rebel girls, riot grrrls and the revenge on the mother
That whole obsession with hip is like collecting records or whatever. It’s more of a male thing.
—KIM GORDON
Any tradition that romanticizes a man for killing his wife in a drunken game of William Tell will never be exactly correct on the Woman Question. The sexual history of hip reached a low-water mark on September 6, 1951, in the Mexico City apartment of John Healy, where Joan Vollmer Adams and her common-law husband, William Burroughs, had gone to drink gin and to sell a gun. By this time both were in bad shape. Burroughs was adrift in the city’s reservoirs of boys, cheap heroin and tequila; Vollmer had polio and her teeth were turning black from too much Benzedrine. What most hipsters know of her life passed in those few minutes above the Bounty bar. Balancing a water glass on her head for Burroughs to shoot, she faced away, telling him, “I can’t watch this. You know I can’t stand the sight of blood.” The words were her last. The guilt from the accident ultimately jolted Burroughs to write his first books, but it is the apparent guiltlessness of it—the surreal violence of the act, the near indifference of the law—that continues to feed his legend. Joan, who was 27, became a footnote in a darkly romantic male tale.
The history of hip, as this incident illustrates, often rides hard over the women who help make it go. Joan Vollmer, born in 1924, was as willful and transgressive as the men around her, and like other women who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, she faced heavier consequences for her actions. The daughter of a factory manager in upstate New York, she chafed against her family’s middle-class expectations before leaving for Barnard College, where she married a law student named Paul Adams, more out of rebellion than passion. Joan was five-foot-six, pretty, with a jutting chin, a voracious appetite for literature and an aloofness that reminded Edie Parker, a Barnard friend and roommate, of Greta Garbo. She liked to spend days in the bathtub, reading or holding court. The string of apartments Joan and Edie took together in the early 1940s became ground zero for the meetings of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Hal Chase and—on their visits up from Times Square—Herbert Huncke and William Burroughs. A prostitute named Vickie Russell showed the group how to make lozenges or tea from the papers in over-the-counter Benzedrine inhalers. Edie dated and soon married Kerouac. Joan gravitated to the bennies and to Burroughs. When she was found hallucinating and incoherent in Times Square, and landed in the psych ward at Bellevue, it was Bill who saw to her release.
Though Burroughs was avowedly homosexual, he and Joan lived together in Texas, New Orleans and finally south of the border, and had a son, Billy Jr., whom Burroughs failed almost as catastrophically as he did his wife (Billy had his own affinity for drugs and died in 1981, at age 34, after a liver transplant failed). As for Edie Parker, whose 1944 marriage to Kerouac lasted less than a year, she had to content herself with her own unpublished memoirs and the tang of Kerouac’s posthumous Visions of Cody (1972), in which he said of his paramours: “Her cunt is sweet, you get to it via white lace panties, and she be fine. This is almost all I can say about almost all girls.” Like Vollmer, she gets little more than a marginal note in most Beat accounts.
Where, then, are all the ladies at? The chronicles of hip, as told by men, often play like T. E. Lawrence’s adventures in Arabia, in which the only female characters were the camels, or like Miles Davis’s autobiography, which could be a how-to manual for aspiring misogynists. In Hip 101 classics like Huck Finn, On the Road, Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” or Iceberg Slim’s Pimp, women appear either as reproving matriarchs like Twain’s Widow Douglas, or as Kerouac’s interchangeable bearers of sweet cunts—either the apron strings from which male hipness takes flight or the enticements it consumes along the road. “Hip definitely seems like a male term,” said Kim Gordon, bass player in Sonic Youth, who came on the scene after the wave of female musicians in the punk era. “Granted, a lot of it is gay. But when I think of hip I think of the Beat generation, that whole rockster toddler male machismo thing.”
Yet there is another side to this story, left out of the male accounts. The line that runs from Zora Neale Hurston to Deborah Harry, or Dawn Powell to Missy Elliott, traces a legacy of self-invention as provocative as its male equivalent. Hip would be incomplete without the withering retort of Dorothy Parker or Laurie Anderson, or the electric gospel of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who cranked her guitar for the Lord. From the Greenwich Village women who shaped American bohemia at the start of the 20th century to the postfeminist grrrls and ghetto-fabulous divas who revitalized it at the end, female hipsters have withstood a double standard that celebrated men who rebelled as rakish and romantic, but condemned women who did so as slatternly, immoral, irresponsible or bad mothers.
