White Jazz, pt 2

You probably don't care about the Austin High School Gang but bear with me because their story is revealing. They were a bunch of guys who went to, you guessed it, Austin High School in Chicago. They decided they wanted to be in a band together and then, after, get this, hearing a jazz record at the soda shop, that they wanted to be a jazz band.

The amazing thing about them is just how ordinary their story is. They met at high school. There aren't any soda shops anymore. Today they would have hung out at the food court at the local mall and one of them would have brought the music that inspired them on their iPhone. But the primary thing about them is their sheer ordinariness.

They had a couple of things going for them. All but one of the gang had some musical training. That was more common back then than it is now. They also lived in Chicago which, if you wanted to be near real jazz in the 1920s, was the very best place in the whole world to be.

But otherwise everything about this jazz craze that caught them is like so many other teen boy crazes. In the 1980s, you used to see guys carry a sheet of plywood down to the park so they could practice break dancing moves, in the 1990s, it was skateboards that they practiced incessantly, later it was snowboards, BMX bikes, various extreme sports and so forth.

Kids don't do music as much as they used to but you only have to go back to the late 1970s to find a time when thousands of them started punk bands. Punk is much easier to play than 1920s jazz, of course. This is because punk was a very limited and simplistic kind of music with no room for development, which goes a long way to explaining why punk died so quickly; even a musically illiterate culture like ours is going to tire of music as simplistic as punk pretty quickly.

1920s Chicago jazz, later known as Dixieland or trad jazz, lasted for decades. There is still a trad jazz movement out there today, although it is pretty small, but the original movement lasted almost five decades, which is a lot longer than any do-it-yourself music trend in the 20th century.

It's instructive to compare the attitudes of the white versus black jazz musicians and enthusiasts. Until very recently (think Wynton Marsalis) black jazz musicians cared a whole lot more about the future of jazz than its past. But whites get excited about jazz heritage, they care about its roots. For blacks, jazz has tended to be a validation of their own authenticity. That is to say, it has been a way to show themselves and whites just how deep and rich black culture is. For whites is was more of an escape. They love the authenticity of jazz but it is precisely the possibility of dressing-up and playing a different role than the one life hands them that is the appeal.

And this early jazz had all the elements that appeal to boys and young men. It was small-group music. It didn't need a lot of arranging. It allowed for a sense of adventure and discovery. And it came with more secret lore than  Harry Potter novel.

It also had the advantage of not being completely dominated by an established group who had started doing this stuff a decade ago and who were motivated to keep the kids out. 

Most important of all, it was good. You listen to this stuff casually today and it feels comfortable and easy like nostalgia of a golden era when life was easy. The truth is the exact opposite. It was a music born of hard times and it was based on deep and rich tradition that allowed infinitely more possibilities than rock and roll, the blues, soul or hip hop could ever do.

And that is why, even today when hardly anyone listens to jazz, its culture casts such a long shadow. That is why concepts of cool hold sway over journalists who graduated from university in the 1980s and 1990s, all of whom are so painfully uncool they squeak. It's also why a younger generation of high school kids and even university graduates would gravitate to hip. With "cool" so completely owned by an elite, hipster offered freedom.

And the "cool"people got insecure and decided to murder hipster while it was still a puppy. And they succeeded. For now. Their grip on the cultural controls won't last forever though. And when it goes, look out.

White Jazz, pt. 1

There is a video on YouTube somewhere of Leon Redbone  talking to a crowd at a show somewhere. He appears to be drunk in the video but he may or mat not be. I don't know. Anyway, he holds up a picture and tells us the picture is of Nick Larocca. And he says that this is the man who invented jazz.

He's probably being ironic. To say such a thing and mean it would get you branded racist in less time than it takes to say, "Hold that tiger". And yet there is a sense in which the claim is not completely crazy and everyone who studies the history of jazz has probably been tempted to think what Redbone teases us by saying.

The name "Nick Larocca" may not mean anything to you. Larocca was the cornet player with the Original Dixieland Jazz band. The ODJB unquestionably made the first jazz record. After that it gets complicated.

No one believes that Larocca invented jazz. I don't think anyone who looks at the history of jazz in an even half-serious manner thinks that anyone invented jazz. But here's the thing: no one thought of it as "jazz" before the ODJB. The word "jazz" seems to come from white culture and it seems to be first applied to music in Chicago or San Francisco by white audiences. And these audiences didn't mean a genre of music. They meant a way of playing music.

Jazz meant to do something with spirit and hustle. It's highly unlikely the audiences who first used the word had any special musical knowledge. They liked that the music was energetic and fast paced. The first world war was just over and there was a new spirit of rebellion in the air and the music fit in with the spirit of rebellion.

Larocca didn't invent jazz—nobody did—but he saw the opportunity to connect the music to a lifestyle and he made money doing it. There was a lawsuit about who wrote an ODJB hit called "Livery Stable Blues". It's of no legal interest. What is interesting is that when Larocca appeared in court to testify, he wore a green jacket with a striped purple shirt underneath. This was in 1917!

He did, in a sense, what lots of other whites have done ever since. And the odd thing about it, is that only whites could have done it because they weren't burdened down with the problem of being authentic. Or, to put it another way, they did it without the burden of being authentically themselves.

Because one of the odd things about early white jazz bands is that they fell over themselves trying to be very authentic about music they had no authentic connection with themselves. The band was called The Original Dixieland Jazz Band for a reason. Even before they were famous, people went to see these shows because they claimed to presenting something authentic from somewhere else.

It was a role to put on and it was a role that came from another place, another culture. And white people love that stuff. Still do. Think of world music. We love any kind of authenticity going so long as it isn't our own.

