(Originally published June 6, 2009)
1995, Age 23. “What Is Hip?” by Tower of Power, from the album Tower of Power.
Let’s begin with first principles, things that we can all agree on; those truths that are beyond all dispute and the foundation of what reasonable people believe.
Firstly, being a musician is the hippest thing a person can do, vocationally or otherwise. Now, while there are exceptions to this truism, the general principle still holds. It may be true that Philip Marlowe is hipper than a violist in the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra, but private detectives outside of the world of fiction are generally more poorly dressed and exhibit less sardonic wit. James Bond has a higher cool quotient than the average 7th grade bassoonist but again . . . we’re dealing in fiction there. While sports stars are (rather inexplicably to me) held in high regard in our culture, you’re much more likely to see a hip 50-year-old guitarist than a hip 50-year-old running back.
Next, we should make sure our terms are well-defined.
I’ve already muddied the waters a little by mixing two different, though closely related, terms: hip & cool. Hip, as has been noted by John Leland and other writers, has something to do with enlightenment. It may even relate to a West African word (Wolof, according to Leland) meaning “to have one’s eyes open.” Cool, on the other hand, denotes a detachment from strong emotional involvement. In my mind it is closely related to black musicians of the forties and fifties who were producing works of exceptional quality and insight, only to be treated as 2nd class citizens in the culture at large. Their public face was cool, whatever their feelings about their treatment were. Blue (and blues) is the color of cool, the very opposite of “hot under the collar,” i.e., “red-necked.”
In practical terms, at least as far as music is concerned, the two terms are often used interchangeably, and rightfully so. Miles Davis’ music is some of the hippest there ever was. Each of Miles’ developments predicted a major shift in the music. But he is also responsible for midwifing The Cool. Hip is almost always cool, though they are not the same thing.
What hip does not mean is “good” or “excellent.” There are plenty of musicians who are technically excellent without being hip. Whoever didn’t get voted off the island this week on American Idol is probably a technically excellent singer. He or she is almost certainly not hip. I love Brahms’ First Symphony; but I doubt anyone will put up much of case for Johannes being a hipster. Hip is often excellent, but excellence is not hip’s essence.
So . . . what is hip? Or, for my purposes here, who are the hippest artists in music? Who are those artists that are not simply trend-setters, but musical seers? Who are those musicians who are agents of change and open the eyes of their fans? Who are the enlighteners, the musical lamas and yogi who point their listeners to yet unchartered corners of the musical map and say, “Go”? My opinions will not be particularly unique or unexpected, but here are my top five. And let me reiterate: these are my top five of “hip,” not my top five of all time.
Since his name has already been introduced, I guess I should start with the most obvious: Miles Davis. Miles is to hip what Abe Lincoln is to honest. If one were to begin a record collection with the sole purpose of collecting the hippest records of all time, it is hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be at least three or four of Miles’ records among them. The great thing about loving Miles’ is that you get the whole package: not only are 90% of his records timeless classics that were years ahead of their time, Miles himself is the epitome of cool. He is easily the most quotable jazz musician of all time. “Don’t call me a genius,” he once said, “just call me ‘Miles Davis.’” (On a related note, I would highly recommend Miles’ autobiography for anyone interested in music or American culture generally. It is an eminently readable book . . . unless you have a strong aversion to the word “motherfucker.”) His gravely whisper, his sleek sense of fashion, his brooding facial expression . . . Miles is the acme of hip.
Even his album titles are hip. Kind of Blue is the largest-selling jazz album of all time for good reason, but one suspects that more than one neophyte jazz fan has walked out of the record store with this disc because of the title alone. The record itself is flawless, with perhaps the greatest (not to mention hippest) ensemble in the history of the style: Miles himself, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Bill Evans (with Wynton Kelly replacing Evans on one track). Every track is a commentary on the blues (hence the title), and the blues are, of course, the psychic protoplasm out of which all things hip are made.