When the Beat poet Gregory Corso was asked about the male clubhouse of 1950s bohemia, he said the problem was not that women were less adventurous. “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.” Many faced the scorn of their communities, bore interracial or out-of-wedlock children and flouted a social order where even in postwar times, as Diane di Prima put it, “a woman without a man didn’t exist at all; a mother without a husband was more than invisible: she was a kind of negative force-field, a bit of antimatter.” Yet still the women have come.
Despite this imbalance, if hip has a gender, it is female—or, like hip’s racial play, hybrid. In the African societies where Robert Farris Thompson studied the origins of cool, including the Bakongo, source of most African culture in America, he found that cool had a distinctly feminine cast. While men were the great warriors, women were associated with peace, and therefore with cool. The 15th-century king Ewuare, with whom Thompson’s linguistic genealogy begins, earned his title by bringing this feminine condition. Hip follows a similar symbolic arc. By its metaphors it is more feminine than masculine. Hip is a process in cyclical rhythm, like a menstrual cycle, rather than an event, like a male ejaculation. It performs for an audience; it only has meaning if it is watched. From the beginning of minstrelsy or the blues, hip has worn a mask. It belongs to the less powerful, to the trickster, who keeps secrets, seduces and communicates ideas through coded image. All of these belong to the mythology of the feminine.
Like what used to be called the feminine mystique, hip is most alluring and complete when idle. It is sexualized, objectified. It only becomes newsworthy when men cross toward it, often in feminine habiliments like long hair, sensitive verse or the preening of the cock rocker—or, as we shall see, when women combine the feminine mask with male symbols of power or license. For better and worse, to be female in America is to see yourself from inside and outside, as subject and object. This double perspective, like the double meaning of hip language, defines hip awareness. To open one’s eyes, or to see, is to know oneself from both angles. If women get less notice in hip’s chronicles, it is in part because they have been there all along.
One way to read the sexual history of hip is as a riff on roles in the American family, which for millions have little to do with real life. The blues, with its twin longings for motion and home, arose from families that had been ripped apart during slavery. The rootlessness of bebop and the Beats echoed men’s sense of dislocation after World War II, when community life reoriented around suburban motherhood and the baby boom. In the mid-1970s, hip-hop spoke for a cohort of urban teenagers without fathers, and spread to white kids as the suburbs began to fill with single mothers. Each of these tribes defined itself against the myth of the nuclear family, and particularly the male role of the breadwinner in an economy that trapped both sexes in what Kerouac described as a domestic cycle of “work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.” Hip’s reactions against conformity and materialism, from Emerson to the annual Burning Man festival, begin by resisting this cycle.
This resistance often plays out as hostility to women. For men in motion, Kerouac wrote, “‘Pretty girls make graves,’ was my saying.”(Recently a coed group of feminist punks from Seattle adopted this line as their band name, mocking it as they claimed its edge.) When Huck Finn resists being “sivilized,” it means yielding to the authority of Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas. Yet more often the target of this hostility is not women per se but domesticity. Hip’s archetypes—outlaws, gangsters, vagabonds, hard-boiled detectives, itinerant musicians, nightcrawlers, slackers, bohemians, drug users—all ramble conspicuously away from the hearth. Gay men, who have been a driving force in hip, represent the most dramatic break from gender roles. Hip’s romance of the road turns the pursuit of sexual happiness upside down: though surveys show married men have more sex and a greater sense of well-being, hip rates the domestic cocoon as sexless and square, and the road as erotic adventure.
For many women, especially those with children, the price of this adventure is too high. Instead of reinventing themselves on the road, they have reinvented the home and the parameters of hip within it.
Modern American bohemia, tellingly, begins on the shoulders of women. In the early years of the 20th century, while Gertrude Stein was settling in Paris, the radical women of Greenwich Village created the space, both geographical and intellectual, for one of America’s great social experiments. The last generation to come of age in the Victorian era, women like Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge, Louise Bryant and Edna St. Vincent Millay left home to invent new identities as artists, activists and lovers. “When the world began to change,” wrote the journalist Hutchins Hapgood, the first chronicler of this downtown scene, “the restlessness of women was the main cause of the development called Greenwich Village, which existed not only in New York but all over the country.” The magazines of the day, on the make for anything saucy, named the new type Bohemian Girls, New Women or Rebel Girls—the last from the title of a radical labor anthem by Joe Hill of the Wobblies.
