Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Hippest of Them All?
“Can you see him? Is he there, in the balcony?” The blind girl next to me in the choir routinely had me searching the crowd for her boyfriend—he had elevated being fashionably late to a hip art form. Okay, so she’s not entirely blind, just too vain to wear the glasses that would render her world in crisp outlines, choosing instead to focus on the clearer, nearer images, and depending on the kindness of those around her to describe the fuzzy, shadowy images beyond. It’s a wonder she never killed anyone driving around that way.
I scan the assembled crowd, skimming over the short and overweight and dark-haired, concentrating on finding the young man with the center-parted, perfectly feathered hair the color of wheat ready for harvest. Shorter than some, taller than most, with the broad shoulders and thin hips of a young man well-acquainted with the rigors of the weight room, he cuts an impressive figure when he enters a room. His wool and leather letterman’s jacket, white sailcloth pants and Puma sneakers mark him as an athlete, along with the rest of his circle of friends. Looking for him has become a habit for me. Hip demands an audience, and I am his.
Months later, the blind girlfriend is out of the picture and I find myself standing on the edge of an outdoor pool, shivering in the chilly June breeze. The Oregon day is deceptively sunny. I am anchored to the spot by the obligation of holding his class ring while he dives into the razor sharp frigidness of the pale green unheated water. He is the only one of a hundred of us who braves the pool. Doing what others only briefly think about doing is what he is all about. The simple request, “Hey, will you hold my ring?” seems pretty straightforward, but it contains ambiguous code which demands, “Notice me!” and implies, “You’re going to spend the rest of your life watching me do things my way.” His language is hip—studiously cloaking the real message from the outside world.
He serenades me with a commercial jingle for Dr. Pepper, dancing ahead of me, not caring what those who look on think of his singing and dancing skills. He will never win any fine arts competition, but he steals my heart by refusing to take himself too seriously. Eventually, we find ourselves in a candlelit church and with the exchange of rings and the simple words, “I do,” he is transformed from the carefree boy who sings, “I’m a Pepper, you’re a Pepper, he’s a Pepper, she’s a Pepper. Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too?” Who is he now? He is about to find out.
He brings his firstborn son home. He will do nothing for the next twenty years without considering the impact on this one. This birth (and the two that come later) is the catalyst for multiple reinventions of the man. The first comes within the year.
He announces he is going to go back to school. He cannot bear the thought of assuming the family carpet cleaning business. He is husband/father/student. Every role defines him, and he is true to himself in excelling at every one. A marginal student in high school, he distinguishes himself by earning a place in the University’s Academic Hall of Fame. He gently breaks the news to his own father that he has chosen a different path. He will not be a carpet cleaner. He will not embrace the status quo. He will be his own man. The family business will be no more.
He finds that the work he does occupies time and provides for his family, but it is not who he is. Honors and promotions stoke his ego and ease financial burdens, but they do not complete him. He looks for ways to honor the essence of who he is and finds that coaching his kids’ sports teams gives him the opportunity he craves to develop knowledge and share it with a select few. He becomes not a businessman who coaches in his spare time; rather he is a coach who finds time to be a businessman. “This goes towards my ‘dad of the year’ award, right?” becomes a frequent refrain. I know what he means. It’s not really about being the best coach; it’s about being the best dad.
He knows something the other baseball coaches do not know: you can take a ragtag bunch of mediocre players and form them into a winning team, not by depending on their skill or perfect mechanics, but by strategizing the plays. He wins countless games against superior teams with this knowledge. I watch him call plays from the third base line with a combination of signals and code phrases he taught to his players. It is a thing of beauty to those who know the code and a source of frustration to those who have yet to crack it. Who would have ever guessed that America’s favorite pastime could be so hip?
“Dude! We were like truckin’ dude down that hill, dude, like so fast, Dude! I mean, dude, it was, dude, unreal! DUDE!” The boy’s verbal skills were neatly matched by his social skills. The man laughingly counted “dpm’s” and growled “Kris—go home!” when he overstayed his welcome. But when the troubled kid who had no father was kicked out of the house by his overwhelmed mother, this man took him in. He showed the kid how to consider his options, make a clean break with his past, see potential in himself. By the time the boy returned to his mother’s home, the “dudes per minute” count and growled phrases about going home had worked their magic, communicating love and acceptance to one who had experienced very little of that. He doesn’t just talk the talk of helping others, he walks the walk. Other people don’t understand this. Sometimes being this hip is hard.