Tumblr cool

To complement yesterday's post on what Tumblr tells us about common associations with the word "hipster", let's look at what Tumblr tells us about "cool".

The top three Tumblr blogs on cool are this one, this one, and this one. Looking at all three of them, my first reaction is to think of Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the others.

The first two are heavy on nostalgia and heavy on black and white photographs. The hipster blogs I highlighted yesterday had some nostalgic items, mostly fashion inspired by the late 1960s and early 1970s but nothing like the relentlessly nostalgic attitude that seems to go with the word "cool". And they flash back mostly to the post war period, running from 1945 to the early 1960s.

They are also very male in outlook. That is also the one thing they clearly do share with the third blog in the group above. It is packed with male stuff: motorbikes, guns, ammunition and partially undressed women with big breasts.

That said there are certain commonalities. The male outlook for example. The pictures of women on the first two tend to be just as contemptuously objectifying as the third. The first two features photos that are artsy, which is to say deliberately non-pornographic, but you don't get a good feel about women from looking at them. The third, if you look long enough, also has the same nostalgic elements as the first two, just not as prominently.

What strikes me about these blogs is how much I share in common with them. When writing about neo-noir, I have highlighted the conscious sense of nostalgia these movies evoke, the femme fatale character who highlights male weaknesses. Well, same thing in all three of these blogs. I can understand how these guys got where they are.

At the same time,  I do have to wonder if the angry attack on hipsters isn't, at least partially, a misogynist thing.

Hipster reality check: Tumblr

Tumblr is interesting in that it represents such a masive copyright violation. Why is that interesting? It's interesting because Tumblr makes it so ridiculously easy to take and use images. You simply reblog an image you find from someone else who stole it in the first place and who is, in any case, anonymous. You can start a blog on Tumblr and instantly have cost free access to millions of images. If you start a blog on a subject, say being a "hipster", then you can pull images that you think go with your concept to your hearts content.

At the same time, Tumblr also measures response. If no one else agrees with you about which images go with your concept or if no one else thinks your concept is interesting, then no one visist your blog and it doesn't register. So if we visit the top blogs on hipsters on Tumblr we get a good read of what most people think hipsters are like. It won't be perfect because Tumblr doesn't give us a representative sample of the public. On the other hand, it will give us a far more representative example than reading people from New York who think they are cool will.

In any case, we're interested in people who care and most people asked what they think of hipsters will say, "What's a hipster?" Tumblr, on the other hand, will give us a good sample of what people who care quite a bit think. Tumblr is a giant sifter that organizes images according to their cultural resonance.

And looking at the most popular hipster sites on Tumblr, say this one, or this one, or this one, or this one (warning all these sites have lots and lots of pictures), after reading what New York cultural critics have to say about hipsters is quite a jolt. New York cultural critics, for example, say that a lot of hipsters wear trucker caps and chain wallets. Well, people who think they are hipsters don't.

So let's come up with a new term. Let's call the people that New York cultural critics hate "New York Hipsters" and everyone else simply "hipster". Everyone hates New York Hipsters, so who cares about them. Besides, they only live in New York, an increasingly unimportant and rather provincial place. (One weird exception, if anyone matches the image of the hated New York Hipsters, it is Lena Dunham and yet the New York culture critics love her.)

Anyway, if we trust Tumblr, the most common emblem of hipsterdom is cut off denim shorts. Short shorts because hipsters are girls, teenage girls.

And she is a rather familiar type. She likes clothes a lot but doesn't have huge amounts of money to spend on them. She likes bright, sunny colours. She is aware of the fact that she is a fetish object for millions and is surprisingly comfortable with that but she isn't going to cater to your tastes so you can forget about these sites if your interest is pornographic.

She likes puppies and flowers and cute stuff generally. She likes her best girlfriends a lot and likes to take pictures of herself with them. She does not like posting pictures of her face or of her breasts. She does like to show lots of skin, and no great surprise because, being sixteen, she has beautiful skin, but she will show her legs, her back and her stomach.

She is emotionally vulnerable and she wants you to know that she is. Her blog is full of cute and inspirational sayings and they all tell you that she can be hurt. In fact, she flaunts this emotional vulnerability at you the way most men and boys wish she'd flaunt her breasts.

The flip side of her emotional vulnerability is her recklessness. She is reckless with precisely the things that make her vulnerable. She flaunts that emotional vulnerability. And she links it very closely to sex. She posts a lot of shots of herself in shorts or a skirt that are clearly meant to make you think about that rather special part of her that is underneath.

And that last is important because she does not think like a man with a thing for teen p____. She links that part of her body with her emotional vulnerability more than with sexual response. She doesn't think of it as the place where most of her sexual arousal buttons are but rather as where her vulnerabilities are most intense.

And that is very, very far from New York Hipster.

Words

"Hip" and "cool" are words first. They have histories.

What they don't tend to have are clear meanings. Both tend to end up being used to praise qualities that the speaker admires but those qualities can, and do, change from generation to generation. In the case "cool" it is possible to find people using the word in a non-ironic fashion to mean something that is the exact opposite of what it used to mean. Beginning in the 1980s, kids started saying "cool" to mean something that was very up-to-date, very in right now, which is to say, they said "cool" when they meant "hot".

No one knows for sure where they came from originally. An awful lot of brain cells have been wasted in fruitless attempts to trace the word "hip" and the concept of "cool" back to African roots. Most of this work has not only been a failure but is, quite frankly, embarrassingly shoddy and naive. It tells us more about the bizarre (and deeply racist) desire of college-educated whites to connect with a black culture they believe to be more authentic than their own than anything about these words.

