Essay 1 - The Hippest Person I Know:
I can hear the faint ringing of the bell when suddenly the high school’s double doors are shoved open wide and teenagers come pouring out in noisy groups. These kids all look the same in their too tight jeans and jelly rolls gathered about their middles, hair long and unwashed, with the look of indifference on their faces. As the clouds in the sky move to cover the sun, he appears in the shadows of the doorway, my teenage son Liam.
He makes his way across the parking lot like a character from a 1940’s pulp fiction film. He moves in two different speeds, one slow and careful, as each fiber and muscle of his body progresses with a specific reason. His dark eyes blanketed in thick lashes quickly take in his surroundings. His senses are heightened and they can detect the flaws in the people around him.
His strides are long and his hands are hidden in his pockets, as if he draws himself in tightly, to avoid the gossip, games, and most importantly the physical interaction with his peers. You can almost see him dressed in a long dark coat and fedora, but he is dressed like a modern day rebel, dark jeans, a dark t-shirt that bares the emblem of rock gods from decades before he was born, a music that speaks the truth to his soul. Liam’s clothes establish a young man that yearns for functionality and individualism over trends that come and go, one who looks put together, but stands out from the crowd in defiance over what the masses think is cool. Liam defines what has always been hip, the rebel, the nonconformist, and the unconventional. His glasses fit tight up against his face, but they do not mask the knowledge in his eyes. He is aware of how others see him but he has the self-assurance, and the enlightenment to not care.
As Liam gets into my car he says, “Hey Mom, how was your day,” always with his good manners on display. After I answer he says, “What’s for dinner?” I let him know that we are having dinner at Pizza Hut by ourselves tonight. “Cool” he says.
Once we arrive at the restaurant and after the waitress brings us our large pepperoni pizza, we each serve ourselves a slice of hot, gooey, greasy goodness; I start to explain to my son why I had lured him there. In my English class we are discussing John Leland’s book “Hip: The History,” and I wanted to talk about why I think Liam is the hippest person I know. He takes a brief pause from his pizza, he looks at me skeptically and says, “I’m not hip, you are the hippest person you know,” I ask him why he doesn’t think he’s hip. Liam says, “Because hip is cool, in, popular, fashionable, entertainment, the masses, and I’m none of these things.” I sit in silence for a moment just staring at him, curiously thinking about his modesty and his take on hip. Liam believes that hip is an external attribute someone has, I wonder if it’s the difference in our generations and the word hip has changed definitions since I was his age. I tell him I don’t think that hip is just a physical image, for me hip embodies a sense of knowledge and intellect. He shakes his long bangs out of his face and with a raised eyebrow says, “You’re crazy.”
Sensing that Liam had no interest in having a conversation about the word hip, I changed the subject and asked him how school was going. As he started talking about his calculus class and how they were, “working on logarithms and how this allows you to find the negative inverse of an exponent,” I watch him in awe as his mind works its way around complicated reasoning.
Suddenly I imagine the Pizza Hut filling with a smoky haze and I can smell rich black coffee brewing in the distance. I look over to my son and he is wearing a black turtleneck sweater, a beret, and in his hands he is holding a book by Jack Kerouac, “On The Road,” I remember Kerouac describing the book as, “An Official Log of the Hip Generation,” (13). Liam is like the Beatnik Generation, instead of contemplating just social issues, war, and the most desired cannabis plant, he is thinking about string theory and quantum mechanics. His knowledge is unassuming, he does not feel superiority over anyone, Liam’s mind just works differently than most, and this is what makes him hip to me. Jon Leland in “Hip: The History” argues that hip is not about intelligence, he says, “Hip is not genius” (9), and Leland contradicts himself when he says, “It (hip) is always seeking a smarter way” (3), that is what geniuses like Liam are doing, trying to find a “smarter way” to make the world a better place to live in.
As I try to connect Liam to Kerouac and the Beatniks I realize that he rejects some of their ideas, especially when it comes to drugs creating an escape from reality. Instead he embraces the world of video games. Like Leland says, “Hips central romance, the myth of reinvention, is a quintessential male fantasy” (87), Liam’s fantasy is the technological world of gaming. Video gaming is a predominately masculine world with a violent and sexually charged atmosphere. Men like Liam develop a separate identity from themselves by taking on the characters within the gaming world. By doing this he lives out his fantasies of being someone other than himself; a soldier, a race car driver, or even a professional sports player. Gaming gives him the safety to act out his aggressions and always get the girl, in the safety of his own room. This allows him to escape from the mundane reality of his own life. And then I was brought back to my own reality when Liam asks, “Are you done with dinner and ready to go?”
In the car and on our way home Liam receives a text from a friend, wanting to know if he wants to go to a party with him. In an esoteric language that is only truly understood by Liam and his peers, he text back in what I call, broken cell phone language, words that I can only assume to mean, “Dude, No.” Leland says, “Technology allowed whites and blacks to engage each other through culture without crossing paths in real life” (85). I think technology today does the same thing, instead of it being about race, young people can engage each other without ever being in the same room together. Liam and his friends are taking the language of hip today, and communicating to a larger audience, at a faster rate of speed. His culture is bonded together by their consumption of technology and circulation of their knowledge. Liam and his friends are delivering their message of hip to the whole world. This makes me wonder how America’s early intellectual’s words would have spread if they had the use of today’s technology.
