I know your type…. This is the worst nightmare. I’ve dreamed of this on the subway…. If you weren’t a journalist you’d never be invited to anything hip.
—LOU REED
The proper way to read this book, of course, is from the back, checking to see if your name is in the index. If it is not there (and let’s face it, what are the chances?), my apologies. Somehow your hang time at the Six Gallery in North Beach or Northsix in Williamsburg, your matted coif or ironic eyeglasses, your collection of white-label vinyl or Bukowski first editions, fell through one of the many holes in this book. Perhaps the hip guy you knew in high school or wished you knew at the needle exchange is not in here, either. Hip is an elusive thing, and sometimes must be its own reward. Take comfort that you are in good company. If all the hipsters omitted from these pages were gathered together, they could fill the back room of Max’s Kansas City from now until the next Velvet Underground reunion. With luck, no one would pay his or her tab, and only a sucker would eat the chickpeas.
If you are in the index, another sort of apology is in order. This is not a conventional history, faithfully reporting the experiences of the people who lived it. Instead, it is a history of a public perception, which by its nature is sometimes awry. Its distortions are part of what makes hip. If you think of Eric Dolphy onstage at the Five Spot, or Rakim writing rhymes in Long Island, you might imagine that they are thinking very hip thoughts, but it is this imagination, and the actions that arise from it, that determine hip’s course. Hip is a romantic idea, not a catalog of facts. The accounts of lives and events in this book are intended to capture these myths, noting when necessary how far they stray from the facts. Hip’s truths are literary but not always literal.
I’ve chosen to tell this history through public figures not because they are hipper than other people—no one who has seen Bob Dylan blow “Hava Nagila” on the Lubavitcher Hasidim telethon can believe in the infallibility of celebrities—but because the public perception of their hipness affects so many people at once. The celebrities are just focal points for broader phenomena. Hip: The History is about the waves that ripple through the big pond, not the composition of the stone that causes the wave. In truth, many of these celebrated figures led melancholy and isolated lives—hip to think about, but tough for those who lived them. Someday more advanced pharmacology may make hip obsolete. In the meantime, there is perhaps just one way to reconcile Neal Cassady’s decision to freeze to death beside a railroad track in Mexico with the actions of those who followed him on the road, drawn by their image of him as a “wild, yea-saying overburst of American joy”—and that is to note that hip’s history, and the world we live in, proceeds from that misperception, not from the reality of Mexican cold.
Like other histories, this book indulges in the cheat of hindsight. In judging what is hip and what is not, I’ve sided with things that shaped or predicted whatever came next. This is admittedly a form of cherry picking: nothing is easier than identifying prescience in the past. Thus, Keith Butler, the Brit folkie who screamed “Judas!” when Dylan played electric at a 1966 concert in Manchester, does not have a place in this book, but Jim Carroll—who can be heard on the Velvet Underground’s Live at Max’s Kansas City asking, “Is that a down? What is it? A Tuinal? Give me it immediately”—will forever belong in hip’s lore. History abandoned the acoustic purists, but smiled on urban poets with an appetite for pills. And so, therefore, did hip.
But enough about other people. After seeing that your name is not in the index, how are you supposed to proceed? With a grudge. After all, hip is a competitive sport. The proper reason to read this book is for the satisfaction of knowing that your hipness is hipper than whatever knowledge passeth herein. Surely the book calls for no less. It is in the nature of hip that it is always tearing down shibboleths, including its own, in order to bring more noise. This is why it endures, why it is important. It is always seeking a smarter way. So if you must, raise a glass of Hatorade. I would. But please remember the words of Ice-T, and don’t hate the player, hate the game.
As for me, you will not find my name in the index, either. There is something inescapably nerdy about compiling a history of hip. My kind can only console ourselves, like my former colleague singled out in the epigraph above, that we are with Lou Reed in his dreams. As the saying goes, those who can, do. Those who can’t…well, you know the rest. And if you are riding the subway, pleasant dreams.