If you look at usage patterns, both words show up being used by whites first and then get picked up by black jazz musicians. "Hip" makes the move in the 1930s and "cool" comes across in the 1940s. We can be pretty certain about this because a number of hep talk dictionaries were written at the beginning of the 1940s (the most famous being Cab Calloway's) and none of these feature the word "cool".

The introduction of the word "cool" into jazz slang is pretty much the work of one man, Lester Young. And the interesting thing about his use of the word was that he didn't just get the word from whites, he used to describe a style of playing music he saw in white musicians he admired. Most of all, he used the word to describe the playing style of Frankie Trumbauer AKA "Tram". You can hear it in this video. Tram's solo begins at .08 and goes until 1.04.



I'm not sure how much explaining that needs. It's a little like explaining "green". You point at something green and say, "This is green". Well, "That's cool".

So what we have are two words and related concepts that come from white America and go into the black jazz culture and, without changing their fundamental meaning, come back out through that filter in a way that was deeply congenial to whites.

That's where I'll be going the next few days with this. For now, I'd like to drop a hint about timing. Both words and the associated attitudes are drawn back into white culture because they offer attractive personas to adopt for rebels but during very different kinds of rebellion. Hip and hipness really start to matter in the late 1930s as the world is headed back into world war for the second time and after years of economic depression. Cool, on the other hand, really takes off in the early 1950s, a period when war is over and the economy (on this side of the Atlantic anyway) is booming. That matters a whole lot.

Hip and cool as virtues

Timidity — bravery — recklessness

Whenever people talked about virtues in the past they used three words. One word meant that you had not enough of the quality in question, a second meant just the right amount and the third meant you had too much. Virtue meant having a good balance.

Now we tend to talk about virtues in purely binary terms. You are either chaste or you are not. As a consequence, chastity (which actually means being controlled and disciplined about sex and how many people you have it with) has, for most people, come to mean not having sex at all. Bravery has come to mean complete disregard of danger. Prudence has come to mean being, well, it has come to mean being a "prude".

We've tended to do that for two reasons. The first was modernism. Modernists saw morality as a matter of law. First you used your reasoning to figure out what the moral law was then you obeyed it.

And that is where the second part came in. That second part is pietism and puritanism. Pietism, which was a huge influence on Kant, emphasized a kind of extreme vigour in the living of life. It ignored the realities of human nature and said everyone should strive to live up to an extreme level of performance in everything. Puritanism did likewise. Once you had rationally determined what the law is, then it was your duty to follow the law. And it was your duty to obey the law even if, odd as this may sound, even if it was completely contrary to what the beings it was applied to tend to be like. If silence was a virtue then dogs were to never bark even though barking is something dogs tend to like doing.

This set up a sort of odd competition between the various Christian religions of the time. The praise of restraint transmogrified into an insistence on complete abstinence. The most damning effect of this was on sexual morality. There had always been people (Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine for example) who pushed the notion that virginity was the ideal we should all aspire to, but the thing hit ridiculous depths with the beginning of modernism.

And if we are honest, we can still see traces of it today. Even the defenders of sexual "freedoms" are heavily influenced by it as they tend to instinctively go to the opposite extreme recommending not that people should feel free to enjoy controlled sex lives but rather pushing promiscuity and sexual recklessness on everyone. The mirror image of any vice is just another vice.

Okay, but what has all this to do with being "hip" or "cool"? Well, the problem is that binary thing. We tend to think of people as being either hip or unhip or cool or uncool. And that is odd because we tend to admire not the hippest person or the coolest person but the one who shows balance and restraint. I'm no fan of Jay Z, for example, but if you compare him with other rappers, it's pretty obvious that the near universal admiration thrown at the guy is a reflection of his balanced life. He is edgy but not a criminal. he has credibility as a lover but he is married, he is a rebel but a successful businessman and so forth.

If we are going to get to the point where we can talk about hipsters in anything resembling a sane fashion, we have to think of it the way the ancients thought of virtues.

And it is a virtue by the way. You may sneer at me for taking a minor virtue so seriously, and go right ahead with my blessing, but it is a virtue.

Moral privacy

Sartre talks in one place of a man in an empty hotel corridor who gets down and peeks through a keyhole. He does so because he knows that an attractive woman is in this hotel room and he has the good luck to see her getting undressed. They could do that once upon a time—you can't see anything through a modern keyhole.

Sartre's point is that so long as the person is utterly unaware of themselves they feel no shame. All this not-so-hypothetical guy is aware of is what he is looking at. But then he hears a sound and looks up to realize that another man is in the hallway and has seen what he is doing. Now he is ashamed. Until that moment, he had no awareness of himself as a subject of moral assessment.

(It never seems to have occurred to Sartre to wonder what the woman might be thinking and feeling but you can do similar things with her. You can imagine, for example, her being aware that someone is watching her and secretly enjoying it because she thinks of him as an anonymous stranger. He doesn't have any existence outside his role of fulfilling her fantasy. That would all change the second she became aware of him as some specific guy she knew. Then the purely private sexual thrill would get replaced by social shame.)

Notice the assumptions that are work here. Sartre, without saying it, is assuming that everyone knows what he is talking about from personal experience. And we do, don't we? You can't peek through keyholes anymore but you can find pictures of naked people or people having sex easily enough. And so long as it's just you and your computer in some private space, no one is evaluating you. Especially not you yourself.

If there is any thought that dominates modern morality, it is the notion that doing that is not just something we have all done but it is something we have an absolute right to do.We insist that there be a moral sphere where we are free to choose as we want because it is private. Or is it a sphere where we are free from morality period? Is it a sphere where I can do things without having to think about their moral status.

Ironically, we sometimes think of this moral privacy as a place where I can just be myself even though the self I tend to be in that place is someone I would be embarrassed to have you find out about. Million dollar question: When are we lying? In public or in private?