Before we reach home Liam tells me he is learning about Henry David Thoreau in English class. The evolution of technology makes me think of Liam sitting around a table with notable isolationists like Thoreau and the Dali Lama discussing the greater meaning of enlightenment. Leland says, “In relative isolation, a small group of individuals, forsaking the general trends around them, give each other permission to do something new” (69). Thoreau was part of the Transcendentalist Movement. Liam talks about Walden and how his isolation in nature helped to find awareness in one’s self. The Dali Lama reflects in “Many Ways to Nirvana” by saying, “Through meditation one can gain a clearer awareness: a clearer picture of reality” (3). Liam on the other hand isolates himself from the physical interaction of the community around him only to share his ideas on self-assurance and self-truths with the world on the internet. While I believe Leland is right when he says, “Hip requires an audience” (8), I don’t think the size of that audience matters. My son Liam however is sharing his ideas in a format larger than Thoreau or the Dali Lama, his audience is the whole world.
Like Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson are men that Leland describes as “writers who set down the intellectual framework for hip, celebrating the individual and the nonconformist” (40). My son embodies these men; in their unorthodox way of thinking, like Walt Whitman says in “Song of Myself” “Nothing not God, is greater to one than one’s self” (36). The peer pressure of having a religious faith in our community could make one question their beliefs, but this does not affect Liam. He is true to himself and has the confidence to know he does not have to believe in a God as long as he believes in himself. Liam doesn’t feel as if he is completely unorthodox, but he fits somewhere in the middle between the norm and the freakish, he’s definitely not a sheep. Leland says, "hip operates in the joints and seams of a culture" (162), Liam lives between the cracks of society that defines hip.
While John Leland thinks, “nonconformity is a dated word. In today’s splintered pop culture, it is hard to imagine a norm that anyone might conform to; the very notion is unhip” (115). This “notion” may be “unhip,” but the masses are still conforming to whatever is deemed popular, where Liam is following the same path as Emerson and Whitman; defying the collective masses by being hip enough to not conform to societies pressures. Liam is an individualist, not afraid to march to his own drummer, and defy the demands of his peers. He does not hide behind what is in fashion in order to mask his individuality. Liam does not wear urban hip-hop clothing, cut his hair to match the long shag made popular by Justin Bieber, or listen to Lady Gaga. He has little interest in parties, random sexually experiences, or is he concerned with high school’s social hierarchy. Liam conforms to nothing leaving his interests wide open to everything that the world has to offer. This outspoken attitude towards conformity classifies Liam as hip.
As we pull up to our house I tell Liam that I’m not done with my questions on how he feels about hip, and I proceed to follow him into his room. He sits on the edge of his bed strumming on his black Gibson Les Paul electric guitar. I faintly recognize the song he is playing as a Metallica song made famous in the late 80’s.
I hear his voice deepen and his speech slows as he tells me about his favorite music. I envision a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth as his head tilts down towards his fingers watching himself play each chord; breathing next to him on his nightstand could be a two finger width of whiskey, neat, in a clear glass snifter. I feel as if I’ve been transported to a night club listening to one of the great blues and jazz guitarists like Lonnie Johnson or B.B. King speak to me. Singers and song writers who played the blues expressed their lifestyles, and the heartaches of others.
My son tells me why he listens to heavy metal and classical music. It’s not about the image either of these genres creates, it’s about how it makes him feel, how the music reaches into his soul and tells his story. Liam says, “The music I listen to reflects how I’m feeling each day.” He talks about the music he would like to create, and plays something that is a cross between hard hitting rock and the richer tones and harmonic sounds of classical music. It’s nothing like I’ve ever heard, it’s innovative, it’s fresh, it defines him, and it’s hip. Just like the blues and jazz musicians before him, he is trying to create a new movement to set himself apart from the mainstream of his generation. Liam’s music wants to enlighten society to the pressures and expectations they have put on him and his peers. Liam is not just another “White boy who stole the blues” (9), as Leland might suggest, and I disagree with Leland’s take on hip being about black or white. Music transcends race and gives us all a way to connect with one another. I’m brought back to the present by a skillful rendition of “Stairway to Heaven,” it makes me smile because I know Liam plays it to mock my generation, and as a sign to get lost.
I leave Liam’s room and sit at my desk with a better sense on how I define hip in the 21st century. My son is leading his generation towards a new sense of hip. His outward identity is both authentic and individual. His internal identity is one of a nonconformist, from the way he carries himself and his outlook on life. Liam possesses the knowledge, self assurance and enlightenment of America’s greatest thinkers, writers, and spiritual leaders. He lives out his fantasies by escaping not into the world of drugs, used by our hip historians, but through the world of video games. By utilizing other technologies popular in today’s culture, Liam uses an ambiguous, coded language; one only he and his friends can decipher. The music he listens to, and ultimately wants to create is used as a way of communicating his hipness to the world. Liam rejects the religious orthodoxy of our community, and instead worships his own self-truth. Ultimately Liam’s intellect sets him apart from the masses, and will bring about many changes in our nation’s future. All of these attributes are what defines hip to me, but even Leland says, “You decide what is hip and what is not” (8). There is no vote or score card created to tally what is hip for one person to another. However Liam says, “hip is a perception,” if this is true, only you have the self-awareness to decide what is hip.
Works Cited:
The Dalai Lama, His Holiness. Many Ways to Nirvana. Ed. Renuka Singh. New York: Penguin
Compass, 2004. Print.
Leland, John. Hip: The History. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004. Print.
Kerouac, Jack. On The Road. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Print.
Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself. 1819-1892. Web. 26 Jan. 2011.