He wants a cabin. He dreams of mountains, and logs, and heavy equipment. It must be a remote place, built with his own hands. He will be a cabin builder, and his creation will be an extension of who he is. It would be much easier to buy one that already exists, but that would be at odds with his purposes in pursuing this dream. In pouring concrete, and stacking logs, and installing windows, and dealing with building inspectors and all the other minutiae of a project of this magnitude, he is afforded the opportunity to once again gain knowledge that only a select few have, and also to interminably suspend himself in the present time. Once the project is begun, there is no turning back. The pace of the project, coupled with the painstaking process of learning as he goes along, seem to ensure that the future of “when the cabin is complete” will never arrive. Being thoroughly comfortable living in the present, enjoying the process instead of demanding the resolution, is hip. When he puts on his “man pants” and retreats to “man land” he is on the road he calls “living the dream”. It is as though Walt Whitman was speaking directly to his soul in his poem Song of Myself when he penned, “Not I—not any one else, can travel that road for you, / You must travel it for yourself. / It is not far—it is within reach; / Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know; / Perhaps it is every where on water and on land” (46.1207-1211). Dreaming the dream is commonplace; living the dream is hip.
His name is Randy, and he is the one person in my life that most closely personifies this maddeningly ambiguous term we are studying this semester, called “hip”.
If “hip” is the reinvention of self as an expression of individualism without regard for the past or the future, then Randy is the picture of hip. In his book, Hip: The History, John Leland argues, “This promise of reinvention—that we are not bound by our pasts—is a core current of hip” (31). He goes on to say that it was “the gospel of individualism that was central to hipsters to come” (Leland 44). When you have reinvention married to the expression of individualism, you get hip. Reinvention in the absence of the expression of individualism is just copycat-ism. Over the course of many years, I have seen varied incarnations of Randy: carefree youth, faithful spouse, father, student, coach, businessman, mentor, dreamer, builder. It’s not so much the fact that he has been called on to fulfill different roles that makes him hip—lots of people do that. His hipness is born of the intensity and focus with which he dedicates himself to his various roles and his ability to live in the moment. He doesn’t just complete the actions; he becomes what he does. When Leland says, “hip germinated in the off hours” (p 46), he paints a picture of a person who indulges their true identity in the hours spent away from the world of work. Randy may be a businessman by occupation, but he finds his identity in being a husband, father, coach, mentor, dreamer and builder. Business is what he does; the other things are what he is.
Hip involves knowledge and awareness not commonly held, though shared by some within an exclusive circle. According to John Leland, “[hip’s] rejection of conventional wisdom is a reflection on convention, not wisdom” (49). He goes on to say that “enlightenment involves stripping away sophistication, not adding to it” (Leland 49). Randy demonstrated both of these ideas in his approach to baseball, rejecting some more conventional approaches to coaching, but embracing wisdom that allowed him to put the special knowledge he had attained to his best advantage, all while keeping it as much about the basics as possible. The exclusive circle within which he shared his special knowledge was the team he was coaching at the time, and assistant coaches he was mentoring.
Paired with this “knowing” or enlightenment is the invention of slang terms or the use of language to mean something other than the definition dictated by the dictionary. The language of hip involves both humor and ambiguity and according to John Leland, “verbal riffing wants an audience that doesn’t get it as much as one that does” (24). When Randy first grinned and casually said to me, “That’s about 40 dpm’s”, the reference to the oft-repeated word sailed completely over Kris’s head. Eventually, Kris decoded that message, and it became a favorite joke within our family. Though most people would be offended by having “Kris–go home!” growled in their faces, our friend came to understand that that particular message included an invitation to return another time. Hip language serves a dual purpose: to communicate with those who are “in the know,” as well as to exclude those who are “out of it.”
So, can anybody be hip? Or is hipness limited to a select segment of the population? Leland contends that hip is the territory of young people because “they have the least invested in the status quo” (22) and that while embracing new technology is easily done by the young, older people are more likely to resist change and “get corny” (61). This is where Leland and I part company. I don’t believe that hipness is tied to a particular age group; it is more closely tied to state of mind than state of body. As a matter of fact, I would argue that if it is hip to reinvent oneself as an expression of individual identity, then the older a person is and the more entrenched they are in the status quo, the greater the impact of a total re-make of identity. Perhaps the potential for hipness actually increases with age.
Just when you think you have a handle on hip, you find you don’t. It defies concrete definition and dwells in a place of subjectivity. Probably, the soul group, Tower of Power, said it best in their 1973 song called “What is Hip?” when they crooned: “Hipness is—what it is! / And sometimes hipness is / What it ain’t!” (qtd in Leland 4). Hipness is a lifestyle, the essence of the man who is hip. It looks different on each person. Hip is a circular reference that refuses to be resolved into a nice neat package…but you will know it when you see it.
Works Cited
Leland, John. Hip: The History.
New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900. N. Pag. Bartleby.com, 1999. Web. 18 February 2011.
