Screenshot from The Hudsucker Proxy (dir. Joel & Ethan Coen/1994)
În zilele astea, pline de proteste cu pet-uri izbite mecanic (şi cumva tribal-ridicol) de asfalt şi pancarte pline de inscripţii witty, e chiar hip să dai cu pietre-n hipsteri (unii chiar îşi merită soarta). Metaforic, desigur! Totuşi, în loc de a recurge la astfel de procedee (sub)urbane mai bine o incursiune veselă în istoria acestei noţiuni să facem... Veselă fiindcă termenul acesta scoate capul în lume pe la sfârşitul anilor 30, asociat muzicienilor şi amatorilor de jazz.
Iniţial se folosea particula hep (hepster), însă în momentul în care a devenit o etichetă şi pentru cunoscători şi pentru neaveniţi, jazz-iştii au schimbat macazul într-o tentativă de a se deosebi de pleavă. Mărturie stau vorbele pianistului Harry Gibson (via wiki): «At that time musicians used jive talk among themselves and many customers were picking up on it. One of these words was hep which described someone in the know. When lots of people started using hep, musicians changed to hip. I started calling people hipsters and greeted customers who dug the kind of jazz we were playing as 'all you hipsters.' Musicians at the club began calling me Harry the Hipster; so I wrote a new tune called 'Handsome Harry the Hipster.'"» Prin „at that time”, Gibson se referă la anii 1944-1945.
În orice caz, la fel ca în zilele de azi, definiţiile nu erau prea flatante. Citiţi (tot via wiki) şi nu vă faceţi cruce:
«The hipster world that Kerouac and Ginsberg drifted in and out of from the mid-1940s to the early-1950s was an amorphous movement without ideology, more a pose than an attitude; a way of "being" without attempting to explain why. Hipsters themselves were not about to supply explanations. Their language, limited as it was, was sufficiently obscure to defy translation into everyday speech. Their rejection of the commonplace was so complete that they could barely acknowledge reality. The measure of their withdrawal was their distrust of language. A word like cool could mean any of a number of contradictory things - its definition came not from the meaning of the word but from the emotion behind it and the accompanying non-verbal facial or body expressions. When hipsters did put together a coherent sentence, it was always prefaced with the word like as if to state at the onset that what would follow was probably an illusion. There was neither a future nor a past, only a present that existed on the existential wings of sound. A Charlie Parker bebop solo - that was the truth.
The hipster's world view was not divided between "free world" and "Communist bloc", and this too set it apart from the then-current orthodoxy. Hipster dualism, instead, transcended geopolitical lines in favor of levels of consciousness. The division was hip and square. Squares sought security and conned themselves into political acquiescence. Hipsters, hip to the bomb, sought the meaning of life and, expecting death, demanded it now. In the wigged-out, flipped-out, zonked-out hipster world, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Truman, McCarthy and Eisenhower shared one thing in common: they were squares...» (Marty Jezer - The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945 - 1960)
Ca să ajung la imaginea de mai sus, trebuie să spun că întâmplările (imaginate) din The Hudsucker Proxy sunt plasate în 1959, deci fix în finalul perioadei la care se referă Jezer. Ca nişte specialişti în a mixa cu sens informaţii şi fapte aparent fără legătură între ele, sunt convins că fraţii Coen erau cu lecturile la zi. Şi ca să speculez mai departe, spun că, în acelaşi an - 1959 - apare The Jazz Scene, volumul în care Hobsbawm şi-a adunat cronicile muzicale, jazz related, evident, publicate în tinereţe sub pseudonimul Francis Newton.
Îi pomeneşte şi el făcând trimitere la vocabularul utilizat (jive-talk/hipster-talk), pe care-l descrie drept „an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders”. Context în care folosirea cuvântului în filmul fraţilor Coen ca posibilă denumire pentru „cea mai nebunească invenţie din America”, Hula Hoop, e cum nu se poate mai nimerită. Pentru un obiect superficial, o jucărie tra-la-la, în fond cam hipsterească, hipster trebuia luat în calcul!
Iniţial se folosea particula hep (hepster), însă în momentul în care a devenit o etichetă şi pentru cunoscători şi pentru neaveniţi, jazz-iştii au schimbat macazul într-o tentativă de a se deosebi de pleavă. Mărturie stau vorbele pianistului Harry Gibson (via wiki): «At that time musicians used jive talk among themselves and many customers were picking up on it. One of these words was hep which described someone in the know. When lots of people started using hep, musicians changed to hip. I started calling people hipsters and greeted customers who dug the kind of jazz we were playing as 'all you hipsters.' Musicians at the club began calling me Harry the Hipster; so I wrote a new tune called 'Handsome Harry the Hipster.'"» Prin „at that time”, Gibson se referă la anii 1944-1945.
În orice caz, la fel ca în zilele de azi, definiţiile nu erau prea flatante. Citiţi (tot via wiki) şi nu vă faceţi cruce:
«The hipster world that Kerouac and Ginsberg drifted in and out of from the mid-1940s to the early-1950s was an amorphous movement without ideology, more a pose than an attitude; a way of "being" without attempting to explain why. Hipsters themselves were not about to supply explanations. Their language, limited as it was, was sufficiently obscure to defy translation into everyday speech. Their rejection of the commonplace was so complete that they could barely acknowledge reality. The measure of their withdrawal was their distrust of language. A word like cool could mean any of a number of contradictory things - its definition came not from the meaning of the word but from the emotion behind it and the accompanying non-verbal facial or body expressions. When hipsters did put together a coherent sentence, it was always prefaced with the word like as if to state at the onset that what would follow was probably an illusion. There was neither a future nor a past, only a present that existed on the existential wings of sound. A Charlie Parker bebop solo - that was the truth.
The hipster's world view was not divided between "free world" and "Communist bloc", and this too set it apart from the then-current orthodoxy. Hipster dualism, instead, transcended geopolitical lines in favor of levels of consciousness. The division was hip and square. Squares sought security and conned themselves into political acquiescence. Hipsters, hip to the bomb, sought the meaning of life and, expecting death, demanded it now. In the wigged-out, flipped-out, zonked-out hipster world, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Truman, McCarthy and Eisenhower shared one thing in common: they were squares...» (Marty Jezer - The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945 - 1960)
Ca să ajung la imaginea de mai sus, trebuie să spun că întâmplările (imaginate) din The Hudsucker Proxy sunt plasate în 1959, deci fix în finalul perioadei la care se referă Jezer. Ca nişte specialişti în a mixa cu sens informaţii şi fapte aparent fără legătură între ele, sunt convins că fraţii Coen erau cu lecturile la zi. Şi ca să speculez mai departe, spun că, în acelaşi an - 1959 - apare The Jazz Scene, volumul în care Hobsbawm şi-a adunat cronicile muzicale, jazz related, evident, publicate în tinereţe sub pseudonimul Francis Newton.
Îi pomeneşte şi el făcând trimitere la vocabularul utilizat (jive-talk/hipster-talk), pe care-l descrie drept „an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders”. Context în care folosirea cuvântului în filmul fraţilor Coen ca posibilă denumire pentru „cea mai nebunească invenţie din America”, Hula Hoop, e cum nu se poate mai nimerită. Pentru un obiect superficial, o jucărie tra-la-la, în fond cam hipsterească, hipster trebuia luat în calcul!