Books: Hip's History

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Race is at the center of his story. Hip is partly a glorious defense mechanism, a residue of the continual attempts of African Americans to make their way through a sometimes menacing white world. It began, for instance, among slaves who developed coded languages to communicate secret meanings to one another under the very eyes of the slaveholders--which for one thing is how bad came to mean good in African-American slang. And though hip is often cool and evasive, it can also be angry and hot. In the late 1940s and the '50s, anger came back into hip through the improvisational bebop style of jazz developed by saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. In response to the domestication of jazz by the swing bands of the 1930s, Parker developed a defiantly anti-commercial style, one with solos so rapid-fire they were too fast to dance to--and almost too fast to listen to. Real hipsters have always disdained the mass market.

But the mass marketers love hip. It makes everything from trucker caps to old Lynyrd Skynyrd albums more salable. Long after his death, even Kerouac found himself trapped in an ad campaign for the Gap. This is the same writer who once told his journal, "I am he who has adopted the Sorrows ... The Serious, the Severe, the Stubborn, the Unappeased." You wouldn't think he was a man who in life would be selling khakis. No problem. All they had to do was wait until he was dead.