What they produced was the prototype of the alternative scene, an American modernism that replaced the severity of the European model with a Whitmanesque belief in the unbounded self. Professions like journalism, medicine and the law were opening to women for the first time, providing alternatives to the sweatshops or the marital kitchen. “Life was ready to take a new form of some kind and many people felt a common urge to shape it,” wrote Mabel Dodge, who opened her apartment on lower Fifth Avenue for social and literary experiments. “The most that anyone knew was the old ways were about over and the new ways all to create. The city was teeming with potentialities.”
The first order of business was to unseat the Victorian matriarchy. Hip needs a foil, and the Victorian matriarch—stout, humorless and moralistic—was made to order. The men and women who poured into New York after the turn of the century had grown up under the granite bosoms of reformers like the temperance leader Frances E. Willard, who declared women “trained by the essence of our nature to deeds of moral elevation, education and the work of God.” The New Women had another view. They wanted a revolution they could dance to, as Emma Goldman famously said. In the tradition of male hipsters, this meant breaking with their families, remaking themselves as their own invention. “My people are in no way a part of me,” wrote the journalist Louise Bryant, a middle-class refugee whose incandescent marriage with John Reed was rivaled only by her affair with Eugene O’Neill.
The women found the city a place to pursue lives of creativity, sex and work, not to re-create the hearths of their mothers. As the illustrator Mary Heaton Vorse put it, women of her generation set “out to hurt their mother” in order to clear room for their own lives. “More and more and more of us are coming all the time, and more of us will come until the sum of us will change the customs of the world.” They did not come to be breeders. Of the women who enlivened New York in the early decades of the century, Millay, Djuna Barnes, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Sara Teasdale, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore and Anita Loos were among those who did not have children.
With a cohort of feminist men, the New Women established many of hip’s future channels, beginning with a low-rent salon culture and a potent underground press. Margaret Sanger, the birth-control advocate, started a magazine in 1915 appropriately called The Woman Rebel, which called for a rethinking of Victorian sex roles. In what might be the first manifesto of female hip, she declared it the duty of modern women to “look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes, to have an ideal, to speak and act in defiance of convention.” On behalf of her readers, she claimed “[t]he right to be lazy. The right to be an unmarried mother. The right to destroy. The right to create. The right to live. The right to love.” Such small-press magazines, often coed, worked like the concentric circles of bop a generation later: the inner circle pushed each other to more radical ideas, then circulated these to a sympathetic cult audience, and from there to the semi-mainstream. As precursors to the zines and blogs of recent vintage, the offset magazines formed a neutral turf where men and women could speak freely in a way no previous generation had. Before the rise of mass media they flourished; in the early 1910s there were more than 300 socialist journals in America, some with circulations of more than 100,000, plus numerous periodicals devoted to art, literature, labor, modernist social theory and anarchy.
Through their publications and their home lives, the moderns reimagined the family, seeking to free men by liberating women. The new division of labor, and the cycle of working and spending, had bred an asymmetry that limited the freedoms for both sexes. Outside the Village, the bohemians campaigned selflessly for the labor movement. At home, with an innocence born of the prewar boom, they hoped to change society by changing their own personal relationships. Sanger promoted contraception as a way to sexual freedom. Couples like Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood experimented with open marriage. Crystal Eastman, the sister of Max Eastman, proposed that spouses take separate residences in order to keep the sexual fires fresh. Goldman railed against the market framework of marriage. In a lecture titled “The Traffic in Women,” she argued that “the wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master.”
For many men, Goldman’s analogy mirrored their own dissatisfaction with the obligations of marriage. H. L. Mencken, writing in 1918, argued that in the surplus economy of the industrial era, which expected men to work harder to bring home the new consumer goods, men were putting more into the marriage bargain and getting less in return. “[U]nder the contract of marriage,” he wrote, “all duties lie upon the man and all the privileges appertain to the woman.” The women around such a man could not help but signify on him, Mencken believed: “whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, [they] always regard him secretly as an ass and with something akin to pity.” The Village bohemians brought these two rebellions—Mencken’s and Goldman’s—under the same roof. For the men, liberated women seemed like protection from the embalmed life of the breadwinner. Floyd Dell predicted in the lefty publication The Masses, “Feminism is going to make it possible for the first time for men to be free.”
As it happened, the experiments in free love, open contraception and sexual collaboration did not last. After the war, the New Women’s utopianism yielded to more market-friendly expressions of female independence, typified by the urbane, skeptical wit of Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell and Mae West. Theirs was a different city, pierced by different media. They spun it knowingly back on its homilies. “Gratitude,” quipped Parker—“the meanest and most sniveling attribute in the world.” By the 1920s, with the first golden age of advertising, the frank sexuality of the prewar bohemians had softened into commercial substitutes like the naughtiness of flappers or the canned candor of the new romance magazines. As an experiment in gynocentric bohemia, the moderns were eclipsed by the more dynamic, masculine hip of the decade that followed. The gap between the sexes resurged as market segmentation.
