outlaws, gangsters, players, hustlers
[T]he roots of the counterculture as a defiant revolutionary way of life lay not so much in the sources that the kids were proud to show…but rather in that culture that had always been most antagonistic to conventional values and codes of behavior, the culture that had always acted out the most basic fantasies of the American psyche and created the whole underground world of drugs, violence, street argot and antisocial defiance: the criminal culture.
—ALBERT GOLDMAN
In 1926, as a young adolescent, William S. Burroughs discovered a book called You Can’t Win, by Jack Black, and it opened his world. Black belonged to the nameless swarms of Americans who followed the railroads west around the turn of the century and never took root again, except in the continuous motion of vice. You Can’t Win recounted his criminal adventures along the way—the hop joints and second-story jobs, the yegg loyalties and penitentiary time. For the young Burroughs, restless in what he called “a malignant matriarchal society” in suburban St. Louis, the book was a beacon, summoning him toward literary characters with names like Salt Chunk Mary or the Sanctimonious Kid, and toward thrills not so easily named. He bought a gun and began accruing his own adventures, reinventing himself through the images in Black’s pages. As an adult he lifted characters and scenes for his own fiction. “It sounded good to me,” he remembered later, “compared with the dullness of a Midwest suburb where all contact with life was shut out.”
In the evolution of hip, few characters have been as influential as the outlaw. For many of us, outlaws are the first figures we encounter who reject mainstream society and are celebrated for it. They are hip’s miscreant uncles, figures who give us permission to adopt our own code, go our own way. In a society directed toward work, outlaws create the leisure space in which the nation’s countercultures, from the colonial rebels to the 1990s gangstas, gather their numbers. Shunned by the law-abiding mainstream—placed literally outside the law—they inhabit a country within a country, inventing their own language, economy, values and folklore. These cross back over through hip.
In broad caricature, outlaws embody the mythologies of the American Renaissance: the lives of unfettered freedom and pleasure, of rebellion and primitive violence. Like the bad men of the blues, outlaws convert life into myth and image. Hip in turn shuttles ideas and language between the criminal underworld and aboveground society. It translates crime as an aesthetic: the black leather jacket, the droop-ass jean, the gangster lean. It borrows the hustle of the hustler, the stroll of the pimp. Like outlaws, hipsters spur a mixture of fear and attraction, projecting society’s fears back to it as style. The hipster, viewed coolly, is the outlaw as metaphor.
The criminal classes, as Whitman called them, are often considered regressive elements, but really they form a social vanguard. To the extent that laws exist to hold a society in place, outlaws are a creative force. In a Darwinian sense, society produces its outlaws for the same reason it produces hip: to foment noise and conflict, the engines of evolution. Many of the hipsters in this book were perceived first as delinquents, subversives or pornographers, and only later as cultural icons. The whorehouses in New Orleans fostered the development of jazz. Colonial rebels, runaway slaves, homosexuals, Mormons and trade unionists all began as outlaws. Yesterday’s crime has consistently proven to be tomorrow’s recreation. In between it is hip. To a nation addicted to the new, crime provides a glimpse of future liberties, a primitive look at the next incarnation of the modern.
Outlaw language, similarly, gives purpose to hip talk. It is by nature furtive and communicative. The compilers of the Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo (1950), who wrote from various niches in the penal system, noted that criminal slang “constitutes an implicit criticism of traditional mores, particularly with respect to those aspects of the social code which most concern the criminal population—the legal system, standards of group loyalty, and standards of sexual morality.” For hipsters living within the law, to sling the slang is to echo its implicit criticism.
Burroughs’s epiphany, an early crossroads in his slink toward hip, is just one link in a chain of criminal seductions. You Can’t Win describes Black’s own similar conversion in 1882, when he came across newspaper accounts of the death of Jesse James, betrayed for the reward money by his former accomplice Robert Ford. “Looking back now,” Black wrote, “I can plainly see the influence the James boys and similar characters had in turning my thoughts to adventure and later to crime.” Modern readers of Burroughs, then, can read through him to Black to Jesse James—and through James to John Newman Edwards, the Kansas City Times editor who more than anyone shaped the James legend, likening him to Robin Hood (whose own legend, to carry the regression back, likely owes to Robert Hod, a 13th-century rogue who made his way into song and story). Such links swing forward as well as back. Spin the same associations forward and you might arrive at Bob Dylan, an admirer of Burroughs, insinuating himself into the same genealogy. “I might look like Robert Ford / But I feel just like Jesse James,” he sang, playing both the outlaw and his betrayer. This is how myth allows the past to speak in the present tense.
