Hipster (20th century)
A hipster was a member of an urban subculture, widespread mainly in the USA , of a generation in society in the mid-20th century.
The hipster is a more modern, American version of the European bohemian of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Shaping the role model were mainly two groups at the time of avant-garde artists, namely the (predominantly black) musicians with the bebop to modern jazz lifted from the baptism, and the (mostly white) poets, under the term today Beat Generation are summarized .
Hipsters defined themselves essentially through the quality of hipness (the associated adjective is hip ). That concept to the outsider (the so-called square , about as much as "philistine", ie conventional, conservative) was not completely understandable, is best shown in a known "definition" that the Jazz - alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley has given : "Hipness is not a state of mind, it's a fact of life."
The name was coined in the late 1940s by the boogie pianist and singer Harry "The Hipster" Gibson .
Terms
The term beatnik , which in itself has the same meaning, refers in today's usage mainly to the white members of the subculture. In contrast, older variants such as hep , hepcat etc. occur in connection with the (black) forerunners of the hipsters from the 30s, as embodied by the singer Cab Calloway (see also “hip” ).
Scene, language, fashion
The actual scene remained a small, relatively manageable group until it slowly disintegrated in the early 1960s. Its members frequented galleries, theaters, cafes and clubs in Manhattan , where they mostly lived. The journalist and jazz critic David H. Rosenthal describes the world of hipsters as follows:
“Bohemian Manhattan was an intimate, small-scale scene: a band of outsiders easily recognizable by their dress and demeanor. [...] Being few in number, they were obliged to stick together; in Eisenhower ’s blandly conformist America, all weirdoes were brothers until the opposite was proven ”
“Manhattan bohemian was an intimate little scene: a bunch of outsiders easily identifiable by clothing and demeanor. Because of their small number, they were forced to stick together; In the non-irritating conformism of the Eisenhower era, all the freaked out looked at themselves as brothers until proven otherwise "
Rosenthal's statement gains in depth when you consider that the "members" of the scene came from extremely different social backgrounds. The saxophonist Charlie Parker , who originally grew up in the black proletariat of provincial Kansas City , lived for a long time as a subtenant with the glamorous Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter , a former Resistance fighter from the English branch of the Rothschild family , who among the hipsters "European" element represented.
The special sociolect of the hipsters was based on an encrypted reinterpretation of everyday language , as for example in the case of the word pad (English "mat"), which initially - because of the related content, but also the tonal similarity - the meaning bed ("bed ") And from there established itself as pars pro toto to the slang term for" apartment ". Many words in hipster lingo could have different connotations depending on the conversation situation , for example in the case of the verb dig (actually "dig"), which means both "understand, understand" and "like, 'get up', appreciate" can. The central term of the hipster, cool , has found its way into modern (not only English) colloquial language without any significant change in meaning . The collective term cat or kat ("cat") for any person is still understood today.
At the time of hipster fashion (sometimes also called bop fad ) around 1950, those who wanted to be “hip” were characterized by a range of typical, if not clichéd, behaviors:
- It was preferable to wear a beret , black clothes, and sunglasses even in the dark of a smoky jazz club .
- The male hipster liked to have a soul patch (lower lip mustache ) modeled on Dizzy Gillespies or a goatee ("goatee").
- A certain affinity for the consumption of illegal drugs was part of “good form”, marijuana ( pot ) was omnipresent and heroin addiction was at least widespread due to role models like Charlie Parker and William S. Burroughs .
- A “cool”, unagitated approval of the works of art of the American avant-garde - be it the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock , the “weird” bebop heads from Parkers and Gillespies, the beat poetry by Allen Ginsberg or a new production by the Living Theater - was assumed.
African American musicians and white poets
A wider public got to know the term through a book by Norman Mailer published in 1956 , The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (German 1957 under the title The White Negro ). Even if the essay was heavily criticized within the subculture, the author aptly describes that the hipster scene of the 40s and 50s was the only niche in the still completely segregated society in which people of different skin colors could compare could face:
"The source of Hip is the Negro, for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries"
"The source of hipness is the negro, because he has been living on the threshold between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries "
Strictly speaking, the young whites even viewed their black peers in many respects and in the spirit of Mailer's presentation as role models, whose speech and lifestyle they tried to imitate. In American pop culture, this type of staging set a different tone: neither that of pure parody, as in early blackface depictions, nor that of an appropriation of originally African American culture (swing, rock 'n' roll) that appears as "white" as possible Being black was emphasized in a positive sense: similar to decades later the more mainstream white staging of a black gangsta rap role model as a white pimp .
Hipster culture emerged in a climate of political disillusionment. The hopes of the Afro-American community that they had fought for some emancipation through their participation in World War II were quickly dashed. The Communist Party of the USA , which was once influential among white intellectuals, also suffered from the repressive climate of the early Cold War , and the once radical unions began to limit themselves to purely economic demands. The African American community saw itself thrown back on its socially underprivileged role, the white intellectuals had to give up all hope of a radical change of the system. In the hipster scene and its admiration, both created a free space and an alternative to the then prevailing white affluence suburbia. In contrast to earlier movements, however, this was only vaguely political, and was rather interpreted by some writers as it was or should be in the opinion of the protagonists.
The far-reaching political indifference of the hipsters is particularly evident in comparison to the almost simultaneous subculture of existentialism in Western Europe, which played a decisive role in the politicization of the “bohème” and ultimately led to the 1968 movement .
aftermath
In hipster parlance, “ hippie ” was a disparaging term for a would-be hipster; the change in meaning to the more positive occupation of the term only began in the 1960s with a new form of youth culture . At the end of the 1990s, the original term "hipster", given a contemporary meaning, experienced a brief revival , which was largely confined to the USA. In the early 21st century, it finally experienced widespread use again, but with a different meaning in terms of content.
literature
- Marigay Graña, César Graña (eds.): On Bohemia. The Code of the Self-Exiled. Transaction Paperback, New Brunswick, New Jersey 1990, ISBN 0-88738-292-4
- Norman Mailer: The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. Fall 1957, republished in: Dissent Magazine, June 20, 2007
- Mark Greif / n + 1-Research (Ed.): Hipster. A transatlantic discussion. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-518-06173-2 .
- David H. Rosenthal: Hard Bop. Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965. Oxford University Press, New York 1992, ISBN 0-19-508556-6