Kind of Blue, though his magnum opus, is not Miles’ last word on hip. Birth of the Cool (again . . . I hope someone got a fat Christmas bonus for that title), In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, On the Corner, etc. It’s almost impossible to go wrong with one of Davis’ records. My personal fave is probably Filles de Kilimanjaro, an under-appreciated record from his “transitional” period. Sending it over the edge is the cover, featuring Miles’ then-wife, Betty Davis (née Mabry), herself a pre-eminent hipster and future funk cult star who introduced Miles to Jimi Hendrix.
It might be equally impossible to imagine “hip” without Charlie Parker. His heroine addiction and early death make him something of a hipster saint/anti-hero, though not to me. Bird’s ability to transcend the expectations of his most ardent devotees may be his most admirable quality. I have written elsewhere of my love of his work with strings, which was rejected by fans and critics at the time it was released and after his death. Bird referred to these sessions as his personal favorites and for me at least, it is easy to see why. He was not bound by either critical expectations or public opinion. What is hipper than that?
Charlie Parker’s entire output was hip, of course. I have listened to the alto break on “A Night in Tunisia” several dozen times and think it nothing short of brilliant. “Now’s the Time” may be the very best solo ever played over a twelve-bar blues. The blistering runs on “Kim,” the tortured (and yes, drug-induced) melody on “Loverman” . . . it’s almost impossible to come away from Bird without at least a touch of enlightenment. For jazz fans of a certain age, Bird was the pinnacle of hip. Terry Southern wrote of two hipsters deciding what record to spin next. One suggests either Charlie Parker or Bartok. The other answers, “Bartok, man . . . where do you go after Bird?”
I was relatively late in my awareness of the genius of James Brown. Had I been ten years older, I would have grown up knowing just how “super bad” the Godfather was, but those of my age probably most associated Soul Brother #1 with Rocky IV, a movie that was only hip if you were ten years old. He was legendary, sure, and everyone knew “I Feel Good.” What you didn’t know about (necessarily) if you were born after 1970 was “Mother Popcorn,” and getting’ on the good foot, givin’ the drummer some, tellin’ Maceo he’s “got to blow,” being black and proud, etc. I didn’t even know who Maceo Parker was until I was in college, let alone Fred Wesley, Bootsy Collins, and all those funky drummers.
Well, for all of the uninitiated out there, let me hip you to the truth: there ain’t nobody bad like James Brown. There is a reason he is the most sampled artist in hip-hop. There is a reason T.O.P. is still diggin’ on J.B. Let’s be clear about this. If there were no James Brown, there would probably be no soul music; there would definitely be no funk. There would be neither Prince nor Parliament. No hip-hop. Nothing.
So what made the Hardest Working Man in Show Business the Hippest Working Man in Pop Music? Single-chord, riff-and-rhythm-based jams; punchy horns; chicken-scratch guitars; hard-grooving bass lines; and fat, fat, PHAT drums. Rapping before there was rap. Inexplicable grunts and indecipherable shouts of ecstasy punctuating every line. Then there was the dancing: spinning, ass-wiggling and foot-shuffling. And the clothes! Loud colors, tight pants and capes! J.B. took the blues and made them serve the rhythm. The result was greasy, southern-fried funk.
That last comment betrays a bias I have. I have a deeply-held conviction that about 95% of anything interesting in American music has its roots in the South. King may have been in Cincinnati, but James Brown was from Augusta, Georgia. Likewise, the Chess studios were on 2120 S. Michigan Ave. in Chicago, but Muddy Waters was from Rolling Fork, Mississippi.
I had heard the name “Muddy Waters” for years before I had ever actually heard a Muddy Waters record. I am young enough to have missed his “revival,” so most of my knowledge of him was limited to what I had heard from The Rolling Stones. Actually, most of my knowledge of the blues was second hand. In my early musical snobbery (something that seems endemic to youth), I believed blues to be inferior to jazz. Blues singers seemed like hillbillies compared to jazz musicians. I knew that jazz had its roots in the blues, but no one had suggested to me that Howlin’ Wolf was as fly as Sonny Rollins.
