What is hip?

Modern marketing is thoroughly steeped in notions of hip (finding it, co-opting it, synthesizing it) but we've never settled on a sturdy definition of it. We've passively adopted a juridical "I know it when I see it" heuristic, which often leads us to mistake surface attributes for True Hip. Particular attributions of hipness will always be subjective, but a basic definition might provide a useful starting point for many discussions and help to avoid some of the worst travesties.

So as a starting point for that starting point, here's a gloss on some key extracts from Hip:The History, John Leland's excellent (though not without its critics) historical survey of hip:

Clarence Major, in his study Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, traces the origins of hip to the Wolof verb hepi ("to see") or hipi ("to open one's eyes")...So from the linguistic start, hip is a term of enlightenment, cultivated by slaves from the West African nations of Senegal and coastal Gambia.

What hipsters see with their wide-open eyes is that mainstream culture is a confidence trick designed to get individuals to take on roles that are not really in their best interests and that limit their freedom. (Leland never says this, but I think it's a fair and useful extension of his analysis.)

At its most pure, hip is utterly mongrel. Which is to say, purism has no place in hip...It is inclusive, open. When people try to get too pure about it, hip leaves the building.

Once rules begin to form, power accretes. Hip fears and despises institutionalized power, so the truly hip are always ready to change even if it means leaving their rule-bound acolytes behind, like Miles Davis going pop in the 80's or Bob Dylan's successive embraces of electric guitars (Newport, 1965) and lingerie (Victoria's Secret, 2004).

If hip is a form of rebellion--or at least a show of rebellion--it should want something. Its desires are America's other appetite, not for wealth but for autonomy. It is a common folk's grab at rich folks' freedom--the purest form of which is freedom from the demands of money.

Hip is not revolutionary despite its sometimes rough and angry surface, its opposition to the mainstream and the way it is often (mis)used in marketing. Hip actually likes money and would never survive if there weren't always outsiders willing to pay to get in. But like Nietzsche's christianity, hip is only a pose of power adopted by the powerless, essentially no more than a stylish and defiant "NO", which is one reason why "hip company" is always going to be kind of an oxymoron. Successful companies, by definition, have power and are most certainly not trying to free you from the demands of money.

Companies can, however, partake of hipness, not by hiring underground directors or getting artists to do wacky viral videos, but by proving that they:

• Believe in and support individual freedom
• Question any received wisdom or standard way of doing things
• Have a sense of humor and flexibility about themselves and their identity
• Know that having stuff, even the stuff they sell, is not the most important thing in the world

All of which simply confirms my 8-year-old intuition (shared by both Leland and Nike) that the hippest, most happening character on this or any other planet is Bugs Bunny.

Comments

[Nishad]

Russell recently got his readers to define cool. Maybe you should try the same with hip. I think it's going to be a bit more difficult to define.

[Camiel]

There's something about things considered hip. They are always expected to be temporary fads, but people seem to be alright with that in advance. The first thing popping up in my mind is H&M, which - apart from the humor - matches all criteria.

I'd rather consider Bugs Bunny cool than hip, by the way.

[Jeffre Jackson]

Both cool and hip are fuzzy concepts, so distinctions and definitions are always going to be questionable. That's why I think it's important to gauge the usefulness (does it clarify your thinking and help you to come up with new ideas and applications?) of the definition as well as its correlation with what most people think.
I think that Leland's distinction between hip and cool usefully disentangles the two words into hip (essentially an insight into the nature of mainstream culture) and cool (a stylish sang froid). I know this isn't the way many people use the word cool, but again, I think the way most people use it is not especially useful.
So I'd say that Bugs is both hip and cool and that while "Who gives a fuck?" is a clever definition of cool, it's less useful than it might be because it focuses only on the aspect of not caring what other people think.
But I agree with you Nishad that it would be interesting to hear how people distinguish between the two words, so I'll write that post right now.