We're hypocrites about it, of course. Let the sex habits of some celebrity become public and everyone mocks.

Actually, never mind sex, let it become known that a former president likes painting but does so as a private activity that he only shares with a  few close friends and everyone else peers shamelessly and some will mock and hate him for not being good enough at it.

There is a funny tension between our desire to have a private sphere where no one judges us and our willingness to constantly invade the moral spheres of others. Back to the million dollar question: Don't automatically condemn the hypocrisy as the real problem. That is, don't assume that the same morality we apply in public must be applied in private.

Nowhere is the tension weirder than when it comes to style. Some people are flamboyant. They damn well mean to be a dandy, or a prep, or formal, or just like everyone else and they work at it and they damn well don't care who hates them for being what they are.

But most people aren't like that. Most people want to pursue a style the way like a keyhole peeper in an empty hallway. They want to constantly evaluate the style choices of others but never be subject to moral criticism themselves.

So which side of that divide do successful hipster chicks land on? Well, it depends who you think of doesn't it? Think of some person who irritates or threatens you and you will see them in the second category. But think of that girl back in high school who seemed to refuse to play the game and dressed with a sense of conscious playing at style and you couldn't help admire her even though you never had the courage to talk to her or to be her friend. And maybe you later wished you had.

How we evaluate a style is less a function of its success than whether we really believe the person adopting it can pull it off.

[Bonus question: When you think of God, how do you imagine him? He can see everything. When he looks at you does he see cause for shame or cause to love you? Are you a nasty, dirty piece of work who must be brutally shamed into being a better person? Or are you like a child who has failings but whom God loves and wants the best for? It's a lot easier to believe that God exists than it is to believe he loves you as a good father would.]

"The thing you have to understand about Bing Crosby is that he was the first hip white person born in the United States"

Artie Shaw said that. The other thing you have to understand is that sometime in the early 1960s "being cool" came to be a more admired virtue than "being hip". The shift had been coming since the war but it was only in the 1960s that cool triumphed over hip everywhere.

That may seem puzzling at first as we sometimes use the words as if they meant the same vague but good property. But ask yourself this, would it be cool to say "I'm hip"? Or, would you describe a cool person as hip? The answer is, only if you were sure your listener would grasp the irony you intended.

I could say a whole lot more, and probably will beginning next week. For now, though, a couple of reminders.

This is what cool sounds like:




This is what hip sounds like (in a suitably uncool video):




Final thought, has hip come back? Well, not yet but when I see articles using eliminationist rhetoric such as "Why the hipster must die: A modest proposal to save New York cool", it's pretty obvious that the purveyors of cool are starting to get nervous.

Miriam

Miriam was the first hipster chick I ever met. I met her way back in the 1970s in the year I was either fourteen or fifteen.

The obvious question is, How do I know she was really a hipster? I'll come back to that.

I was out sailing with my father when I met her. We went way up the reach 'cause it was blowing hard and it felt good to go tearing along. At one point we were both soaked to the skin, tired and hungry and maybe twelve to fifteen miles from home. And my father looked over towards the shore and said, "That's X's summer place."

It was a rocky shore and we pulled head to wind way out. I remember jumping out and standing in about four feet of water to hold the forestay while my father dropped the main, raised the centreboard and shipped the rudder so we could carry the dinghy up onto the grass (it was an International 14 for those who care about such things). Because the waves were running two to three feet, my head would be under water and my feet briefly off the ground at the peaks. It all felt good because it was an adventure and I was handling it well.

X was, and still is, a criminology professor (emeritus now). He is no longer married to Miriam. She was young, mid twenties. She may have been a former student. She was home alone. I remember she was wearing a long dress with a cardigan over the top and bare footed. I remember watching her walk about and realizing (because I was studying her with care) that she was wearing nothing at all underneath. This was a jolt because the dress and cardigan was like something someone's grandmother would have worn in the 1950s and to wear it bare-footed (among other things) was a playfully subversive thing to do.

Even as young as I was, I realized that Miriam was playing at life. She had no serious responsibilities and she wasn't in any hurry to assume them. The life she spoke of was like like student life only with no classes alternating with summering here up the reach. We changed into terrycloth robes X had for guests and she made us hot chocolate while our clothes dried. And she served us brownies.

And then we sailed back to the yacht club, put the boat away and drove home. At some point along the way, I noticed that my eyes felt funny. We were also both laughing very hard at one another's remarks. I remember giggling quietly to myself when it hit me that we were both stoned and it was the brownies that had done it. I had never been before. I think my father had the same revelation but, being father and son we couldn't talk about it.

There were also things about Miriam that we both were thinking but that fathers and sons don't typically discuss. Of what we could discuss I remember thinking that, normally, Miriam was a type that my father would have made some critical remark about. Not a cruel or disparaging remark but a remark designed to make it clear that you wouldn't want to make the life choices she had made. He didn't because she was a successful hipster. She pulled that vintage look off so well and with such ease that you could only approve of her.

And what was her life like? She was ambitious. That is the important thing to know. She wanted a career and she eventually got one, and quite a successful one in, of all things, intelligence. I found her on the net a while ago giving a talk at a UN conference about counter-terrorism. And you could see that driving ambition in the things she talked about back then.

But she cared not at all for what might be called the realities of the marketplace. This really struck me because I, only two generations off the farm on one side and descended from victims of the great famine on the other, was already being urged to think of a university degree in terms of where the jobs were likely to be and not in terms of what I wanted to do. Miriam was all about what she wanted to be.