In college, two of my friends joined a blues band, partly to pay for school. They were mostly jazz players, so they had to immerse themselves very quickly in the music to keep up with what was expected on the band stand. I remember walking down two doors to their apartment one Saturday morning while they had Muddy’s Hard Again album on the stereo. They must have played the opening of “Mannish Boy” for me ten times in a row. They were particularly thrilled by the opening lines as Muddy sang, “Everything . . . everything . . . everything’s gonna be alright this morning’,” and Johnny Winter screamed back, “Yes I know!” There was a thickness in the sound that I hadn’t expected. To me, blues sounded like somebody’s grandpa picking away feebly on a ten-dollar guitar, but this was really powerful, sexual even. It was unexpected and vibrant. I had heard the term “electric blues,” surely, but to me that just meant they used electric guitars. This was something else. Even the singing was electric.
That record is still one of my favorites and I like this version of “Mannish Boy” better than the original. I know that sounds blasphemous to blues purists, but I can’t help it. Over the next couple of years I would “discover” the rest of the canon: “Can’t Be Satisified,” “Got My Mojo Workin’,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” etc.
Muddy Waters was hip in a way that almost no one else has been since. He had such an intrinsic sense of hip that anything he did became cool. I remember listening to an interview with his daughter who said he used to eat black walnut ice cream and drink grape soda-pop and thinking, “Man . . . I gotta get me some of that.” He is one of the progenitors of hip – his music, certainly, especially his voice, but also his sense of style, his cool demeanor . . . even his name for crying out loud! It would be harder to come up with a hipper moniker.
Steely Dan may have the hippest band name in pop music history, though, based as it is in a William Burroughs novel. (For those of you who don’t know the origins of the name, I will let you explore that one on your own. Suffice it to say that the story is a little less “PG” than I like for my blog.) The duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are slicker than most. Their blend of rock, R&B and jazz was more sophisticated than anything on radio at the time or, in my opinion, since.
I was introduced to “The Dan” in college, too, this time by my friend Marty. He was a senior saxophone major when I was a freshman. He walked into my practice room one day, uninvited, and asked, “You wanna go fly a kite?” I thought that must be a euphemism until I saw that he was, indeed, holding a brightly-colored nylon kite in his hand. So, I packed up my horn and we got in his car and drove across the street (yeah, I know – but it seemed like a long walk at the time) to the parking lot of the Coliseum at West Virginia University. He had a tape playing in his stereo and he said, “You like Steely Dan?” I told him I’d never of them and he informed me that all good musicians like Steely Dan. I guess that was all it took to convince me.
I think I was ready to dismiss them when I found out that the band was really just two guys and a whole bunch of session players. But then I looked at the names of those “session” players. Tom Scott. Lee Ritenour. Patti Austin. Joe Sample. Michael Brecker. Wayne Shorter. Wayne Shorter, for crying out loud! He had played with Miles in the 60’s and here he was, an established jazz presence at the height of the popularity of his band, Weather Report, doing session work on a rock album.
Steely Dan knows how to build a sophisticated groove; none of this silly little straight back beat for them. They open up room for solos – real solos – right in the middle of the song. But it may be the lyrics that send Becker and Fagan into the red on the hipness scale. Sly, esoteric and ironic in the extreme, half of the words are indecipherable and the other half are cryptic. It took me five years to realize they were singing, “The Cuervo Gold, the fine Columbian” on “Hey Nineteen.” They name-check bebop musicians, Chinese acupuncturists and avant-garde opera singers. Lyrics about the Guernsey Fair, drinking the German liqueur Kirschwasser from a shell and the Moonie enclave of Barrytown, NY, are mixed with themes concerning the darker side of human nature. This is rock-and-roll for the literate, but it still grooves hard.
I’d be interested to hear others’ “top fives” in this category, but if these wouldn’t make your top twenty, you better keep listening. Honorable mentions go to Prince, George Clinton and the P-Funk mob, Hank Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Elvis Presley (yes, Elvis Presley, jungle room and all). Oh, and the Tower of Power, who first made me ask, “What IS hip?”