By the next hip convergence, the Cold War tandem of bebop and the Beats, from a feminist perspective men were revolting in more ways than one. As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983), the economic expansion of two world wars bred two streams of male rebellion. The first, which Hugh Hefner captured in 1953 with Playboy magazine, imagined a maverick world of pleasure and connoisseurship, for which family was an impediment. Getting married meant fewer consumer options, both in bed and at the MG dealership. In a booming economy, this was a timely message: the magazine’s circulation hit a million by 1956, the year before On the Road came out. The Playboy mythos was a blend of corporate aspiration and rebellion, as Hefner encouraged readers to “expend greater effort in their work, develop their capabilities further and climb higher on the ladder of success.” Rebellion, for the Playboy man, was against whatever might prevent him from enjoying the airbrushed nipples on the page or the new goodies flowing into stores. He was a square with a sporty wardrobe and a hard-on, congratulated by a magazine that told him this was hip.
The men who met in the Columbia apartments of Edie Parker and Joan Vollmer in the 1940s nursed a deeper disaffection. While Playboy promised better loving through upward mobility, the Beat men opted out of the game. Refugees from good colleges, they lionized petty thieves like Huncke and Cassady or what they imagined as the liberating poverty of African Americans. They took occasional work on the docks or for the railroads. Even Ginsberg, who worked briefly in market research in an effort to go straight, did not last. Their resistence was less to women than to consumerism itself, and the domestic cycle of working too hard and spending too much. In practice, though, this often amounted to running away from women and, inevitably, their children. The Beat men chose the path of poverty and experience—romantic as a solo flight, poor as a family plan.
This raised the bar for bohemian women like Parker or Vollmer to participate fully. The lifestyle of hitchhiking around the country, sleeping wherever your last ride let off, seemed unsafe to many women. Nor could they rebel in the same way against the rat race, because they were never in it. Instead, rebellion and independence meant taking jobs to support themselves and often their children. This meant opting in. Edie Parker, who earned $27.50 a week as a cigarette girl, shared this sum with Kerouac, keeping him afloat between his stays with his beloved mother, his other safety net. For the men, gender roles had been flipped. Supported by their spouses, they wrote poetry, talked about their feelings and accessed their sensual side. Presenting themselves as sexual objects, in part because of the mixed orientation of their group, they took on everything but the responsibilities of homemaking and child rearing. This was a makeover the women could not match. Where the bohemian women of the 1910s had been at the artistic and political center of a movement for class uplift, Beat women were saddled with feeding downwardly mobile men whose rebellion meant shedding any return obligations.
For this privilege, the women faced the full censure of the 1950s. Joyce Johnson, who took up with Kerouac in 1957 after Ginsberg fixed them up on a blind date (she paid), said she knew only that “I wanted the life of an outlaw rather than the kind of life my mother had had.” In a 1996 panel of Beat women writers, Johnson said she and her peers put up with the sexism of Beat men because the rest of society was worse. “In the late fifties, it was an enormous thing for a young woman who wasn’t married to leave home, support herself, have her own apartment, have a sex life,” she said. “It wasn’t the moment then to try to transform relationships with men.”
The poet Anne Waldman, who was a few years younger than the first Beat generation, later inventoried the damage the women endured from both their families and their partners:
I knew interesting creative women who became junkies for their boyfriends, who stole for their boyfriends, who concealed their poetry and artistic aspirations, who slept around to be popular, who had serious eating disorders, who concealed their unwanted pregnancies raising money for abortions on their own or who put the child up for adoption. Who never felt they owned or could appreciate their own bodies. I knew women living secret or double lives because love and sexual desire for another woman was anathema. I knew women in daily therapy because their fathers abused them, or women who got sent away to mental hospitals or special schools because they’d taken a black lover. Some ran away from home. Some committed suicide. There were casualties among the men as well, but not, in my experience, as legion.
