Hipformity

I wish to descend in the social scale. High society is low society. I am a social climber climbing downward And the descent is difficult. The Upper Middle Class Ideal is for the birds but the birds have no use for it having their own kind of pecking order.

-Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Junkman's Obligato-


Rebellions and revolutions seem to be self-betraying. The rebellion against middle class proprieties, moralities and repression of consensual behavior that was the Beat movement tried to embrace what they saw as the greater freedom and dignity of working class people and particularly Black people.

In his 1956 essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster, Norman Mailer defined the hipster as a philosophical psychopath and urban adventurer, who has adopted elements from black culture and could be called "a White Negro". To become a hipster is a conscious choice for members of the intellectual élite.

It wasn’t long before Ferlinghetti began to notice that this new counter culture was generating ten thousand identical coffee houses filled with a million patrons identically dressed and all talking and acting the same hip way. A new pecking order had emerged and to be hip was a thing to be climbed toward through careful attention to dress, speech patterns, musical interests and topics of discussion.

It wasn’t long before mainstream culture was able to sell you everything you needed to seem to have dropped out. Because the phantom caravan of hipness has returned to the middle class ideal it started out to deny, it requires conformity, punishes dissent and mocks the outsider. We are hip because we listen to the most popular music and wear the correct although ever changing uniform. Social climbing by chasing the ephemeral, we are hip through our narcissistic obsessions, our endless pursuit of entertainment and of course our youth. Thus as we age and become increasing frantic that we are no longer as hip, we spend more money on hipness accessories.

We use terms like Edgy, hip, and “with it” as though they expressed some ineffable quality other than what they really mean: I’ve purchased products that identify me with a certain group of people who through watching each other’s purchases and styles closely for clues, adopt the air of a rebelliously independent elite. It’s an endless cycle that always ends in despair, unless of course, we rebel and drop out. . . . . .