1995, Age 23. “What Is Hip?” by Tower of Power, from the album Tower of Power.
Let’s begin with first principles, things that we can all agree on; those truths that are beyond all dispute and the foundation of what reasonable people believe.
Firstly, being a musician is the hippest thing a person can do, vocationally or otherwise. Now, while there are exceptions to this truism, the general principle still holds. It may be true that Philip Marlowe is hipper than a violist in the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra, but private detectives outside of the world of fiction are generally more poorly dressed and exhibit less sardonic wit. James Bond has a higher cool quotient than the average 7th grade bassoonist but again . . . we’re dealing in fiction there. While sports stars are (rather inexplicably to me) held in high regard in our culture, you’re much more likely to see a hip 50-year-old guitarist than a hip 50-year-old running back.
Next, we should make sure our terms are well-defined.
I’ve already muddied the waters a little by mixing two different, though closely related, terms: hip & cool. Hip, as has been noted by John Leland and other writers, has something to do with enlightenment. It may even relate to a West African word (Wolof, according to Leland) meaning “to have one’s eyes open.” Cool, on the other hand, denotes a detachment from strong emotional involvement. In my mind it is closely related to black musicians of the forties and fifties who were producing works of exceptional quality and insight, only to be treated as 2nd class citizens in the culture at large. Their public face was cool, whatever their feelings about their treatment were. Blue (and blues) is the color of cool, the very opposite of “hot under the collar,” i.e., “red-necked.”
In practical terms, at least as far as music is concerned, the two terms are often used interchangeably, and rightfully so. Miles Davis’ music is some of the hippest there ever was. Each of Miles’ developments predicted a major shift in the music. But he is also responsible for midwifing The Cool. Hip is almost always cool, though they are not the same thing.
What hip does not mean is “good” or “excellent.” There are plenty of musicians who are technically excellent without being hip. Whoever didn’t get voted off the island this week on American Idol is probably a technically excellent singer. He or she is almost certainly not hip. I love Brahms’ First Symphony; but I doubt anyone will put up much of case for Johannes being a hipster. Hip is often excellent, but excellence is not hip’s essence.
So . . . what is hip? Or, for my purposes here, who are the hippest artists in music? Who are those artists that are not simply trend-setters, but musical seers? Who are those musicians who are agents of change and open the eyes of their fans? Who are the enlighteners, the musical lamas and yogi who point their listeners to yet unchartered corners of the musical map and say, “Go”? My opinions will not be particularly unique or unexpected, but here are my top five. And let me reiterate: these are my top five of “hip,” not my top five of all time.
Since his name has already been introduced, I guess I should start with the most obvious: Miles Davis. Miles is to hip what Abe Lincoln is to honest. If one were to begin a record collection with the sole purpose of collecting the hippest records of all time, it is hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be at least three or four of Miles’ records among them. The great thing about loving Miles’ is that you get the whole package: not only are 90% of his records timeless classics that were years ahead of their time, Miles himself is the epitome of cool. He is easily the most quotable jazz musician of all time. “Don’t call me a genius,” he once said, “just call me ‘Miles Davis.’” (On a related note, I would highly recommend Miles’ autobiography for anyone interested in music or American culture generally. It is an eminently readable book . . . unless you have a strong aversion to the word “motherfucker.”) His gravely whisper, his sleek sense of fashion, his brooding facial expression . . . Miles is the acme of hip.
Even his album titles are hip. Kind of Blue is the largest-selling jazz album of all time for good reason, but one suspects that more than one neophyte jazz fan has walked out of the record store with this disc because of the title alone. The record itself is flawless, with perhaps the greatest (not to mention hippest) ensemble in the history of the style: Miles himself, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Bill Evans (with Wynton Kelly replacing Evans on one track). Every track is a commentary on the blues (hence the title), and the blues are, of course, the psychic protoplasm out of which all things hip are made.
