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This article was downloaded by: [Indiana University Libraries] On: 19 November 2008 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 788831718] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Jazz Perspectives Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t741771151 Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture Phil Ford Online Publication Date: 01 January 2008 To cite this Article Ford, Phil(2008)'Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture',Jazz Perspectives,2:2,121 — 163 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17494060802373382 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060802373382 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Jazz Perspectives Vol. 2, No. 2, November 2008, pp. 121–163 Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture Phil Ford You ask me what’s a square I’ll tell you what’s a square He has a certain air A square is unaware that he’s a square That’s a square. Milt Gabler and John Benson Brooks1 Hipness is an oddly obscure concept. While hip style (and the craving for hip prestige) is ubiquitous, it seems armored against inquiry, resisting all attempts to claim authority over it.2 Hipness cannot be understood rationally, we are told, but must be felt and experienced. When Cannonball Adderley praised his Village Vanguard audience for ‘‘being so really hip,’’ he explained, ‘‘you get a lot of people who are supposed to be hip, you know, and they act like they supposed to be hip, which makes a big difference … You know, hipness is not a state of mind, it’s a fact of life … You don’t decide you’re hip, it just happens that way.’’3 Deciding you are hip is what LeRoi Jones called ‘‘hipness as such,’’ which meant observing canons of hipster behavior, ‘‘initialing ideas which had currency in the circles, talking the prevailing talk, or walking the prevailing walk.’’4 Authentic hipness, on the other hand, is won only when we engage in an intellectual or spiritual struggle for ourselves, with no shortcuts—and no relying on others to tell us what is hip. Praise of 1 Milt Gabler and John Benson Brooks, ‘‘What’s a Square?,’’ from Avant Slant (One Plus 1 5 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 Downloaded By: [Indiana University Libraries] At: 13:24 19 November 2008 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. ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online # 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17494060802373382 122 Hip Sensibility a Charlie Parker solo cannot be the sort of social-climbing affectation of a taste one knows one is supposed to possess. Such taste is earned only when there is a resonance between the sound of the music and the texture of one’s own life. Parker’s dictum, ‘‘if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn,’’ is a hip motto and a prescription for hip self-fashioning.5 And if we cannot rely on others to tell us what is hip, then the idea of hip authority is equally questionable. No one can tell me what is hip; no one can tell anyone else, either. The obvious objection to any attempt at a study of hipness, then, runs something like this: hipness, by its very nature, resists definition, because it resists authority. The idea of trying to analyze hip culture in order to extract the habits of mind or rhetorical tropes by which it is constituted is a grotesque violation of what hipness fundamentally is. Hipness is not an idea and it is not a style; it is an attitude, a stance towards the square, unfree world. Each individual must act—or not act—on an understanding of squareness or unfreedom in his or her own way. There are no rules to learn or loyalties to enforce. It is woven into the very fabric of the concept that it not be amenable to stylistic analysis, and if it somehow finds itself so analyzed, those items under examination would shrivel, losing whatever hip aura they might have had. There is something Heisenbergian6 about this line of argument: the mere act of observing hip culture alters it. This is the working problem of coolhunters, those fashion consultants who infiltrate city neighborhoods in which hip styles evolve in order to discover what is considered ‘‘cool.’’7 The difficulty coolhunters encounter is that while they can streamline how hip styles are processed into industrial manufacture, they can do nothing about what happens once they are brought to market. The hip kids who develop new styles abandon them once they are widely issued. The coolhunter is thus forever running in circles, following the increasingly rapid cycles by which hip urban youth adopt and discard styles. The ever-escalating speed of obsolescence is a result of the success of modern market research. Hip styles, once they enter into mass awareness, are no longer hip styles. And yet there are clearly ways in which hipness is not the unselfconscious, spontaneous expression of individual uniqueness its believers think it is. Whatever Cannonball Adderley says, hipness is a state of mind. It is a sensibility and aesthetic that for half a century has structured art and thought in various recognizable ways. Downloaded By: [Indiana University Libraries] At: 13:24 19 November 2008 Hip styles, whatever they may mean in themselves, are manifestations of ideas. They are gaudy plants that flourish above ground, nourished by a underground stream of intellectual history. What drives change in hip style is a conception of the individual’s alienation from society—alienation that is due not to any specific political wrong but 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. Jazz Perspectives 123 to something more radical, a clash of sensibility and perception. Society not only makes people unhappy; in dulling self-awareness, creativity, and self-expression, society fails to offer the preconditions of happiness. The culture of a hegemonic system stamps individuals into a uniform mold, and so it is culture that becomes the medium of resistance rather than politics as such. This is what Thomas Frank has called the ‘‘countercultural idea,’’ appropriately enough, as it underwrites the tendency to construe dissent as the act of creating a counter-culture to oppose the mainstream one.8 Making counterculture means aesthetic cultivation, either of the self or of those things that embellish the self—such as music, which has routinely been central to countercultural expression. Hipness is the aesthetic and the sensibility of counterculture. And while hip people continue to insist on the ineffability of this sensibility, certain images and tropes of representation have recurred in hip culture throughout the past half-century, persistently shaping the ways people imagine themselves and their relationship to society.