I BECAME A TEENAGER in 1960. I spent my high school years admiring and trying to emulate the creeds and tastes of ’40 and ’50s hipsters — and then, after 1964, moved along with them as these creeds and tastes modulated and diversified through the Civil Rights and youth movements, the counterculture, the New Left, and Black Power, feminism, and gay rights.
I can’t pretend to know much firsthand about the new hipsters of the last decade. It interests me that “hip-hop” also gestured to similar origins when it took the “hip” from “hipster.” Can it be a cultural accident that within about twenty years of each other, black and white vanguardists (and arrivistes) drew on the old black and white uses of the same word? And then further segregated its meanings via their musical, social, and style codes?
Clearly, the first hipsters craved racial variety when it came to tastes and icons. There was plenty of tension and competition, but the need was evident — and not just in Norman Mailer’s exorbitant “White Negro” proclamations. Music provides the best example. In jazz you had a spectrum from Miles Davis to Chet Baker of musicians who seemed distinct, but not segregated. Davis’s Birth of the Cool sessions defined a common aesthetic of black and white musicians that linked New York bop to the West Coast cool school. But in the literary and stage arts one could also cite the alliance of LeRoi and Hettie Jones, and the indeterminacy or intermediateness of Anatole Broyard, and the variety of the Off-Broadway scene. Is the recent hipster world really as racially singular as the music and films and books named in the transcript indicate? Is that possible?
In many ways popular music does now seem as segregated as it often appeared in the ’40s and ’50s. The difference? Today it looks like the result of cultural choice and niche constituencies rather than entrenched race politics and economics. Clearly there are simply many more sub- and sub-subcultures of music to choose from these days, all of them with style markers that matter — markers that are socio-economic and cultural, decipherable by any high-school kid, and reinforced by the iron discipline of teasing and disparagement. How do neighborhood makeup and gentrification — with their strains (but also juxtapositions) of classes, races, ethnicities — mark hipster tastes and determine fetish objects? Aren’t there significant nonwhite hipster tastes : keywords, emblems, bands, movies, clothes? Are there — or have there been, since the late 1990s — significant, clearly evident, and imitable nonwhite hipsters, and not just “exceptions”?
I WAS PARTICULARLY interested in the periodizing and analysis of a white ethnic or working-class aesthetic. Doesn’t it seem as if that working-class Pittsburgh ethnic, Andy Warhol, born “Warhola,” set us up for all of this irony about the trappings of mass-produced homogeneity in the early 1960s, with his Brillo boxes and soup cans? Surely he set us up for a way out, too — and that is also why I was surprised to see that the “white ethnic irony” question had been shorn of its own proper history.
This aesthetic had a surge in the late 1980s, in the Reagan years of highly unequal advancing wealth, framed by two recessions. At that time, the media tended to label it a “white trash” fad, naming the people who had been left behind in some dump of the American racial mind.
Some of the emblems and icons: plastic flowers, loud chunky costume jewelry. The trucker look, some trucker talk. Cajun and country western. Lots of old-school Southern redneck stuff; strenuously arch, often patronizing, while aiming for irony. “White trash” cookbooks and “white trash” guidebooks. Snarky movies like the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona and David Byrne’s True Stories. White ethnics showed up in quirkier, cleverer settings, where the aesthetic was often deliberately queer or complicatedly attached to “bad taste” and bids for freedom: John Waters movies, the clothes of Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, even the Boston Irish bar boys of Cheers. Italian ethnics got some irony and romantic comedy relief in Moonstruck. And Jonathan Demme had his cross-class and culture miscegenation movies, too, with Something Wild and Melvin and Howard. It was as if, with fears of Reagan’s capitalism sinking the whole ship of democracy, people were seeking fantasies about a more generous and diverse life at the bottom, to keep them warm.
All this was also happening, too, as whiteness studies was taking hold in the academy, and stirring up some shit. The basic quarrel, still unresolved: was whiteness studies really a critique of white power structures and ideologies motivated by Afro-American studies? Or was it a cunning way to reclaim center stage in the university from the multi-cultural reorganization set in motion by programs of black, Chicano, Asian, women’s and queer studies and cultures (no longer called “subcultures”)? Is there a contemporary testing of intellectual disciplines on the horizon that will unsettle us again? I don’t know.
There’s something worrisome, after all, in the persistent return of Mommy, Daddy, and childhood dream days, which the panel revisited. How much does this preserving of the adult world one knew as a child really set the boundaries (unconsciously as much as consciously) of one’s tastes and choices? I know this is a huge generalization, but that impulse truly did not characterize the ’40s and ’50s hipsters. They claimed — sometimes desperately, often clumsily, by no means always effectively — to be consciously separating themselves from the look, the sound, the artifacts, the sensory world of their parents as well as that social, political, and (sometimes) economic world.
Finally, look at this exchange: “Do we believe an attachment remains — a genuine attachment — between hipster culture and anti-capitalist, environmentalist . . .” “Feminist!” “. . . feminist, thank you — feminist, progressive culture?”
What I can’t tell, and I hope this shows my ignorance, is how powerful as agents — as artists, as shapers — women are in contemporary hipster culture. Riot grrrls were mentioned. There are female musicians in some of the named bands. But what else? Where else? Who else? In the old days, we were artifacts, consumers, muses, and accessories. How about now? Are there dyke, fag, tranny icons and participants? I just can’t tell if queer culture overlaps with hipster culture. But I would be depressed if it didn’t.