By Michael F. Duggan
“The word hip was used in those days to mean “knowing,” not to mean what was fashionable.” -Pete Hamil
I posted a version of this short essay in April 2019 as a part of a longer piece on language and usage (I originally wrote it two or three years before that). For the past day or so I have been revisiting the essays of Norman Mailer, and felt compelled to put it up again by itself.
Present rant triggered by a routine stop at a coffee shop.
I appreciate that language evolves, that the meanings of words emerge, evolve, disappear, diverge, procreate, amalgamate, splinter-off, become obscure, reemerge and overshadow older meanings, especially in times of rapid change. I am less sanguine about words that are appropriated (and yes, I know that one cannot “steal” a word) from former meanings that still have more texture, resonance, authenticity, and historical context for me.
For example, over the past decade, and probably going back to the 1990s, the word “hipster” has taken on a new, in some ways inverse, but not unrelated meaning to the original. My understanding of the original meaning of “hipster” was a late 1930s-1950s blue collar drifter, an attempted societal drop-out, a modernist descendant of the romantic hero, and borderline antisocial type who shunned the “phoniness” of mainstream life and commercial mass culture and trends and listened to authentic (read: African-American) jazz—bop—(think of Dean Moriarty from On the Road).1
He/she was “hip” (presumably an evolution of 1920s “hep”)—clued-in, disillusioned—to what was really going on in the world behind the facades and appearances. This meaning stands in contrast to today’s idea of “hip” as being in touch with current trends—an important distinction. It was a modern echo of Byron’s being “among” the crowd rather than “of” it. The hipster presaged the beat of the later 1950s who was more cerebral, contrived, literary, and urban. In the movies, the male of the hipster genera might have been played by John Garfield or Robert Mitchum. In real life, Jackson Pollock will suffice as a representative example. Hipsters were typically flawed individuals and were often irresponsible and failures as family people. But at least there was something authentic and substantial about them as an intellectual type.
By contrast, today’s “hipster” seems to be self-consciously affected right down to the point of his goatee-ed chin: consciously urban (often living in gentrified neighborhoods) consciously fashionable and ahead of the pack, dismissive of non-hipsters (and quiet about his/her middle-to-upper-middle class upbringing in the ‘burbs and an ongoing childhood once centered around play dates), a conformist to generational chauvinism, clichés, and dictates. It is therefore snobbery or reverse snobbery (if snobbery can be thus qualified). Today’s hipster embodies the calculation and trendiness that the original hipsters specifically stood against (they were noticed, not self-promoted). It sees itself as ahead of the pack, but most are squarely in its middle. Admittedly, hip talk was adopted by the Beats and later cultural types and elements of it became embedded in the mainstream and then fell out of favor. Today it seems affected and corny (as Hemingway observed “…the most authentic hipster talk of today is the twenty-three skidoo of tomorrow…”).2
I realize that this might sound like a “kids these days” grouse or reduction—and I hope it is not; upon the backs of the rising generation ride the hopes for the future of the nation, our species, and the world. I have known many young people—interns and students—the great majority of whom are intelligent, serious, thoughtful, and oriented toward problem solving and social justice. They are also angry, and there is a strong current toward rejecting the trends of previous generations among them (perhaps an echo of the disdain of the original hipsters with mainstream life). The young people these days have every right to be mad at what previous generations have done to the economy and the environment. Perhaps the hipsters among them will morph into something along the lines of their earlier namesake or something better.
If not, then it is likely that the word will continue to have a double meaning as the original becomes increasingly obscure or until another generation takes it up as its own with its own new meaning. And then old dogs like me will growl about it.
- For the best analyses and commentary on the original meaning of “hip” and “hipster,” see Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” “Reflections on the Hip,” “Hipster and Beatnik,” and “The Hip and the Square,” in Advertisements for Myself.
- See “The Art of the Short Story,” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway Library Edition, 2.