Outlaws hold an elevated position in a nation founded by rebels and runaways. If America lacks the kings and queens of European legend, it has invented its own icons, in the likeness of its own savage heart: Billy the Kid and Jesse James, John Dillinger and Al Capone; and later, through the fictions of mass media, Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, the Outlaws of country music and the Outlawz of rap. Through hip, the romance of the outlaw poured life into American literature and movies, and in turn sustained itself through these media. The romance flourished not so much in our prisons as in the popular culture it helped create. Its chroniclers are both ambivalent and joyous:
I began to view the American criminal as a breed apart from the criminals of other countries. The American genus began to emerge as one striving for his own criminal identity in a society that considered him integral with something called the Frontier Spirit; a society that knew the criminal outwardly, condemned him as being against the common good, yet marked him for special recognition in a pioneer category aligned with obsessive types such as carnival freaks, daredevils, and wilderness adventurers who came with the bark on. The criminal became, in many respects, an extension of all of these—the loudest, the gaudiest. He was noise! He was public! And he was ours!
Like Mailer’s wise primitive, the outlaw is a simple way of understanding a complicated story.
At an elemental level, the hipster is a vicarious form of the outlaw. Hipsters are criminals once removed, intimations of crime without the thing itself. In a nation of laws, the romance of the outlaw lies mainly in the potential, isolated from the seamier reality of its results. Americans may love the swagger of the gunslinger riding into town, but they do not like to clean up afterward. Hip freezes this potential in slang and posture. In the instant before impact, the bullet of a criminal or the notes of a Miles Davis solo can have the same promise. Both see themselves as outside the law. Hip captures this moment of anticipation, a present tense that never becomes the done deal of the past. Hip is to crime what gangsta rap is to real gangbanging: the attitude and the lingo are the same, but the music is all implied potential, the real thing all grisly result. Hip is the frisson of the bullet or blue note still in the air, dangerous but remote. Its alternative is the romance of work, and that’s no romance at all.
The folklore of the outlaw extends back well before the colonization of the Americas. Among tribal societies of northern Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries, the Old English word lagu, or Old Icelandic log, the precursor of our own word law, referred to the value a free individual held within the society. A person’s lagu, as the crime historian Frank Richard Prassel has written, included both his material possessions and his rights within the laws of the community. This lagu could be forfeited. If a person stole or killed, the victim’s family or clan was entitled to compensation, in the form of property or the life of the offender. If the killer escaped, and there could be no proper compensation, then he was considered to have relinquished his lagu. He had no claim to the society’s wealth or the protection of its laws. He was utlaga, an outlaw.
It is not surprising that members of a society would embrace their outlaws. Robert Wright, in his book Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny (2000), makes the case that all societies evolve toward more complicated forms, and a society that hangs onto its outlaws preserves an extra wrinkle. Compensation is a zero-sum equation, enriching one party while depleting the other. To embrace outlaws, even symbolically, creates what Wright calls a non-zero-sum game, where one party gains without the other party losing. By the late Middle Ages, the peasants of England saw in this math a fable of class revenge, spinning ever more elaborate tales of the robber they called Robin Hood. After a few centuries the tale took on the twist that Robin stole from the rich and gave to the poor—a way of justifying a romance that preceded such justification.
In America the criminal took on a special significance. The first problem facing landowners in the New World was a vast shortage of manpower. One solution was to import African slaves. Another was to use convicts. The British crown, eager to export its thieves and villains, paid their way to the New World as bound labor. Virginia planters got their land grants from the king based on the number of servants they had, which stimulated a brisk market in convicts. Though they worked in the same fields as slaves and white freemen, convicts constituted their own temporary class, subject to brutal exploitation. In the decades before the Revolution, around 50,000 English prisoners passed into servitude in the New World. France supplied the feminine enticements that America lacked, exporting more than 1,200 women prisoners over a five-year span, mostly to the brothels of New Orleans. In the capital of American pleasure, then, the most basic pleasure began in crime. Criminals were a constructive force in the new country, outsiders on whom the inside relied. In the coming eras, as America developed a celebrity of crime, hip flowed from the possibilities they represented.