Kind of Blue, though his magnum opus, is not Miles’ last word on hip. Birth of the Cool (again . . . I hope someone got a fat Christmas bonus for that title), In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, On the Corner, etc. It’s almost impossible to go wrong with one of Davis’ records. My personal fave is probably Filles de Kilimanjaro, an under-appreciated record from his “transitional” period. Sending it over the edge is the cover, featuring Miles’ then-wife, Betty Davis (née Mabry), herself a pre-eminent hipster and future funk cult star who introduced Miles to Jimi Hendrix.
It might be equally impossible to imagine “hip” without Charlie Parker. His heroine addiction and early death make him something of a hipster saint/anti-hero, though not to me. Bird’s ability to transcend the expectations of his most ardent devotees may be his most admirable quality. I have written elsewhere of my love of his work with strings, which was rejected by fans and critics at the time it was released and after his death. Bird referred to these sessions as his personal favorites and for me at least, it is easy to see why. He was not bound by either critical expectations or public opinion. What is hipper than that?
Charlie Parker’s entire output was hip, of course. I have listened to the alto break on “A Night in Tunisia” several dozen times and think it nothing short of brilliant. “Now’s the Time” may be the very best solo ever played over a twelve-bar blues. The blistering runs on “Kim,” the tortured (and yes, drug-induced) melody on “Loverman” . . . it’s almost impossible to come away from Bird without at least a touch of enlightenment. For jazz fans of a certain age, Bird was the pinnacle of hip. Terry Southern wrote of two hipsters deciding what record to spin next. One suggests either Charlie Parker or Bartok. The other answers, “Bartok, man . . . where do you go after Bird?”
I was relatively late in my awareness of the genius of James Brown. Had I been ten years older, I would have grown up knowing just how “super bad” the Godfather was, but those of my age probably most associated Soul Brother #1 with Rocky IV, a movie that was only hip if you were ten years old. He was legendary, sure, and everyone knew “I Feel Good.” What you didn’t know about (necessarily) if you were born after 1970 was “Mother Popcorn,” and getting’ on the good foot, givin’ the drummer some, tellin’ Maceo he’s “got to blow,” being black and proud, etc. I didn’t even know who Maceo Parker was until I was in college, let alone Fred Wesley, Bootsy Collins, and all those funky drummers.
Well, for all of the uninitiated out there, let me hip you to the truth: there ain’t nobody bad like James Brown. There is a reason he is the most sampled artist in hip-hop. There is a reason T.O.P. is still diggin’ on J.B. Let’s be clear about this. If there were no James Brown, there would probably be no soul music; there would definitely be no funk. There would be neither Prince nor Parliament. No hip-hop. Nothing.
So what made the Hardest Working Man in Show Business the Hippest Working Man in Pop Music? Single-chord, riff-and-rhythm-based jams; punchy horns; chicken-scratch guitars; hard-grooving bass lines; and fat, fat, PHAT drums. Rapping before there was rap. Inexplicable grunts and indecipherable shouts of ecstasy punctuating every line. Then there was the dancing: spinning, ass-wiggling and foot-shuffling. And the clothes! Loud colors, tight pants and capes! J.B. took the blues and made them serve the rhythm. The result was greasy, southern-fried funk.
That last comment betrays a bias I have. I have a deeply-held conviction that about 95% of anything interesting in American music has its roots in the South. King may have been in Cincinnati, but James Brown was from Augusta, Georgia. Likewise, the Chess studios were on 2120 S. Michigan Ave. in Chicago, but Muddy Waters was from Rolling Fork, Mississippi.
I had heard the name “Muddy Waters” for years before I had ever actually heard a Muddy Waters record. I am young enough to have missed his “revival,” so most of my knowledge of him was limited to what I had heard from The Rolling Stones. Actually, most of my knowledge of the blues was second hand. In my early musical snobbery (something that seems endemic to youth), I believed blues to be inferior to jazz. Blues singers seemed like hillbillies compared to jazz musicians. I knew that jazz had its roots in the blues, but no one had suggested to me that Howlin’ Wolf was as fly as Sonny Rollins.
