 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Hipster" 1940s subculture – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
The termshipster orhepcat, as used in the 1940s, referred toaficionados ofjump blues andjazz, in particularbebop, which became popular in the early 1940s. The hipstersubculture adopted the lifestyle of thejazz musician, including some or all of the following features:Conk hairstyles, loose fitting or oversize suits with loud colors,jive talk slang, use oftobacco,cannabis, and otherrecreational drugs, relaxed attitude, love forJazz orJump blues music, and styles ofswing dancing, especiallyLindy hop.
Thezoot suit was the popular style amongst hepcats. It incorporated baggy or oversize suits sometimes with loud colors, thick chalk stripes, floppy hats, and long chains. Many zoot suiters would often wear afedora orpork pie hat, color-coordinated with the suit. Occasionally they would have a long feather on the fedora or pork pie hat as decoration.
When conversing, hepcats would communicate injive talk. Jive talk (also known as Harlem jive or simply Jive) is anAfrican-American Vernacular English slang or vocabulary that was developed in urban African American communities. It was adopted more widely in African-American society and then later into the mainstream. This style of English dialect peaked in the 1940s.
In 1938, jazz bandleader and singerCab Calloway published a small glossary, "Hepster's Dictionary," the first dictionary by an African-American. This dictionary was specified for jive talk and other phrases that were popular amongst African-American youth.
The wordshep andhip are of uncertain origin, with numerous competing theories being proposed. In the early days ofjazz, musicians were using thehep variant to describe anybody who was "in the know" about an emerging, mostlyAfrican-Americansubculture, which revolved around jazz. They and their fans were known ashepcats. In 1938, the wordhepster was used by bandleaderCab Calloway in the title of his dictionary,Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary, which defineshep cat as "a guy who knows all the answers, understandsjive". British author and poetLemn Sissay remarked that "Cab Calloway was taking ownership of language for a people who, just a few generations before, had their own languages taken away."[1] By the late 1930s, with the rise ofswing,hep began to be used commonly in mainstream "square" culture, so by the 1940ship rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replacehep. In 1944, pianistHarry Gibson modifiedhepcat tohipster[2] in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk", published in 1944 with the albumBoogie Woogie In Blue, featuring the self-titled hit "Handsome Harry the Hipster".[3] The entry forhipsters defined them as "characters who like hot jazz." In 1947, Gibson sought to clarify the switch in the record "It Ain't Hep" which musically describes the difference between the two terms. Initially, hipsters were usuallymiddle-classEuropean American youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largelyAfrican-American jazz musicians they followed.[4] InThe Jazz Scene (1959), the British historian and social theoristEric Hobsbawm (originally writing under the pen name Francis Newton) described hipster language—i.e., "jive-talk or hipster-talk"—as "anargot orcant designed to set the group apart from outsiders". This group crucially included White jazz musicians such asBenny Goodman,Al Cohn,Gerry Mulligan,Stan Getz,Mezz Mezzrow,Barney Kessel,Doc Pomus,Bing Crosby,Bob Hope,Frank Sinatra,Dean Martin,Jerry Lewis,Joey Bishop,Perry Como,Tony Bennett,Chet Baker, andGene Krupa who ought to be counted as some of the "true" original hipsters as they were instrumental in turning the White American audience onto jazz and itsunderground culture in the 1930s and 1940s. ClarinetistArtie Shaw described singer Bing Crosby as "the first hip white person born in the United States."[5]
Hipsters were more interested inbebop and "hot" jazz than they were in swing, which by the late 1940s was becoming old-fashioned and watered down by "squares" likeLawrence Welk,Guy Lombardo and Robert Coates. In the 1940s, White youth began to frequent Black communities for theirmusic and dance. These first youths diverged from the mainstream due to their newphilosophies of racial diversity and their exploratory sexual nature and drug habits. The drug of choice was marijuana, and many hipsterslang terms were dedicated to the substance. The hipster subculture rapidly expanded, and afterWorld War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it.[4] In 1957, the American writer and adventurerJack Kerouac described hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality".[6] Toward the beginning of his poemHowl, the Jewish-AmericanBeatnik poetAllen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". In his 1957 essayThe White Negro, the American novelist and journalistNorman Mailer characterized hipsters as Americanexistentialists, living a life surrounded bydeath—annihilated by theatomic war or strangled bysocial conformity—and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self".[4]
The new philosophy of racial role reversal was transcribed by many popular hipster authors of the time.Norman Mailer's 1957 pamphlet, entitledThe White Negro,[7] has become the paradigmatic example of hipster ideology. Mailer described the hipsters as individuals "with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm."[8] In a nod to Mailer's discussion of hipsterism, theUnited States'Cold War deployments ofAfrican-American culture andpersonalities for the purposes ofpublic diplomacy has been discussed as "hipster diplomacy".[9]