The story of Jesse James, the first modern outlaw, might properly begin with Robin Hood, to whom his admirers compared him, or with the bullet of Robert Ford, who snuck up behind Jesse in a rented house in St. Joseph, Missouri, on April 3, 1882, shooting him in the back as he straightened a picture. Or it might begin with the rise of the American press, and of editors like John Edwards, who endowed James and his brothers with a “halo of medieval chivalry,” turning them from pathological hoodlums to early models of hipster contradiction. Any of these makes an appropriate starting point, because as fiercely as Jesse determined to be his own invention, he was as much Robin Hood’s or Bob Ford’s, or John Edwards’s. Without these three, he would have been just a poor man who did bad. When he started to invent his own legend in the newspapers of the Great Plains, the door to hip was open.
Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County, Missouri, on September 5, 1847, the second son of a farmer and itinerant minister. Before Jesse was four, his father headed west with the California gold rush, only to die from a fever just 18 days after his arrival. The boys’ mother, Zarelda, raised them with fierce clannish loyalties and a penchant for violence. As the nation headed into Civil War, Jesse and his older brother, Frank, joined the bands of Confederate raiders who skirmished with the Jayhawkers and the Redlegs, Union militiamen roaming the border states of Missouri and Kansas. Accounts of Jesse as an adult describe him as just under six feet, slender but sturdy, with cavernous blue eyes, thin lips and long lashes. He was missing the tip of the middle finger on his left hand after a childhood gun mishap. The entry marks of a musket ball and a bullet, taken just nine months apart in 1864 and 1865, scarred the right side of his chest.
The James brothers and their associates, the Youngers, invented the modern American outlaw not in the field of crime, but in the new furnaces of the media. Their rise coincided with that of the most powerful popular press the world had ever known. From the time they robbed their first bank, on Valentine’s Day, 1866, they cultivated their image through journalists like Edwards, granting interviews and explaining their deeds in letters to the regional press. After one train robbery, they left their victim a note, to be passed to the local editor, providing “an exact account of this hold-up. We prefer this to be published instead of the exaggerated account that usually appears in the newspapers after such an event.” Since southern readers considered the banks and railroads as Yankee institutions, they were happy to side with the perpetrators, not the victims. Edwards put the muscle of the press into building a story. He described Jesse, who was by other accounts an indifferent gunslinger, as the fastest gun in the West, and bathed the gang’s jobs, in which innocent men lost their lives over minor sums of money, in the honey of epic. Edwards portrayed their acts as feats of daring, not the desperate toil of poor men. His editorials treated their crimes as pure style. For the James Gang, he wrote, “booty is but the second thought; the wild drama of adventure first.” Jesse appreciated the attention, naming his son Jesse Edwards James.
This third-party perspective, which transformed violence into image and story, opened the connection to hip. Centuries earlier, the legend of Robin Hood had required that he give his booty to the poor; Jesse James only had to be daring and sexy, a criminal rock star on perpetual tour. Like Melville’s confidence man, the mythic Jesse seemed to be in it for the grace, not the workingman’s payday. Modern biographers like T. J. Stiles, author of Jesse James: The Last Rebel of the Civil War, have begun to unravel the myths of the James Gang, but for Edwards and his readers, the outlaws were paragons of shady nobility. The public bought in. After Jesse’s death, his landlord sold bloody splinters from the floorboards for a quarter apiece. When all the splinters sold out, the landlord soaked new floorboards in ox blood and kept the business rolling.
Yet there were better ways to tell the story, and hip’s history is one of technological opportunism. In 1903, through the auspices of Thomas Edison, Edwin S. Porter made the first modern film, a 12-minute crime sequence called The Great Train Robbery. The new medium portrayed crime as pure action, a ballet of violence moving across a silent screen. The menace of the criminal, removed from any association with real life and real victims, became a visual vocabulary of stance, swagger and gesture. Audiences could take these home with them, repeating them as the postures of hip.
