Saul, S. (2003).

Birth of the Cool: the early career of the hipster

- Being hip, Andrew ross notes, began with a kind of refusal, a negotiated relation to
black culture and mass culture that most often designated the latter as white,
middlebrow, and deadingly devoid of provocation
o But hipsterism was more than a efiant attitude struck against mass culture in
line with sociological worries about the soul-crushing pressures of conformity
o But hipsterism was more than a defiant attitude struck against mass culture
in line with sociological worries about the soul-crushing pressures of
conformity
o Hipsters did not simply recoil from the culture at large, but tried to assimilate
its most useful elemetns
- The appeal fo this aesthetic was tied to: the public acts of Af-am defiance that
galvanised the CRM; and the widespread concnern with the power of social norms—
everything tha came together in that very 1950s word “conformity”.
- The hipsters cool pose was part of this movement-related social dissonance, a
posture to the world that defied easy interpretation and so begged to be deciphered
- The hipster was the civil rights movmement’s less charitable double, the face of a
defiance that did not unconditionally turn the other cheek
- The second trend—the questioning of conformity—had led, by the late 50s, to a
burgeoning genre of “social problem” of literature, which weighed how cultural
norms imprisoned the individual psyche
- The hipster was born at a crossroads—at the palce where the CRM met these works
of social criticism
- The hipster was someone who lived by his wits and not by cultural conveitons, and
who took inspiration from an art form (jazz) that was populist but not popular
- The Down Beat readership fell largely inot the demographic category addressed by
the lonely crowd, the status seekers, and growing up absurd—new men of the
service ecnomoy, working for a salry but aspiring ot a life that was not batch-
processed
- This chapter traces the first arc in the hipster’s career, starting with his origins in the
swing and bebop eras, when etertainers and DJs began to experiment with jive and
its playful ironies

Jive Talking: Hip onstage and on the Airwaves

- Cab Calloway’s Hespter’s Dictionary was designed to commericalise the dialect that
was gibberish to untrained ears
- The jive of Calloway and others was exported in the late forties to an even large
mass audience by a pack of hep-talking DJs—some white, some black—who found a
new niche in urban locals across the country
- Between 1946-1954, radios mushroomed, independent in their tastes, giving more
play to the four hundred record companies that had been ofunded in the 1940s
- The efforts of radio pioneers helped spread the gospel of jive far from its origins in
black urban crucibles like Harlem and Chicago’s South Side

The first white negro: Mezz Mezzrow, Bebop and the Art of Signifiying
 - Mezzrow was a countercultural pioneer who refashioned the story of the slumming
bohemian
- The books influence in the postwar period should not be underestimated
- Ginsberg testified that reading Mezzrow’s book for him was “the first signal into
white culture of the underground black, hip culture that preexisted before my own
generation”
- Mezzrow believed he had soaked up not only the culture that sustained the blues
but also some extra melanin as well
- Mezzrow was na aficionado of the ‘primitive’—a blues spirit that he paraphrased as:

o “life is good, its great ot be alive. That was was new orelans was really saying,
it was a celebration of life.
- The pioneers of bebop were a black brotherhood who palyed music according to
still-unwritten rules
- Being ‘hip’ was to practice a form of “Crazeology”: one codified a type of knowledge
that while institutionally unaccredited, tapped hidden mental reserved
- The lifestyle could appeal to those blacks who were excluded from the middle class
by Jim Crow conveitons and cultural snobbery, or it could appeal to those—like
Mezzrow, Beats—who disparaged “making it” as “selling out” and who looked to
black subcultures for intense personal transifugraiton.
- Mezzrow’s hunger for transcendental pleasure made him tone-deaf to the appeal of
the jazz styles that followed his own adopted New Orleans idiom
o He atakced swing, jump, and bebop as music that symptomatized it through
“tics” and “mania”

Analysis interminable? Early partisan reviews of the hipster

- While mezz Mezzrow was the first white negro in print, his cowriters Bernard Wolfe
can claim a similar distinction: first highbrow critic of the white Negro, first
intellectual to anatomise the hipster as a cluster of interacial longings and
psychosexual drives
- Wolfe was obsessed with the allure of subcultural solidarity and the value of
nonconformity in an unjust, underarchieving America.
- A much more introuging set of writings on bebop and the hipster culture came from
then-unknwon intellectual Anatole Broyard
o While Mezzrow built his literary career out of his claim of becoming black,
Bryoyard claimed, as a black author writing as an insider about black culture,
he succeeded in passing as white

Underground in the Late 1940s: Birth of the Cool and On the Road
- The hipster as a cultural figure did tend to remain underground in the alte 1940s and
early 1950s—a fact underscored by the belated recpiton of two landmarks of the
“cool” cultures, Miles Davis’s Birth of Cool and Keouac’s On the Road
o Both works were grounded in artisit cusbucltures of new York in the 40s
- On the Road reception as an untroubled tributed to youthful spontaneity did a
double disservice—to the black american swho were assumed to embody its spirit of
spontaneity and to Kerouac’s full literary achievement
- Miles Davis shredded many of the ficiotns of black life and culture that Kerouac
leaned on
o Davis’ career is the story of an artist who transofmred his aesthetic and self-
conception as a matter of principle, and who did so with such freshness,
charisma, and collborative brilliance that the rest of the culture followed him
in hot pursuit
- David borught a new genre of cool to the culture at large, even as he dramatically
turned away from the sound of the Nonet in favour of the more blues-inflected,
heavily improvised, and aggressive sound of his mid-fifties quintets.
o Gary Giddins: though davis rejected cool jazz, he came to personify jazz cool”.
o To which one might add: an idiom unto himself, yes, but also an idiom that
many perofrmers and listenres would try to adopt and speak as their own, as
the ventriloquism of cool became, in the late fifties, a cultural fixation