Though many of these women were writing, often they could not find publishers, or subordinated their ambitions to their partners’. Bonnie Bremser (nee Brenda Frazer), wife of the Beat poet Ray Bremser, endured his physical abuse and turned tricks to support him. In her eyes, he was “surely poetry’s representative in the flesh.” Finally, on a disastrous trip through Mexico, she abandoned their baby daughter to escape him. Elise Cowen, a Barnard rebel who had the misfortune to fall in love with Ginsberg, was unpublished in her lifetime, but became widely known through a photo of her naked, ironing a shirt. She battled with mental illness and the era’s harsh psychotherapies for women who did not fit in. In February 1962 she leapt to her death from a window of her parents’ Washington Heights living room.
Like Kerouac and Cassady, many of the women expressed themselves most lucidly in memoirs or journals, which got attention only much later. At the time, the sexual dynamics of the day rendered their knowledge a species of gossip or dish, and the men’s musings the hip gospel. Hip history would look much different if this pecking order were reversed. Hettie Cohen helped her lover and future husband LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) run the Beat journal Yugen and a publishing imprint called Totem Press, and supported the couple on her small salary from the Partisan Review. When later women asked her if she’d really been just a typist, she reminded them that without typists, nothing would have gotten done. But of her Beat days she recalled, “Many, myself included, wanted far more of ourselves than we ever produced. I’ve been asked how women in that group got published, and the answer, with some notable exceptions, is ‘if men wanted to include them.’”
The exception was Diane di Prima. Raised in Brooklyn by conservative Italian-American parents and anarchist grandparents, di Prima dropped out of Swarthmore College in 1953 to become a writer. When she set eyes on “Howl” in 1957, she interrupted a meal she was cooking for friends so she could be alone with the poem. “I sensed that Allen was only, could only be, the vanguard of a much larger thing,” she wrote. “All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends…waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man’s era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation—all these would now step forward and say their piece. Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other.”
Supporting herself with the odd nude modeling gig and by writing the lubricious Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), a cult classic for its Beat orgies and blow jobs, she moved through the downtown worlds of art, literature, dance and music in a man’s shirt, Levi’s and cropped red hair, often with a baby or two in tow. She considered the archetype of the father as simply an anachronistic myth. When she left a gathering one night at Ginsberg’s in order to take care of her children, Kerouac remonstrated: “Di Prima, unless you forget about your babysitter, you’re never going to be a writer.” Yet she was already there, and no one now would consider Kerouac’s scold a message of liberation. She launched the journal Floating Bear with LeRoi Jones in 1961, bore a child with him (after his split with Hettie Jones), helped him beat an obscenity charge, and wrote some of the Bear’s most significant poems. More than most Beat men or women, she managed to juggle independence and a family, perching both on the far fringe of the economy. The male rebellion was her rebellion as well.
Recognition for other Beat women came only in the 1980s and 1990s. Now their stories had currency: they were valuable precisely because they had been overlooked, never commercialized or consumed. While the male legacy of Kerouac and Cassady resurfaced in jazzy Gap ads, the mature reflections of Beat women provided a new perspective on both past and present. Joyce Johnson, who had become a successful book editor and was responsible for getting Visions of Cody published in 1972, won a 1983 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for her memoir, Minor Characters. Hettie Jones’s 1990 memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones, examined the Beat era through the lens of family life, and cut through some of the racial sentimentality that still hangs over the period. Two anthologies, Women of the Beat Generation (1996) and A Different Beat: Writings By Women of the Beat Generation (1997), published some of the writers for the first time.
The juggernaut of rock and roll, which adopted many of the Beats’ precepts, moved their rebellions into the commercial marketplace, just as the Jazz Age had commercialized the rebellions of the Greenwich Village moderns. Between rock and roll and the birth-control pill, which was introduced in 1960, entire swaths of American life were suddenly doomed to oblivion, soon to be as remote as gothic romance. America would no longer lock up its independent young women, who had become mainstays of the office economy. By mid-decade it was men’s sexual identity, now draped in androgynous long hair, that got the nation in a lather.
The early rock years packaged women and sex as tightly as the 1920s had, serving up mostly man-made sirens or folkie earth mothers. In the new marketplace of the image, women were still commodities, not the ends toward which commodities were shaped. Pop divas served male songwriters or producers; folkies and sexy rock mamas alike played out narrow stereotypes. Where women tampered with the package, their hip gestures were subtle and coded. Ronnie Spector (nee Veronica Bennett) took beatings in her Spanish Harlem high school for her big hair, but as lead singer of the multiracial Ronettes, she flaunted it as a symbol of Aqua Net rebellion. In the prim early 1960s, she recalled, “we didn’t do like the Supremes. Our hair would be up in these big beehives with intentions for it to fall down during the show. I always made sure the pin wasn’t tight. I loved getting messy. Now, my eyes are a little Chinese. I wanted them ALL the way out. The three of us would sit in the mirror and see whose eyes would get out the longest with the eyeliner.”