It was only fitting that both Jesse James Jr. and Emmett Dalton (1871–1937), a member of the Dalton Gang, slid from crime to the movie business, making myths in celluloid rather than dust and blood. Dalton, who watched his brothers Robert and Grattan die in an 1892 bank job, turned their deaths into the 1912 movie The Last Stand of the Dalton Boys. He played the public’s ambivalence toward bad men like a fiddle. “Why has the free-running reprobate always been so extolled?” he wrote, in a passage that gracefully shifts scale from the grandiose to the petty. “Is it because he symbolizes the undying anarchy in the heart of almost every man? Because he has the rude courage of his desires?…He becomes our fighting vicar against aristocracy, against power, against law, against the upstart, the pretender, the smugly virtuous, and the pompously successful person or corporation whom we envy. He becomes a hero of democracy.”
Law enforcement agencies joined the coronation, creating the honorific Public Enemy Number One, as if celebrating a sports legend or a Hollywood star. Who wouldn’t want to be number one? John Dillinger (1903–1934), a Prohibition-era bank robber, was the first to earn the title, and he cultivated an image as a gentleman Robin Hood. Newspapers covered his acts like the deeds of movie characters, and he punctuated his crimes with the wisecracks and asides that were becoming the conventions of film. When a bank customer moved to hand over his cash during a robbery, Dillinger refused it, explaining that he took money only from banks; on another job, when the gang had to take hostages, Dillinger gave them carfare home, certain that such deeds would play big in the papers. They did. When he died, shot down outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago on July 22, 1934, women dipped their hems in his blood on the sidewalk. Five thousand people attended his funeral. Even his sexual apparatus has remained a topic of urban myth. To this day, visitors to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., ask to see his preserved member, rumored to be residing in a jar somewhere in the museum’s vaults. One reckoning estimated its size to be anywhere from 13 to 28 inches—literally larger than life.
In its rhetoric, hip looks down on the drudgery of making a living. But as a broad force, hip shapes itself to economic needs. It forms a kind of consumer avant-garde, not necessarily the first to buy the new product but the first to shape the desire. The romance of the outlaw, similarly, has evolved according to the needs of the economy. The myths of the Wild West stimulated the expansion of the frontier. By the 1920s, as a maturing industrial economy began to produce luxury goods as well as necessities, the romance shifted to leisure criminals, urban figures renowned for their corporate organization and louche glamour. Chicago mobsters like Alphonse “Scarface” Capone, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Lester Gillis (aka Baby Face Nelson) and George “Machine Gun” Kelly helped coax the nation from the fiscal austerity of temperance to the more profitable model of sin. Their joints, venues for the evolution of jazz, hummed with the possibilities of sex and death, the alpha and omega of hip enlightenment. They spent freely, lived lavishly and invited civilians to do the same. Though crime actually dropped in the 1930s, a rarity in American history, the public fascination with these media-savvy gangsters created the impression of lawless anarchy. Decades later, gangsta rap wove the same illusion, overshadowing the drop in real crime during the 1990s.
As the economy changed, so did the romantic profile of the gangster. Four decades after the Chicago mobsters, the Harlem heroin kingpin Leroy “Nicky” Barnes melded the outlaw archetype to the new corporate paradigms of the 1970s. Barnes’s sleek, efficient heroin operation was not so much contrary to the national agenda as an apotheosis of it: a hypercapitalist inferno, with no bureaucracy or internal corruption to cool it down. Barnes was the CEO with a killer instinct, anticipating the cowboy capitalism of Reaganomics. Portrayed in the press as “Mr. Untouchable,” as if he were a TV character perpetrating entertainment rather than crime, he made crime a performance. He played Robin Hood of Harlem, giving Christmas turkeys to the poor, and publicly thumbed his nose at authority. When he went on trial for possession of guns and hashish in 1976, Barnes found himself in the courthouse washroom with two narcotics cops. “I need a handkerchief,” he said, loudly enough to get their attention. He stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a fat roll of bills, more money than a cop made in a month. “Let’s see, is this a handkerchief?” Then he patted the other side pocket and pulled out another fat roll, waving it in front of the cops. “Now, that isn’t a handkerchief either, is it?” Satisfied that he had made his point, he smiled at the narcs and walked out.
