of heavy labor.  They were nearly indestructible.  The fabric didn’t easily rip, and it could take years for it to wear through.

So, what made jeans hip?  Well, the first step was rules against them.  The establishment – and I mean to use the word literally, as in establishments like churches, courthouses, sit-down restaurants, and schools – banned them, so wearing blue jeans became an act of rebellion. The rarity of blue jeans made them precious overseas.  In the 60’s and 70’s, you couldn’t buy jeans in Paris, for example, so owning a pair bought on a trip to America became a status symbol.  If something as common and down-market as a pair of jeans gave you status in the city the capital of couture, you’re counter-programming style.  That’s hip.  When the fashion icon Jane Birkin died recently -- the Hermes Birkin bag is named for her – she was celebrated as much for popularizing blue jeans worn with a silk shirt and an Yves St. Laurent jacket as much as she was for the bag bearing her name.  Who was going to turn away Jane Birkin at the door of the Oak Room at the Plaza, or the Four Seasons, or even the upscale and chic disco, Arthur, built on the site of the 1950’s nightclub El Morocco?  Nobody.  She was hip, so her jeans were hip.

By the time every vertical male human being playing a guitar took to wearing jeans on stage rather than a suit and tie or a performance outfit, hip went in the other direction.  Esquire or maybe it was GQ did an entire story a couple of decades ago about Mick Jagger picking out a pair of trousers and going to one fitting after another until they were perfect to wear on stage.  Listening to him talk about how the crotch had to fit just so and there had to be enough fabric through the thighs so the trousers didn’t lose their crease on stage was as interesting as hearing him talk about the recording to “Sympathy for the Devil.” It was impossible to think of the funky rhythms and soulful voice of gentleman rocker Robert Palmer without the finely tailored suits he performed in.  

What was hip was only one part.  Who was considered hip was what really counted, and knowing who was hip mattered almost as much.  Simply knowing the name Bob Dylan before “Like a Rolling Stone” hit the charts in 1965 was hip.  Appreciating Dylan’s voice on his second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” released in 1963, while your friends said stuff like, I like his songs but I can’t stand his voice,” was hip. 

Owning a record by James Brown in the early 60’s was hip because he wasn’t on the pop charts, he wasn’t played on top 10 radio, and in the state of Virginia, you had to seek out a black record store to buy “Please Please Please” or “Try Me.”  Going to a James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner concert, where you were probably going to be the only white face in a sea of black ones, wasn’t hip because you were willing to mix races.  It was hip because you knew about the concert at all.  Concerts by even prominent black acts, much less blues singers like Bobby “Blue” Bland, weren’t advertised in the Washington Post or the Washington Times, and posters advertising the concerts weren’t stapled to telephone poles or plastered on empty walls except in the black section of town. 

So, what was hip?  The music or just knowing about something outside the ken of your age group or where you lived?  Hipness came out of jazz and jazz musicians.  It was an underground world of tiny, smoky clubs and microscopic bandstands that gave birth to the world of hip.  Marijuana was being smoked in the alley behind Club 47 in Boston in the late 1950’s, but you had to know somebody in the band, or somebody who knew somebody in the band to even know about it. 

To be hip was to take everything right out to the edge of what was acceptable and then over it into a never-never land of the dark and the weird.  If it was sinful in church, it was hip coming out of a saxophone or in the pages of “On the Road” or “Tropic of Cancer.”  If it was forbidden, it was hip.

Jazz masters like Charlie Parker were honking bebop; heavy-lidded Chet Baker was playing “cool” jazz on his trumpet, and to be in on the secret that those unforgettable grooves were coming out of them while they were on smack, now that was hip. 

Until they died.  Then incredibly, they became more hip.  Hip became its own self-fulfilling prophesy.  Just think of marijuana.  Bought in pot boutiques and no longer smoked in alleys behind jazz clubs or at private gatherings of people-in-the-know, legal marijuana has lost its cool.  It’s as common has sitting down for a burger or buying an ice cream cone.

To be young was the essence of hip. It was even hip to die young, like Jimmy Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, who seemed at the time to have given their lives in the service of hip.

But now, look at Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. They are living lives that are the best answer to the question, what is an aging hipster to do? Patti flies around the world reading her poetry and giving concerts. Joni has to be helped on stage, but her voice is as vibrant and thrilling as ever. And Dylan, at age 82, he is on his never-ending tour, making his music more accessible than it ever was, turning upside down the idea that hipness has to do with being among the few, not the many.  He doesn’t wear jeans on stage.  He has elegant white stripes down the sides of his show trousers, and his jackets are paneled and embroidered, and as he did on the Rolling Thunder tour, he peers out at his audience from beneath the broad flat brim of a hat, and he often plays songs of his that people have forgotten, or never heard in the first place.  Nowadays,  he also covers tunes he listened to on the radio when he was a kid.  Now that is hip.