But it was Phil Spector, her domineering husband and producer, who made all the decisions, at home and in her act. This was typical. In the Velvet Underground, Warhol and Paul Morrissey, who managed the band, felt that Lou Reed was not a compelling front man, so they made the group take on a female lead singer. Icy, blonde, a former fashion model, Nico (nee Christa Päffgen, 1938–1988) had trouble with pitch and rhythm, but looked great under the barrage of Warhol’s lighting effects. Despite her formidable junkie cool, she was mainly a pretty front, never a full member. She could sing about being Lou’s mirror, but he was always the viewer and main object. Ultimately Lou threw her out of the band. (She did not leave before showing the sharpness of her glass, however; after a romantic spat with Reed, she announced to the band at practice, “I cannot make love to Jews anymore.”)
When women’s economic opportunities changed, hip’s subject matter changed with them. No longer was their knowledge denigrated as gossip. By the 1970s and 1980s, women had far greater latitude as protagonists in their own stories. At CBGB, for instance, the loudest sound was often that of female critique. “The only people who had any money, unless you had a trust fund, were the strippers,” said the photographer Roberta Bayley, who worked the door at CBGB and later lived with Richard Hell. “The musicians didn’t have any money. This was when apartments cost $100 and you still couldn’t make your rent. The girls had the money and the moxie and great apartments.” A chart posted in the club’s ladies room rated the sexual prowess of the male musicians, with spaces for women to dish what they knew.
The stage was also unprecedentedly coed. Because punk began outside the record industry, it didn’t have the same male superstructure as mainstream rock; even now, the indie scene is far more female than the corporate labels. Punk women like Patti Smith, Deborah Harry, Lydia Lunch and the Bush Tetras played with female stereotypes, pushing toward butch androgyny or pulling toward Blondie’s feminine mask. Unlike the Beat women, they were as autonomous as the men. “I was always Flash Gordon, not his old lady,” Patti Smith explained in 1973. Her idols were Keith Richards and Rimbaud, not Patti Page or Emily Dickinson; her idea of hip was Dylan and Bobby Neuwirth in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back. “I never identified with any female at all,” she said. “When I had a baby [at 19, as a college student in Glassboro, New Jersey], I was forced to look at myself as a female, although only physically, not intellectually. I gave it away because I had to assert myself as an artist, in a body of work.”
In addition to the front women, punk’s amateurism opened doors for support players like Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads or Poison Ivy Rorschach of the Cramps, who were simply part of the band. By the generation after the Ramones, groups of boys with guitars seemed figures of male confusion. More captivating acts, especially in the indie scene, were either female or mixed—ESG, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, the Breeders, Hole, P. J. Harvey, Shonen Knife—or else, like Nirvana, Fugazi and Pavement, they slipped far enough from masculinity to goad it from the outside. The future of rock, as Kurt Cobain said, belonged to women.
Simultaneous with punk, hip-hop was inventing its own dialog between men and women. In 1978, the year before the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” became the first rap single, the census reported for the first time that more African-American children were living with one parent than two. The father was disappearing. Hip-hop reflected this. Born out of family disintegration, hip-hop evolved as a wordwise subculture in which parental authority—especially paternal presence—was spectral. No culture has been less interested in the past, except as something to be scratched and remixed. The crews of rappers, graffiti writers and break-dancers were alternate families, even supplying members with new names. Like nuclear families, many were dysfunctional. Without fathers, graffiti artists proved their existence by writing their names, constructing roots on the side of subway cars or buildings. This was a twist on hip’s promise of reinvention: it explored birth without paternity. And as a mostly male way of getting over, it was symbolically feminine, constructing identities in paint and image.
Though hip-hop parties were largely run by men, and often flagrantly sexist, women like the Mercedes Ladies, Sha-Rock, Sequence and the graffiti writer Lady Pink broke through, first as novelties, then as the sexual balance the scene needed; Sylvia Robinson at Sugarhill Records and Monica Lynch at Tommy Boy, the two most important labels, created a hip matriarchy for the new business. Since nothing ended a party like a shoot-out, the scene’s masculine energies were always on the verge of tearing it apart—in part because men were adjusting to being both images and producers. It was not enough to act hard, one had to be hard. By the 1990s, as male rappers beat the tired horse of gangsta masculinity, the hippest voices belonged to women like Missy Elliott, Erykah Badu, Eve and Mary J. Blige. If gangsta is the shutting down of a second internal voice, one that could critique the thug pose, female rappers examined their images from all angles. Instead of threats or bluster, they played with topics of seeing and being seen. As Missy rapped, mocking some fans’ speculation on her weight loss, “Girl, I heard she eats one cracker a day.”