She'd finished her degree and then had traveled to Europe and stayed there as long as she could make the money hold out. I don't know this but I suspect that nice young men she met on her travels helped her along the way. And I suspect that she got to be rather good at playing at being the various types required to satisfy varieties of great-romantic-adventure-while -traveling-in-Europe they wanted.

When she got home, she gravitated back to the college neighbourhood because she could continue to live the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed there. She'd come home with the faintest trace of an accent. It suggested that it was the last remnant of an accent she was slowly losing and I kept waiting for her to tell us she was born somewhere else (she wasn't). That, along with her vintage look, played just enough of the harmony notes for every man to supply the melody to accompany his Eliza Doolittle fantasy, particularly Professor X.

She didn't push her sexuality in any overt way. No cleavage or thighs were visible, her clothes were not tight and she had minimal, if any, make up on. Her hair was not styled. One of the effects of this, of course, was to make it clear that she didn't need to do these things. The other effect was effortless grace.

Underline that last: if there is one virtue that hipsters admire it is effortless grace. Someone who can gracefully recover from a gaffe is more admired than the person who is so studied so as never to commit a gaffe in the first place.

Final point: she wasn't rich. For there have always been kids who had years of leisure because they were rich and went to Oxford or some such place and they weren't hipsters. Hipsters have to get a job someday, they just don't have to do it just now. The flip side of that is that they are painfully aware of the social status that goes with jobs. They want a job with the right amount, which is to say quite a bit, of social status or one with none. Better to be a barista than a dental hygenist because you can brush of barista with a good ironic posture but a dental hygenist is what you are.

To come back to the question from the top: How do I know she was really a hipster? If you prefer, you can call her a proto-hipster. Either way, I'd argue she had all the defining characteristics. The other thing, and this is all crucially important, is that she was a successful hipster. Hipster is always and everywhere a pose and you can succeed or fail at pulling it off. And most people will fail. Even now that hipsters are far more common than they were back in Miriam's day, there are far more failed hipsters than successful ones. The temptation to sneer at hipsters is understandable and it comes easy but meet a successful hipster and you will be impressed.

Let's talk about teenyboppers

It was in the 1950s when marketers first discovered "youth" as a specific market that teenyboppers appeared. Like "hipster" the word comes from the jazz world. "Boppers" originally meant people who were really into bebop. "Teenybopper" was applied to girls between roughly 11 and 17 years of age who liked to gather in private with one or two friends and listen to pop music. Years aren't very helpful here though: it's more helpful to think of the term as meaning girls in the years ranging from the onset of puberty until they become sexually active. Some start and finish earlier or later than others (and there will be considerable anticipation of the moment as well as a natural desire to prolong it too).

It's a time where a girl completely rethinks who and what she is. Up until this moment, her sexuality was defined in terms of outward trappings. She had all the necessary parts to be a girl to be sure but they weren't functional. And now they are. And that's just the beginning of it; there is a whole hell-of-a-lot-else that has changed too.

And you could write up a list of the characteristics of this new culture. Let's go to a really obvious and not particularly good source to begin: Wikipedia:

• the subculture is exclusive to young girls
• it is a "retreat and preparation", allowing girls to relate to their peers and "practice in the secrecy of girl culture the rituals of courtship away from the eye of male ridicule"
• serving as a retreat to avoid being labeled sexually
• it also allows young girls to participate in semi-masturbatory rituals
• it allows its members to define themselves apart from younger and older girls

I've cherry picked those. There are others that are just stupid or driven by heavy-handed ideology. There are some I'd tweak a bit but I think the set I've picked here is pretty close to right. Now all we have to do is move by analogy from that to hipster for hipsters are a similar phenomena. It's a girl-driven subculture and it has been made possible by a linear expansion of "youth". Teenyboppers sprang up when girls stopped being married off or sent into service but instead went to high school thereby creating a stage of human life where they were neither children nor adults. That delay of adulthood has now been prolonged for another seven to ten years by increased access to university and internships.

What strikes me as most right about it is that there is no "Storyville" and no "Buddy Bolden" in the story. That is to say, there is no supposedly authentic but actually largely mythical place or person at the source of the hipster subculture. And that shouldn't surprise us because it could not be any other way. Any cultural phenomenon has to be sown in fertile soil so our definition has to be in general cultural terms. It might have sprung up only in a specific place at a specific time, of course, but that is relatively unimportant. What is important is the subculture that spread and was easily adopted and not the "authentic" source for it it; that source is like Wittgenstein's beetle in a box, it doesn't matter whether it exists or not because it wouldn't help explain anything if it did.

The thing about being a hipster is that millions of people got it without needing an explanation. They saw the role, understood it and decided it was for them. Most importantly, when they took it up, they knew how to do it without anyone having to explain it to them.

Anyway, I promised actual content today and here it is. Every one of these based on the teenybopper definitions above:

1. It is a subculture defined by and for girls

There are, of course, hipster guys, but they are curiously nonsexual beings. They might, of course, be living out wild sex lives behind closed doors (although I rather doubt it) but publicly they lack all confidence to project any sort of sexual identity. Hipster girls, on the other hand, all project something sexual. They are often clearly lacking in confidence or painfully uncertain about their sexual identity but we can see this because they are out there. If hipster life is a recital, the girls are up on stage actually performing and the boys are hiding in the wings desperately hoping no one will notice them.

2. It's a retreat allowing hipster girls to practice being adult women away from scrutiny.

Instead of hiding in their bedrooms with their friends and their favourite pop songs like teenyboppers, hipsters use various ironic stances to hide in plain sight. The irony says, these clothes and the roles that you might normally assign to them—bohemian, rebel, trucker girl, sex bomb—are just a put on. Beneath the irony, though, these roles are picked because she wants to try something like them out. (Notice, by the way, that Hipster roles are always pulled out of an historical closet. The pre-existing identity that can be ironically adopted is the whole point.)

