Hipsters have always used clothing, hairstyle, gesture, and slang
to mark their distance from consensus culture, yet it is music that
has always been the privileged means of cultural disaffiliation,
the royal road to hip. Hipness in postwar America became an
indelible part of the nation's intellectual and cultural landscape,
and during the past half century, hip sensibility has structured
self-understanding and self-representation, thought and art, in
various recognizable ways. Although hipness is a famously elusive
and changeable quality, what remains recognizable throughout its
history in American intellectual life is a particular conception of
the individual's alienation from society-alienation due not to any
specific political wrong but to something more radical, a clash of
perception and consciousness. The dominant culture thus constitutes
a system bent on foreclosing the creativity, self-awareness, and
self-expression by which people might find satisfaction in their
lives. The hipster's project is to imagine this system and define
himself against it; his task is to resist being stamped in its
uniform, squarish mold. Culture then becomes the primary medium of
hip resistance rather than political action as such, and this
resistance is manifested in aesthetic creation, be that artworks or
the very self. Music has stood consistently at the center of the
evolving and alienated hipster's self-structuring: every hip
subculture at least tags along with some kind of music (as the
musically ungifted Beats did with jazz), and for many subcultures
music is their raison d'etre. In Dig, author Phil Ford argues that
hipness is in fact wedded to music at an altogether deeper level.
In hip culture it is sound itself, and the faculty of hearing, that
is the privileged part of the sensory experience. Ford's discussion
of songs and albums in context of the social and political world
illustrates how hip intellectuals conceived of sound as a way of
challenging meaning - that which is cognitive and abstract,
timeless and placeless - with experience - that which is embodied,
concrete and anchored in place and time. Through Charlie Parker's
"Ornithology," Ken Nordine's "Sound Museum," Bob Dylan's "Ballad of
a Thin Man," and a string of other lucid and illuminating examples,
Ford shows why and how music became a central facet of hipness and
the counterculture. Shedding new light on an elusive and enigmatic
culture, Dig is essential reading for students and scholars of
popular music and culture, as well as anyone fascinated by the
counterculture movement of the mid-twentieth-century.
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