Like the men who rejected male roles, punk and hip-hop women played with sexual identity. Diane di Prima had been a provocation in the 1950s, running the city in a man’s shirt and jeans; two decades later, Patti Smith, photographed in a man’s shirt and skinny tie by her friend Robert Mapplethorpe for the cover of Horses (1975), was an instant rock icon. Smith in her early days railed against feminists, whom she felt missed the power of hip swagger. “Hung-up women,” she told Nick Tosches in 1976, “can’t produce anything but mediocre art, and there ain’t no room for mediocre art…. Every time I say the word pussy at a poetry reading, some idiot broad rises and has a fit. ‘What’s your definition of pussy, sister?’ I dunno, it’s a slang term. If I wanna say pussy, I’ll say pussy. If I wanna say nigger, I’ll say nigger. If somebody wants to call me a cracker bitch, that’s cool. It’s all part of being American. But all these tight-assed movements are fucking up our slang, and that eats it.” By the time she withdrew from music in 1979, choosing domestic life in Detroit with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, such an embrace of domesticity was more controversial than any language she might use in her poetry.
As women raised their value in the commercial marketplace, hip circles, even anticommercial ones, began to claim traditionally female qualities as valuable. A group of bands labeled “foxcore” by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth—Babes in Toyland, Hole, L7—made waves just by wearing girly dresses. Young feminists calling themselves riot grrrls reclaimed traits that had been buried by their elders. Kathleen Hanna of the riot grrrl group Bikini Kill, writing in her zine Girl Power in 1991, proposed a new, girl-centric orientation of cool that was the opposite of Patti Smith’s:
For the most part, cool attributes have been claimed by our society as “male.” This means that the only way a person brought up GIRL (and thus the opposite of what is cool) can be “truly” cool is to assimilate into male culture via toughness.
By claiming “dork” as cool we can confuse and disrupt this whole process. The idea is that not only have we decided that being a dork (not repressing our supposedly feminine qualities like niceness and telling people how we feel) is cool and thus, valuable to us BUT also that we are not willing to accept claims that how we are is wrong, undeveloped, bad or….. uncool.
Men played, too, though not always well: by the end of the 1990s, the an-timachismo of Kurt Cobain or Pavement gave way to the whine of emo and Coldplay.
A role model for this school of cool has been Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, who has now survived more than two decades on the indie or alt circuit, along with marriage and motherhood. Riot grrrls, new folkies, singer songwriters, chick rockers, punk dykes and conventional rock women cite her as inspiration or hip godmother, even when their work bears no similarity to Sonic Youth’s. Born in West Los Angeles in 1953, she grew up mostly in southern California in the Manson years, flying up to San Francisco to see bands at the Fillmore. “The Beach Boys were still singing these happy songs, but people were starting to see that LA was actually a little sleazy,” she said. Like Raymond Chandler, she made this dissonance her métier. Moving to New York after art school in 1980, she discovered the small no wave scene, an art-school response to punk’s glorious filth. No wavers rejected punk for being too conventional. As the drummer Jim Sclavunos, who played briefly in Sonic Youth, told the writer Alec Foege, punk “just seemed like a very easy scene for a bunch of losers. And we were determined to be bigger losers, I guess.” Gordon didn’t play an instrument, so at first she became a critic. One of the first groups that inspired her was a guitar ensemble hopped up on amyl nitrate. “They’d take a big hit and then do the guitar trio thing,” she said.
But it was the curious ritual of male bonding that most interested her. “I thought if I really wanted to learn about it, I needed to get in the middle of it,” she said. “So I really came as a voyeur.” She picked up the bass and ended up in Sonic Youth. As she mused in a 1987 tour diary called “Boys Are Smelly,” which was published in the Village Voice, “What would it be like to be right at the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys crossing their guitars, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and male bonding? How sick, but what desire could be more ordinary? How many grannies once wanted to rub their faces in Elvis’s crotch, and how many boys want to be whipped by Steve Albini’s guitar.”