As the Romans used to say, hip fugit. Barnes became a police informant, and is now hiding out under the witness protection program. But he earns a place here not just for his retro flamboyance—copied most overtly by the rapper Notorious B.I.G.—but also for the creativity that flourished on his natty coattails. In the mid-1970s, through a front, he bought the Apollo Theater on 125th Street in Harlem. If Barnes was laissez-faire in his business practices, he was downright negligent in his stewardship of the Apollo. Yet as in the extralegal zone of Storyville in New Orleans, which nurtured the early sounds of jazz, the chaos was fertile. Between acts, a neighborhood youth who called himself DJ Hollywood spun records and kept up a rhyming patter over them. “To the hip, hop, the hibby, the hibby,” he began, chanting the name for the unnamed music that was then surging in the parks of Harlem and the Bronx and would soon rule the rhythm nation.
By the turn of the century, the outlaw romance had settled on the padded shoulders of the black pimp, a retro figure who tweaked both the ridiculous and the archaic in the American Dream. Rappers like Snoop Dogg and Too Short played out fantasies from The Mack; teenagers declared themselves sneaker pimps, gorilla pimps, or any of the other 52 officially recognized varieties. Pimps had the virtue of believing their own myth—the myth came first, the game second. They were also the consummate lifestyle capitalists, treating the most basic human act as a branded financial transaction. They took the brand logo to absurd limits: one of the most arresting photographs in the recent book Pimpnosis, taken by Tracy Funches, shows a topless woman drinking out of a martini glass, her left breast tattooed with the words Kenny’s Bitch.
The crossover between hipsters and outlaws has been fluid. Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1954) demonstrated the classic straddle, planting one leather boot in each camp. Riding into a square, sleepy town with an unconvincing cast of biker goons, Brando is all sexy brood and bad intent, chewing wads of hokey dialog. When a local famously asks him, “What’re you rebelling against, Johnny?” the proper answer might have been, “The script.” As hipster and outlaw, he ducked the orderly life by which the townspeople measured a person’s worth. That the same middle-class society actually willed this rebellion—and would have created men to perform it, had the population not proven so accommodating—only makes the outlaw story more quintessentially American, and more illuminating to hip’s evolution. In reconciling society’s fears and attractions, hip serves its critics as well as its adherents.
Like the bluesmen who sold their souls to the devil, outlaws promised access to forbidden knowledge. They had a code of sangfroid, an essential cool. In his autobiography, Pimp: The Story of My Life (1969), Iceberg Slim recounts a lesson from his first jail bid: “Always remember whether you be a sucker or hustler in the world out there, you’ve got that vital edge if you can iron-clad your feelings.” The myth of outlaws was that they were ready to kill, ready to die; emotionally steeled. A commonly repeated story about Billy the Kid (William Bonney or William McCarty, ca. 1859–1881) had him killing a band of Mexicans “just to see them kick.” Though the story was unsupported, it circulated as gospel, along with other conjectures regarding this man about whom little is known, and little of that likely to pass a good sniff test.
This cool dispassion, however mythologized, runs throughout the hip canon. In hip circles it signifies emotional intensity, not a void: the notes not played say as much as the ones that are. Hemingway worked it into parched, masculine prose, anticipating the hard-boiled writings of Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson and James Ellroy. The same chill blew through the heroin-dipped trumpets of Miles Davis and Chet Baker in the cool jazz of the 1950s, and through the aloof postures of James Dean, the Velvet Underground or Snoop Dogg—a river running from one end of hip to the other.
Outlaws and gangsters also provided a model for treating style as identity. Like the major writers of the American Renaissance, the modern outlaw emerged just after the birth of advertising, which freed images from their subjects. A deliciously fanciful account of Billy the Kid decks him in a
blue dragoon jacket of the finest broadcloth, heavily loaded down with gold embroidery, buckskin pants, dyed jet black, with small tinkling bells sewed down the sides…. Underneath this garment were his drawers of fine scarlet broadcloth, extending clear down to the ankle and over his feet, encasing them like stockings…. And [his] whole structure of a hat was covered with gold and jewels until it sparkled and shone in a dazzling and blinding manner when one looked upon it.
This seems an unlikely getup for the baked frontier of Lincoln County, New Mexico, but never mind. Iceberg Slim himself could not have been more pimping. Which is not to say he didn’t try. In a chapter entitled “A Degree in Pimping,” he writes: “I would see myself gigantic and powerful like God Almighty…. My suits were spun-gold shot through with precious stones. My shoes would be dazzling silver. The toes were as sharp as daggers. Beautiful whores with piteous eyes groveled at my feet.” (The piteous eyes, you will agree, are the killer touch.) In a suit like that, you wear your outsider status for all to see.