3. It serves as a retreat to avoid being labelled sexually.

As I've said before, these girls are supposed to be very experienced and "savvy" about sex but can't help but feel terribly inexperienced (sex and Christianity are  two human activities that anyone doing them honesty will always feel like a beginner). As a consequence, they feel like they have to improvise all the time because they somehow missed the meeting where everyone else got a script. They are terrified they are going to say or do something that will allow others to forever cast them in a part they don't want before they can even figure out what the parts are.

4. It also allows young girls to participate in semi-masturbatory rituals

Nothing to add here except that the whole point of the semi-masturbatory exercise is to visualize different kinds of sexual status that might be available to her. Unlike boys, just getting sex is not hard to imagine. Getting it under terms she can live with is.

5. It allows its members to define themselves apart from younger and older women

This is a key ingredient, a necessary condition. Hipster girls want to differentiate themselves from others in an era where every identity is a market choice. The Suzanne of the famous Leonard Cohen song wore "rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters" but if you want her look today you go to a boutique that specializes in that look. Hipster girls can't opt out of the market. They have only two choices, a) pick an historical hip look like gypsy girl. flapper or trucker girl or b) become so good at the fashion game that they can play at it ironically.

Those inauthentic hipsters that everyone who really matters hold in disdain

Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn.

Notice the casual flattery aimed at you the reader. You are not one of these awful people. No! The writer, Christian Lorentzen, is kindly including you in the in group that he too, of course, is a charter member of.

That is what the people who hate hipsters have in common. They see themselves as an exclusive elite but not an economic exclusive elite. They hate the idea that some people should have special status by virtue of wealth  or political power. But they very much want to be elite themselves.

And they are in the elite. Make no mistake about that. Lorentzen writes for the London Review of Books and for a New York publication called N+1. N+1 comes up over and over again if you Google "hipster". They seemed to have had a bit of an obsession about hipsters a few years ago. I know, as opposed to me who seems to have an obsession about them right now. But the N+1 obsession was interesting in that they were obsessed with explaining hipsters away. They were sufficiently self aware to recognize that there was something odd about their wanting to do this (they seem to be painfully self aware about everything) but they couldn't stop themselves.

However elite this group may be, they argue in universal terms. Any member of a proper elite would simply dismiss those they felt not worthy, in this case hipsters, as "not our kind". But this new elite can't do that. Their political views are anti-elitist while their personal desire is very much to be elite. So they need an elite that is open to anyone who deserves to be in it. Yeah, that's it, our elite is different from all those artificial elites of the past because our elite is made up of people who ... well, who what. 

They can't say that it is a matter of merit, that their elite is a matter of merit. They are sophisticated enough to know that that never happens. Every elite tends to be at least a matter of contingency as merit. The only option that seems open to them is the hoary old whore of authenticity. And that is what we see in the bit I cited at the opening: hipster must die so "cool" can be reborn. What is cool you ask? Well, if you have to ask ... then you might just expose Lorentzen for the fraud he is.

The only way to save the mythology them is the Liberty Valance ploy. That is to pretend to be unmasking the myth while actually reaffirming it.

Which brings me to Mark Greif, the founder of N+1 and charter member of the elite:

Greif attended the Commonwealth School in Boston. In 1992, he attended a Telluride Association Summer Program. He received a BA in History and Literature from Harvard in 1997, after which he received a Marshall Scholarship, which he used to study British Literature and 19th and 20th century American Literature at Oxford through 1999. He holds a PhD in American studies from Yale.

That's Wikipedia and I cite it here only to make it clear that isn't your typical middle class hipster's biography.

Greif's smarter than Lorentzen though, and he grasps that pointing at some supposed genuinely authentic group as justification for attacking hipsters isn't going to wash. Greif's argument is that being a hipster is all about claiming taste as the justification for superior social status. And he makes some very solid points about how this move always fails but there is a huge problem: everyone says they hate hipsters, how can they be an elite. 

At every turn Grief forgets that he went to the Commonwealth School. He started out lucky and got luckier. He is a classic example of privilege and power pretending to unmask privilege and power elsewhere. 

Over and over again, he comes very close to stating what should be obvious: that the hipsters that "everyone" hates are not an elite but that they are pretty ordinary kids who aspire to a higher taste than what life has offered them.

But they aren't going to walk into a comfortable existence where they get paid to play taste games the way a privileged liberal arts professor and founder of a literary magazine like Mark Grief does. With middlebrow culture more or less destroyed, neither are they likely to find a path to higher culture. So all they can do is endlessly shift from one subculture to another.

Which, when you think about it, sounds an awful lot like what people like Mark Greif do these days.

Yeah, I don't know how much more time I want to spend on the spectacle of the snake of New York cool eating its own tail either.

I guess the point here is that in figuring out what hipster chick style is, we can pretty much ignore the cultural Brahmins. And I promise, starting tomorrow, I'll put some actual flesh on the hipster bones. And very nice flesh it is!

The cool guy who debunked the myth of Liberty Hipster

This is where I bore you by talking about historiography.

No, not really but I do want to talk about mythology and how it is often precisely when we think we are debunking myths that we are actually erecting them.

So bear with me (or don't, it's a big Internet if you don't want to) for a moment while I talk about the curious case of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. That's a movie, in case you don't know, and it's a western that shamelessly indulges every cliché of the western genre in a way that ought to have driven people from the theatres in disgust.

It didn't though. It succeeded by pretending to demythologize while it was, in fact, pushing the same lame old mythology.