In tight pants or miniskirts, Gordon plays with sexual imagery onstage, but at a distance. She is as aloof from her husband, guitarist Thurston Moore, as from the audience. She can always step outside the image and comment on it. Some of her best masks are male, uttering creepy lines like “Hey fox, come here / Hey beautiful, come here, sugar…Let’s go for a ride somewhere / I won’t hurt you.” As the center of attention, strapped into a phallic guitar, she is a woman playing a man playing a woman, and setting each role aside in quotation marks. Even now, she said, “when people say, what’s it like to be a woman in rock, I still think that you have to look at what it’s like to be a man in rock. There’s something about being tied into electricity and being able to exert lots of sound, that if you do the moves you can feel what it’s like to be a man in rock. But I think it’s the same thing for guys, who get a sense of what it’s like to be the sexualized idea of what a woman is.”
As a rejection of roles like good husband or dutiful daughter, hip has pushed steadily toward androgyny or sexual ambiguity. The male revolt, whatever its hostilities to women, has done its most lasting damage to the borders of masculinity. Nothing is cornier than a dumbly masculine jock, frat boy, company man or golf buddy. Male hip has played against these types, celebrating sensitive Beat poets, long-haired hippies, homoerotic motorcycle boys, New York Dolls and grunge rockers in dresses. Hip women, from Bessie Smith to Patti Smith, have picked at the lines of femininity. In gender as in race, hip thrives in the hybrid, the hyphen. It requires the enlightenment of a second voice: the female within the male, the black within the white, or vice versa. In a society that has devalued women and blacks, hip embraces the feminine and the African.
It is by now a meaningless exercise to single out the women in hip. That’s who is there. If you find yourself in the exclusive company of men, and you are not at a YMCA or a gay bar, it probably means you have fallen into in a room full of record nerds, car guys, sweat lodgers or train-spotters. Though MTV, VH1 and Rolling Stone still churn out specials on women in rock, these are mainly programming stunts. Zines like Chicklit, Bitch and Bust, which are constitutionally hipper, by now should consider sympathy coverage for boys. The masculine pursuits that have resurged in the 21st century—Maxim, drag racing, mud bogging, street ball, demolition derby, extreme fighting—come as either self-conscious kitsch, like the 1990s cocktail culture, or escapist diversions, like the rides at theme parks. They put masculinity in quotation marks, something to be explored from the outside, not claimed from within. Their hippest participants are not men but women, who don the requisite wife-beater tops, aviator sunglasses and tattoos, adding a layer of knowingness to the proceedings. These hip pursuits are less a quest for Kerouac’s “jewel center of interest” than an ironic celebration of novelty: the men in hip. Imagine.
At the same time, domesticity has lost some of its bad odor. A generation after the 1969 Stonewall riots, which began the gay liberation movement after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, the battle lines of gay culture now focus on marriage and parenthood. Baby boomers, who prided themselves on inventing youth culture in the 1960s, invested the same energies in parenthood in the 1980s and 1990s. Their children in turn took domestic hints from shows like MTV’s Cribs, in which rappers and rockers showed off pads more stylish and inventive than most of their music. It was no longer clear that the jewel center of interest lay on the road and not at home.
The economy of the late 20th century changed from a model that is traditionally masculine—building things—to a traditionally female one, which sells images. The old model favored male hipsters; the new one does not. In the 1990s, the most mesmerizing male figures—Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G.—all died violent deaths. Tupac and Biggie were killed in drive-by shootings in 1996 and 1997; Cobain killed himself in the garage apartment of his Seattle home in April 1994. Biggie and Kurt both left behind young children. Unlike past hipster tragedies such as James Dean or Lenny Bruce, the three died in conflict not with a disapproving outside world, but with their mostly male peers or fans. Where Kim Gordon or Deborah Harry made careers of providing both image and commentary, the three men were held by audiences that did not want them to step out from behind the mask to dissect it. Yet even after their deaths, their male fans measure themselves by the performers’ “realness.” Male hip did not prepare men for this economy that expects them to be both real and unreal.
If women are hipper, and if domesticity has lost some of its square taint, it is in part because both move beyond this self-destruction. Women have long manipulated myth and image, playing with the space between image and reality. They are rarely destroyed when the two are not the same. This is a trickster move, using image to mean two things. The stories of women like Gordon, Sofia Coppola, Missy Elliott, Zadie Smith, Meg White, Lauryn Hill, Macy Gray, Danzy Senna, Eve, Erykah Badu and the rest take image and myths as beginnings, not ends. They restore the second internal voice—not the confusion, but the commentary on the confusion. This second voice, wise and unruffled, speaks the secrets of hip.