Hip: The History (P.S.)

Hip: The History is the story of how American pop culture has evolved throughout the twentieth century to its current position as world cultural touchstone. How did hip become such an obsession? From sex and music to fashion and commerce, John Leland tracks the arc of ideas as they move from subterranean Bohemia to Madison Avenue and back again. Hip: The History examines how hip has helped shape -- and continues to influence -- America's view of itself, and provides an incisive account of hip's quest for authenticity.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Customer Reviews:

Quite A Ride

By M. Gladd - November 3, 2004

This book takes the reader on a remarkable journey from 17th century plantations to 21st century Williamsburg, Brooklyn. On route, we meet America's greatest hipsters- people who used language and manipulated the forces around them to transform society, from Mark Twain to Muhammed Ali, from Charlie Parker to Richard Hell. Leland draws a family tree linking the most influential cuktural movements across generations, detailing not only how the unique American experience begat our cultural icons, but how, in turn, those enlightened individuals have shaped the world around them, our world.

"Hip: A History" is sufficiently thorough and analytical to read like a textbook of American cultural history. But its much more than that. Leland's narratives put us right in the middle of some of the most provocative scenes: minstrel shows, the beats, bebops, early hip-hop and grafetti art, to name a few. You may not always agree with Leland about what is hip; that's part of the fun... read more

DK

By A. Keller "DK" - January 27, 2005

In Hip: The History Leland offers up nothing less than an alternate history of the development and importance of American pop culture to understanding America as a whole. In doing so he makes us rethink the familiar (Bugs Bunny, Miles Davis, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman) in light of the common thread of "hip," which he refuses to define too simply. At the heart of the book is an attempt to rethink the complex interplay of black and white culture throughout American history, its effect on the arts, commerce, and background noise of our lives. Leland does not overlook the destructiveness of this story in the history of America, but he's out to show how productive the tensions have been as well. And it's not the only story he has to tell: the book sheds light equally on writers in the nineteenth century (Emerson and Thoreau among them), musicians in the early, middle and late twentieth, computer geeks in the last twenty years, and, of course, the... read more

Be there....

By Gordon Fitch - October 16, 2004

Clearly, those who say don't know and those who know don't

say; if you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know; you might

as well be loading mercury with a pitchfork. And yet there

is something called hip, and it seems to have a story.

_Hip:_The_History_, by John Leland, takes a shot at it, even

if it can't be told.

Right at the beginning, then, Leland has this fairly serious

problem which is yet part of his story, and maybe even an

assistant; and that is finding the definition of _hip_. (You

can't tell the players without a program.) He earnestly

derives the word from Wolof etymons meaning "to know" or "to

open one's eyes"; but clearly it's not ordinary knowledge of

the sort which comes from experience, or the traditions conveyed

by elders, or from assiduous study. "Hep" or "hip" was at

first a word used by Negro slaves to denote... read more

AVAILABILITY
Merchant	Format	Price
Amazon US	Paperback	$2.44 - $14.99
eBooks.com	Digital (PDF)	$10.99
BookByte	Paperback	$7.27
eCampus	Paperback	~~$11.47~~ discount!