ePub The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (e-Duke books scholarly collection.) by T. J. Demos in Arts-Photography

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Hipness has been an indelible part of Americas intellectual and cultural landscape since the 1940s. But the question What is hip? remains a kind of cultural koan; equally intriguing and elusive.In Dig; Phil Ford argues that while hipsters have always used clothing; hairstyle; gesture; and slang to mark their distance from consensus culture; music has consistently been the primary means of resistance; the royal road to hip. Hipness suggests a particular kind of alienation from society--alienation due not to any specific political wrong but to something more radical; a clash of perception and consciousness. From the vantage of hipness; the dominant culture constitutes a system bent on excluding creativity; self-awareness; and self-expression. The hipsters project is thus to define himself against this system; to resist being stamped in its uniform; squarish mold. Ford explores radio shows; films; novels; poems; essays; jokes; and political manifestos; but argues that music more than any other form of expression has shaped the alienated hipsters identity. Indeed; for many avant-garde subcultures music is their raison d?tre. Hip intellectuals conceived of sound itself as a way of challenging meaning--that which is cognitive and abstract; timeless and placeless--with experience--that which is embodied; concrete and anchored in place and time. Through Charlie Parkers "Ornithology;" Ken Nordines "Sound Museum;" Bob Dylans "Ballad of a Thin Man;" and a range of other illuminating examples; Ford shows why and how music came to be at the center of hipness.Shedding new light on an enigmatic concept; Dig is essential reading for students and scholars of popular music and culture; as well as anyone fascinated by the counterculture movement of the mid-twentieth-century.Publication of this book was supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society; funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.