In college, two of my friends joined a blues band, partly to pay for school. They were mostly jazz players, so they had to immerse themselves very quickly in the music to keep up with what was expected on the band stand. I remember walking down two doors to their apartment one Saturday morning while they had Muddy’s Hard Again album on the stereo. They must have played the opening of “Mannish Boy” for me ten times in a row. They were particularly thrilled by the opening lines as Muddy sang, “Everything . . . everything . . . everything’s gonna be alright this morning’,” and Johnny Winter screamed back, “Yes I know!” There was a thickness in the sound that I hadn’t expected. To me, blues sounded like somebody’s grandpa picking away feebly on a ten-dollar guitar, but this was really powerful, sexual even. It was unexpected and vibrant. I had heard the term “electric blues,” surely, but to me that just meant they used electric guitars. This was something else. Even the singing was electric.
That record is still one of my favorites and I like this version of “Mannish Boy” better than the original. I know that sounds blasphemous to blues purists, but I can’t help it. Over the next couple of years I would “discover” the rest of the canon: “Can’t Be Satisified,” “Got My Mojo Workin’,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” etc.
Muddy Waters was hip in a way that almost no one else has been since. He had such an intrinsic sense of hip that anything he did became cool. I remember listening to an interview with his daughter who said he used to eat black walnut ice cream and drink grape soda-pop and thinking, “Man . . . I gotta get me some of that.” He is one of the progenitors of hip – his music, certainly, especially his voice, but also his sense of style, his cool demeanor . . . even his name for crying out loud! It would be harder to come up with a hipper moniker.
Steely Dan may have the hippest band name in pop music history, though, based as it is in a William Burroughs novel. (For those of you who don’t know the origins of the name, I will let you explore that one on your own. Suffice it to say that the story is a little less “PG” than I like for my blog.) The duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are slicker than most. Their blend of rock, R&B and jazz was more sophisticated than anything on radio at the time or, in my opinion, since.
I was introduced to “The Dan” in college, too, this time by my friend Marty. He was a senior saxophone major when I was a freshman. He walked into my practice room one day, uninvited, and asked, “You wanna go fly a kite?” I thought that must be a euphemism until I saw that he was, indeed, holding a brightly-colored nylon kite in his hand. So, I packed up my horn and we got in his car and drove across the street (yeah, I know – but it seemed like a long walk at the time) to the parking lot of the Coliseum at West Virginia University. He had a tape playing in his stereo and he said, “You like Steely Dan?” I told him I’d never of them and he informed me that all good musicians like Steely Dan. I guess that was all it took to convince me.
I think I was ready to dismiss them when I found out that the band was really just two guys and a whole bunch of session players. But then I looked at the names of those “session” players. Tom Scott. Lee Ritenour. Patti Austin. Joe Sample. Michael Brecker. Wayne Shorter. Wayne Shorter, for crying out loud! He had played with Miles in the 60’s and here he was, an established jazz presence at the height of the popularity of his band, Weather Report, doing session work on a rock album.
Steely Dan knows how to build a sophisticated groove; none of this silly little straight back beat for them. They open up room for solos – real solos – right in the middle of the song. But it may be the lyrics that send Becker and Fagan into the red on the hipness scale. Sly, esoteric and ironic in the extreme, half of the words are indecipherable and the other half are cryptic. It took me five years to realize they were singing, “The Cuervo Gold, the fine Columbian” on “Hey Nineteen.” They name-check bebop musicians, Chinese acupuncturists and avant-garde opera singers. Lyrics about the Guernsey Fair, drinking the German liqueur Kirschwasser from a shell and the Moonie enclave of Barrytown, NY, are mixed with themes concerning the darker side of human nature. This is rock-and-roll for the literate, but it still grooves hard.
I’d be interested to hear others’ “top fives” in this category, but if these wouldn’t make your top twenty, you better keep listening. Honorable mentions go to Prince, George Clinton and the P-Funk mob, Hank Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Elvis Presley (yes, Elvis Presley, jungle room and all). Oh, and the Tower of Power, who first made me ask, “What IS hip?”
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