Here is the story in rough. Jimmy Stewart, playing an aging senator and his wife, go to the funeral of an obscure rancher played by John Wayne. Why? So we can get a whole lot of flashbacks. The flashbacks tell us that Stewart's character once moved to this frontier town and set up shop as a lawyer. This gets him to fall in love with a lovely woman who is attracted to him because he can teach her how to read. It also put him in conflict with the outlaw Liberty Valance* who was working in concert with the ranchmen to defy the advance of civilization and keep the frontier open so that the way of life the ranchers loved would continue unchanged.

You need to stop right away and see that this is the classic western myth only with the lawyer standing in for the pig farmer. Now what happens next in the classic myth? Well, two things. There is a woman who loves the pig farmer, in this case, the lawyer, and there are two outlaws, one who also loves her, and, by loving her comes to love the civilized new west which is the only kind of west where women like her can thrive, and another who works for the ranchers to kill all the pig farmers/lawyers. At some point, the first outlaw sees that his kind has to disappear for that civilization to be possible. But the other outlaw (Liberty Valence!) stands in the way of happiness for the woman and her pig farmer and so a  showdown happens between the outlaw who can see the future and the one who cannot. The pro-civilization outlaw wins and then, realizing there is no place for him in the new civilized west, he rides off into the sunset leaving the pig farmer to enjoy the civilization and, not incidentally, the woman.

It's important to the myth that the big show down is not an act of justice. When Shane guns down Jack Wilson, he does so by provoking a duel that is just an excuse for cold blooded murder. That is why the good outlaw realizes there is no place for him in the civilization that he, in the myth anyway, makes possible. The myth tells us that civilization is wonderful but it takes a big, authentic man who is himself not part of civilization to get it going and he does this in a not terribly civilized way.

So what happens in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? Well, initially, we think Jimmy Stewart's character is the one who shot Liberty Valance. He is a guy who forced into a duel with the dangerous outlaw, a duel that he wins , much to his own and everyone else's surprise. As the movie goes along, we learn that this isn't true. We learn at the end of the movie that John Wayne's character was standing by and saved the life of Jimmy Stewart's character by gunning down an unsuspecting Valance before he could kill Stewart's character**. So the myth is restored.

But the movie pretends otherwise through a complicated double shuffle. It pretends to lift the veil to show you the secret only to show you a hoary myth underneath.

But ask yourself a question: How many of the myths of the wild west center around mild-mannered and meek lawyers who gun down mighty gunfighters? Because, if we take the movie at it's word, that is the "myth" it is debunking. And this in order to restore the "authentic truth" that John Wayne killed the bad guy!

There are a couple of things I think worth taking from this. The central notion behind this myth is that our culture depends on the heroic self-sacrificing of some outlaw-type. The role of others is to honour his sacrifice by maintaining the culture he made possible.

This is particularly interesting when we think of hipness because a racial twist gets thrown in then. The mythological version of any kind of hipness will attribute it's origins to brave, authentic blacks and make whites to be, at best, respectful posers who can never really do the thing quite right or, at worst, evil thieves who profit at the expense of the unrecognized creators of hipness. And there will be no approach to hipness wherein whites can be authentic or guilt free.

A similar problem applies to contemporary hipsters. The mythmakers aren't going to let them get away with it.  For the mythmaker, the real story is always about some more authentic type the hipster has stolen their stuff from.

The second aspect of the wild-west mythology is how it plays against male sexuality. There are two types here: outlaw and husband. And it is one of the odd quirks of the genre that the woman unfailingly chooses the reliable husband character over the outlaw with the big gun, which, as you may have noticed, is not what she unfailingly does in real life. But even if there is only one guy in the story, he has mixed feelings about things. Sometimes he looks at the woman he loves and thinks ... well, let's just say he thinks like a gun-slinging outlaw and less like a reliable husband.

And, if he is honest, he'll admit that he is unlikely to have ever fallen in love in the first place if the outlaw aspect weren't there. That's a pretty banal observation but here is the question: How would this mythology have changed if women had had more input? It's not that men don't recognize about the attraction the outlaw type has for women—if anything, we obsess about it. As I've said before, there is lovely moment in dramatic irony at the end of Shane when the innocent little boy wanting Shane to stay yells, "And Mama wants you too." What's missing from the story is an outlaw type for the woman herself to play at being the way any boy can play at being a gunslinger.

I'm sure you've guessed where that is going and it will continue to go there ...



* Whose name literally means a curtain or veil hiding liberty from us by the way.

**By the way, it's an odd quirk of the western myth that Stewart's character would have to follow the rules of an illegal and immoral gunfight to be morally justified.

A little light culture: I don't want to go to New York City, it ain't the place to be no more

I'm going to start with an outrageous claim: a necessary but not sufficient quality for a woman or girl to be a hipster chick is that she be comfortable in her own skin and is admired by others for this. That is what divides the successful hipster from the many wannabes. You can tell because the subject makes so many others uncomfortable and defensive.

Case in point, Julia Plevin writing in the Huffington Post:

I know I am not a hipster. I have spent the spring in San Francisco and the summer in Manhattan, two hipster hotspots. I shop at American Apparel, have an Apple computer, avoid Starbucks and other corporate conglomerate coffee, smoothie, and frozen yogurt places, and consider myself "unique," but I assure you I'm not a hipster. I don't think I know any hipsters, I don't even understand hipsters. Are they angry at the world? Are they cynical toward modern society? Are they artistic and blasé? Are they smart or plain lazy? To me, that all seems like a waste of time.

Regardless, the definition of "hipster" remains opaque to anyone outside this self-proclaiming, highly-selective circle. 

She forgot to add that, "Besides, those grapes are probably sour."

Paradoxically, while she knows that she doesn't make the cut, Plevin wishes hipsterdom was more elite. It grieves her soul to know that young girls who don't even live in New York City feel entitled to adopt the look.

