[lbo-talk] Hipsterville

[Robert Wrubel]

Jazz musicians coined the word "hep" in the late forties.  It meant something like "in the know", "cool", probably with reference to the new styles of jazz.  I believe the beat poets, like Ferlinghetti, later took up "hep", with its connotations of outsiders in the know, drugged out or otherwise uncouth, and slid it over eventually to "hip".  Blossom Dearie's seventies tune, "I'm hip", completes the journey of "hip" from black to white culture, and fills it out, mockingly, with what was considred avant garde then.

   

  In my understanding, "hippie" has only a slight connection to "hip" -- in its voluntary outsider connotation.  Otherwise, hippies, in their unworldliness and naivete, were almost the opposite of hip.

  
"Mr. WD" <mister.wd at gmail.com> wrote:

  On 7/4/07, Michael Smith wrote:


> Can somebody indulge an old coot, dwelling in an un-hip part
> of town, and list for me a few of the markers of hipsterism?
> I'm not sure who's a hipster and who isn't. What do they wear?
> How do they cut their hair? What's the preferred body type?
> Are there diagnostic expressions or turns of phrase?

A few years ago a Mormon friend of mine asked me the same question. I
pointed him to the following:

http://www.viceland.com/ ("cynicism," but probably not "well-informed")
http://americanapparel.net/
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/

-WD

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