New book shows the history of hip

Author writes about a culture consumed with being 'cool.'
By LYNELL GEORGE
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LOS ANGELES -- You'd have thought it was one of the other life-or-death issues currently bedeviling us, like war, stem cells, gay marriage or the red state/blue state post-mortem.
But what had people gnashing their teeth, if not altogether up in arms the other night at the W Hotel in Los Angeles, wasn't what was happening in Iraq or in Ivory Coast or, for that matter, Ohio.
To hear writer John Leland tell it, it was a different bend on the culture wars. "Everyone came up and they were really challenging, like: 'Well, come on! Isn't this just about self-destruction and killing? Nihilism? Why aren't you writing about nihilism?' "
You'd have thought Leland was really on to something truly transgressive. But his new book, "Hip: The History," is an earnest look at a phenomenon that tends to prefer to wriggle out of definition. At nearly 400 pages, it is not just a history of hip; rather it is a history of popular culture in America and how blips in hip have shaped everything from cartoons to noir to the Internet -- with commerce never too far behind.
What's hip?
For those deeply invested, "hip" is nothing if not subjective. Who or what is "authentically" hip has always been something hotly contested -- fighting words. That doesn't even scratch at the notion that the word "hip" (or "cool" or "edgy," for that matter) often translates into just the opposite after it broadcasts wide, is suddenly everywhere at once. Such is the nature of the street.
"Cool used to be a symbol of escape. An unassailable castle, at least that was the sense," says Lewis MacAdams, who too tackled this ever-changing territory a couple of years ago in his elegant and worldly book, "The Birth of Cool." "Hip is angry and wise to the ways of the world," he says. Indeed, nowadays, what hip is -- or what it was and has evolved into -- is often elusive, slithery.
The idea then, says Leland, was to start conversations, not finish them. "I thought if this were the last word on hip, that's bad," says Leland, who is in the midst of taking hip's temperature across the United States promoting his book. "My hope was that it would be the start of an argument or a piece of an argument. If there's value here, it will be in what people add to it."
Leland is ready, come what may. He's busy diagraming all of this over lunch in a shadowy bistro that overlooks Sunset Boulevard's scruffy eastern end. To his now well-seasoned eye, it looks a lot like much of the post-hip enclaves of the last few years -- dotted with coyly named boutiques selling neo-retro garb, music outposts that deal in vinyl and a surfeit of cafes for loafing.
Leland takes in the street theater: Dudes in trucker hats slouched in front of laptops, girls with blue-black Bettie Page bangs and combat boots trudging to the bus stop are juxtaposed against the guy with the suede top hat, beard and '60s flight bag, rushing past them, bent toward something else.
Rebirth of hip
But hip is cyclical. It's subjective and elusive -- and always au courant. This season alone offers two very different books strolling bohemia's picturesque territory -- Leland's comprehensive history charting the evolution of the word as well as Laren Stover's whimsical, tongue-not-completely-in-cheek "Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge" -- which tracks the lifestyle.
What both these recent books remind us -- whether it is called "cool" or "hip" or "boho," or recoils from labels all together -- is that what used to be considered "outsider culture" is something that is constantly being picked apart, redefined or utterly reimagined.
Those hipsters who rolled up in their ironic '62 Ford Fairlanes in the '80s look down two decades later on the guys with Beck hair, who are driving up their rent. But what the Fairlane folk forget: When they arrived, there was that crop of earlier settlers who were packing up, fleeing their soon-to-be ruined scene.
One hip enclave is much like another. And so is its history: What's happening in L.A. neighborhoods is happening in Williamsburg, N.Y., or San Francisco. "But for the people who moved in today the glory days are right now," Leland explains. "The people who move in two years from now will be really annoying and fake. I think authenticity and hip are almost exclusive. That kind of purism, to me, it curdles immediately. It gets to be that nerdy, hipper than thou, band boy, record collector types."
No arbiter of hip
Former editor in chief of Details and now a reporter for the New York Times, Leland, 45, says that he by no means set out to crown himself the arbiter of what was hip and what was over. What he didn't want it to be was "a snobby book about cool people by someone who never got to be one."
Hip's origins lie in the language of West African slaves, in the Wolof verb hepi ("to see") or hipi ("to open one's eyes"). It began, Leland says, as one of the tools Africans developed to negotiate an alien landscape, to carry subversive intelligence that could only be understood by insiders.
The friction of blacks and whites' early cultural exchanges formed hip's roots. Leland then taps into what he sees as the further "major convergences of hip." The flashpoints include the birth of blues and minstrel shows -- "black and white Americans' first responses to one another" -- coupled with the emergence of Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, who celebrated individualism and civil disobedience; the bohemia of Greenwich Village, the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation. The tucked-away basements of bebop and the Beats was another marker, as were the punk-inspired Do-It-Yourself movement of the '70s and '80s and b-boy culture, the nexus of cyber-cool and the birth of the re-mixers, DJs and Turntableists as pop stars.
"It wasn't so much about discovering fresh that there were these musicians called bebop musicians," he says, "but trying to discover the connections between them and other things" -- from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ralph Ellison to Louis Armstrong, and William S. Burroughs to DJ Spooky.
Hip guide
At the outset of Stover's new field guide, she proclaims that Bohemia is about living beyond convention; it is not mindful of hip's currency, rather its concerns revolve around living out of the norm.
"There's a bit of idealism, but I don't think that it is always rebellion," Stover said. "Bohemia is an atmosphere, a way of life, a state of mind."
She traces the usage back to writer Henry Murger, who brought the term to the mainstream when his play La Vie de Boheme debuted in Paris. "He gave the label to the eccentric and socially unorthodox," writes Stover, "poets, painters, absinthe drinkers, dandies on the fringe -- any oddball qualified."
True bohemianism is not a trend, she explains. It's not a pair of boots or a cap cocked "just so" like you saw it on MTV. It's a way of life. For her it is her crooked stairway, her black rotary telephone, seeing the gifts of imperfections. "The brocade of everything that surrounds me."
Like Leland's conclusions about hip, Stover sees "bohemianism" as a mosaic of possibilities shaped by what it brushes up against: "Bohemianism is more than an attitude. It's the apolitical freedom of ideas, clothing and behaviors gently outside the norm. It is an elixir of undisclosed ingredients."
In this post-hip era when marketers unleash "cool hunters" to spot the most minute shift in the culture, that in-between space of hip or cool has often vanished, gone before the thought is fully articulated. And right behind them, "viral marketers," who install themselves at the hottest nightspots to stealthily hawk a new product. Such are the ways of our times.
Attempting to bottle the unbottleable or, at the very least, that essence, and selling it like snake oil is what hip feels like to many today. It's not the suede top hat, but the turned-up cuff, blunt short bangs or the irony of a trucker's cap; it's a pose that too often feels contrived.
All told, it's probably easier to be hip now than square.
"Any group who is 'hip' or 'cool' now is simply part of advertising," MacAdams says. "It's so conscious," he says. "Before, it was a destination. Now it is a sales tool. Cool used to be a symbol of escape. Cool was a province of few and a desire of everyone. Now it is a province of many and a desire of nobody."
Yet hip, maintains Leland, has never been pure. Hip and advertising have long been bedfellows. Hip, he writes, is "a trick to make people think they're rebelling when they are just buying stuff."