But the look has gone mainstream -- tweens all over America, from the suburbs to cities, from public schools to prep schools are trying hard to be hipsters. Oh dear, can anything be done to stop them before it's too late?

I mean, we can't allow that some twelve year old in Kansas might be able to pull off a style that a bicoastal young adult who writes for the Huffington Post tried to do and failed at can we? If she can, then the style must, de facto have something deeply wrong with it.

To navel-gazers in New York and San Francisco it may seem obvious that everyone else in the world is imitating them but the equation has always run the other way around. These places have always depended on a constant influx of people bringing style with them. There is no style in music, theatre or fashion associated with New York that didn't originate elsewhere first. New York became important because it was the hub for these ideas in that it had to come there to get broadcast all over the world through the powerful media that was headquartered in New York.

And the reason New York is so over now is that the Internet has made it obsolete. Hipster style has a history in New York but it isn't a terribly important history. It didn't come to town and gel and then get broadcast to the rest of the world by the approved leaders in the media and fashion industries. No, it traveled by the Tumblr Express and went viral on YouTube while New Yorkers were still in bed.

Don't believe me? Look at this paragraph from an unintentionally revealing Time article on hipsters from 2009!

Though the subculture is met with derision in wider society, hipsters have been able to eke out enclaves across the country, chief among them the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Williamsburg. But now even that is threatened. The hip have been hit with a double whammy of economic reality (more are struggling to pay rent as parental support dries up) and population changes (the carefully gentrified neighborhood is gradually being infiltrated by squatters inhabiting Williamsburg's stalled building projects).

Hey, that's the premise for Girls three years before the show was launched. How did that happen? It happened because New York got bypassed. Here's the big secret, hipsters elsewhere didn't need enclaves. It fit right into the suburbs and high schools of most American towns and it's been sitting comfortably there for decades now. (When I arrived at high school in a Quebec milltown in 1972 there were already hipsters in residence.) Instead, it's New York city that is desperately struggling to find its own home-grown history of hipsters so that it can pretend to be relevant again.

Manly Thor's Day Special: the launch of hipster chick history month

I was talking to a friend about Lana Del Rey (I love Lana Del Rey) and how I'd just heard her most recent EP for the first time this week. I quite like it and I bought it. And he said something along the lines of of, "The hipsters all loved her until she got really popular and then they turned against her."

I think that is completely wrong-headed. What really happened is that the hipsters or, to be more precise, the hipster chicks ate up Lana Del Rey and that had the effect of raising her profile enough that she became the target of all the people who hate the hipster chick style. And they hate it because it is a style. At the same time, they don't hate it because the girls who adopt the style are so damned desirable. But again, they do hate it because hipster girls tend to be unavailable to them. It's all terribly complicated. Long story short, poor Lana became the perfect target for their hatred when she came along.

The hipster chick has a long history. I don't know exactly when she starts but Jackie Gleason did a concept album called Tawny in 1954 all about falling in love with such a girl. This was an easy listening album, which is to say that the type had to have been already well-established enough that Gleason could take it for granted that he didn't have to explain it to anyone; he could take it for granted, in fact, that millions of men would buy the record, which they did. And Audrey Hepburn was already parodying the type in the 1957 movie Funny Face. I'm sure there are earlier examples.

It's a fascinating style because it's one of those rare male sexual fantasies where you can find lots of girls willing to live the part. No, much more than that, where you can find lots of girls who want to be the part for reasons of their own. You might find a girl willing to play at being a Baby Doll type or even who has a secret sexual fantasy of playing the part but you won't find many girls willing to adopt the type as her personal style in everything.

There are millions of girls in every generation who eat up the hipster style like it was candy and would do it even if it weren't attractive to boys and, cough, older men. And this, odd as it may seem, is one of the reasons for the anger. If you are a man and your secret thrill is to be dominated, you'll probably have to pay someone to do it as most women hate doing this, but you won't be taunted by the presence of dominant-type women you can't have all around you every day. But if you are into hipster chicks, you could well end up like the the stranded sailor surrounded by water he cannot drink. There are always hipster chicks—sometimes more sometimes fewer depending on fashion—but they aren't easily available.

It's worth noting that one of the reasons they tend to be unavailable is that they became hipster chicks for themselves and not to attract men. They aren't stupid, they know some men like the look a lot, but they did it because being a hipster was a thrilling thought for them. Sex was part of it but the main reason was because the whole style appeals to these women all the time and not the tiny fraction of time they have sex whereas the men who obsess about them think only in terms of sex.

The other big reason hipster chicks attract so much hatred is political. Hipster style is a style and liberals hate style for style's sake, or at least they affect to do so when it suits them. They only tolerate hipster style under one of two conditions. First, they will tolerate it when it is directly tied to a political movement, which it rarely is. Second, they'll tolerate it when it is tied directly to some sort of gritty reality (thus the same people who hated Lana Del Rey will typically love Girls).

In any case, I was thinking of devoting the entire month of February to writing about Hipster Chick Style. I don't do this on the basis of any authority or special knowledge. To be honest, I never really thought about it much. I have long been interested as a consequence of falling in love with the much older hipster chick wife of a friend of the families when I was about fourteen years old. I'm doing it for the simple reason that I damn well want to, which is the great thing about having a blog. If you think I don't know what I'm talking about and want to tell me so, fire away.

I'm going to say little about the clothing and more about the intellectual and moral aspects of the style, which will, no doubt, offend the people who believe there are none. I'm not sure where I'm going to start but I will start tomorrow. There were, I think, hipster men before there were hipster women so I'll probably start with the question of why that was and why women in the 1920s weren't quite so keen to adopt the style as men.