Even the sobriquet beat, applied to a generation, was the contribution of the thief and addict Herbert Huncke, who became a friend and inspiration to Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. He was their connection to a world that would never be wholly theirs. For Huncke, beat was drug-world slang for defeated, a condition beyond “the insult of rehabilitation,” as Ann Douglas called it—it meant you’ve fallen and you can’t get up. Kerouac called Huncke “the greatest storyteller I know, an actual genius at it, in my mind,” and immortalized him in three novels, including On the Road, in which he is Elmo Hassel, the seedy savant of Times Square.
Myths are rarely without an agenda. Like hip, the romance of the outlaw serves a broader cultural purpose. America from the start preached Puritan austerity yet thrived by its hungers for sex, conquest and material wealth. Unwilling to acknowledge these compulsions, and unable to give them up, we project them on our outlaws in grandiose excess. If these lusts are essential to the nation’s good times, then let them exist outside proper society. Outlaws show the public what its desires would look like with the brakes off. Though reality is often more prosaic, in legend the bad men kill without remorse, stack fortunes beyond taste, fuck like animals. “I shot a man in Reno,” Johnny Cash sang, slinging the myth, “just to watch him die,” and even in this obvious fabrication there was a gem of truth, not just for the Man in Black (1932–2003), but for listeners as well. As the critic Robert Warshow wrote, criminals embody both “what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.” This threat, or invitation, is the other side of the public’s fascination with outlaws—not because they are unfathomable, but because they are us. The features of the criminal, Warshow added, are inseparable from the nicer faces Americans see in the mirror: “The gangster is the ‘no’ to that great American ‘yes’ which is stamped so big over our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really feel about our lives.” The outlaws cannot really be pushed outside the law because their passions haunt the inner life of the community, circulating madly through the fantasies of the populace.
In such places as Greenwich Village, a ménage-a-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.” That’s how Mailer saw hip’s genesis in 1957, but of course the associations were much older, and this sudden confluence, like Burroughs’s epiphany on reading Jack Black, was really just one in a longer series of cultural exchanges. The affinity of hipsters for criminals begins in the original self-consciousness of the outlaw, the moment at which the criminal and the artist could converge.
Yet outlaws are not the same as hipsters, different in both motive and what they produce. Burroughs’s epiphany, like Black’s, led him not just to crime but to prose, where he used the myth to tell broader stories about freedom and dominance. Stealing alone wasn’t interesting enough. Though Herbert Huncke introduced the others to a rogues’ gallery of larcenous characters, it was Huncke himself, a writer and storyteller, who captured their imagination.
John Clellon Holmes, in a 1958 essay titled “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation,” acknowledged the freedoms of the outlaw as a starting point for the Beats, but saw crime as a spiritual cul-de-sac.
What differentiated the characters in On the Road from the slum-bred petty criminals and icon-smashing Bohemians which have been something of a staple in modern American fiction—what made them beat— was something which seemed to irritate critics most of all. It was Kerouac’s insistence that actually they were on a quest, and that the specific object of their quest was spiritual.
The outlaws represented a more primal enlightenment, a congress with death itself.
Ultimately, though, outlaws are not in control of their own myth. They do not create it and cannot defend it. It owes its currency to the public, and the public can crack it back upon them. A crime reporter laid out the rules at the turn of the previous century:
In case a crime has been committed which incenses the public mind, if the accused is able to divide the public sentiment, then take the sympathetic side of the case; but if the accused has few or no friends, then jump onto him with both feet and stamp him out of existence, for in so doing you will satisfy the mind of the public and close the incident.
The freedom of the mythic outlaw is thus contingent, illusory.
The logic of the romance ultimately requires that the outlaws die for it, preferably in a blaze of glory. Living represents a kind of failure. Theirs is literally a dead end. For all their crossover with hipsters, outlaws are more often transitional figures on the way to hip, guides to the American atavism that hip channels. If they are figures of attraction and repulsion to the straight world, to the hip they are raw material. The division between hipsters and squares repeats that between the criminal world and the straight one. Without outlaws, without the abyss they imply, hip would not have the same power to excite and repel. But where the outlaws can succeed only as tragedy, hip thrives in the continuities of living.