Wednesday, September 30, 2015 // The Statement
6B

I

t’s a Game Day in late September, and hoards of maize
and blue-tinged students are streaming down State
Street to the sounds of The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel

My Face.” But just as the University cements its place on
Playboy’s annual list of top party schools, it’s equally the
stomping grounds of the hipster — so much so that the town
garnered the dubious distinction of being the 15th most
hipster city in America.

So where is the hipster in Ann Arbor? Probably in a

restaurant. Nothing better encapsulates taste, that elusive
hipster currency, better than Ann Arbor restaurants. Freed
from its functional properties, the cuisine of a trendy small-
plates spot is a formalistic delight for the hipster. At once
appealing to sensual faculties, restaurants, which Ann Arbor
is abundant in (as well as cocktail bars, cafes and gourmet
grocery stores) also fulfill the intellectual desire to know
how the ingredients work, to observe ingredients perform as
they should, stripped from the corporate magic of chemicals
and preservatives. Restaurants are where the Ann Arbor
hipsters are.

Transparency is the name of the game in Ann Arbor’s

foodie culture. In Ann Arbor, you can buy juice from Babo
with just six or seven ingredients, all of which are organic
fruits and vegetables. At the farmer’s market, sellers move
their local, pesticide-free goods straight into the reusable
cotton totes of local Ann Arborites. On the menu at Mani
Osteria, a popular Italian small plates restaurant, the dishes
are named by ingredient, followed by a small description
of further ingredients. “Cauliflower Fritti: shallots, pickled
chile, bacon jam” is the antithesis of “Big Mac,” which
reveals nothing of its origins or its parts. In Ann Arbor, you
can eat ice cream that was made in front of you at Blank Slate
or check Lab’s tumblr to see where their cold brew coffee is
from.

Of course, transparency comes with a hefty price tag,

and seems marketed to its own (predominantly white)
demographic. And more so, authenticity and transparency
can become their own fetishes: Whole Foods sold Asparagus
Water’ (ingredients: asparagus, water) for $6 at a store
in Brentwood, California and a small bowl of bone broth
(ingredients: bones, water) can be purchased at Brodo
in Manhattan for $9. But this story of authenticity and
transparency dates back to times well before most of Ann
Arbor’s present day hipsters were born.

Where is the hipster from?

The term “hipster” first bubbled to the cultural surface

in the late 1930s, when jazz gained popularity in Harlem.
Musicians, artists and followers alike were dubbed “hepcat”
and their identity accrued the effortless aura of cool. In 1939,
the language of this identity was transcribed in the satirical
book, “The Hepster’s Dictionary of Jive” by Cab Calloway
(who, incidentally, became the first African-American to
publish a dictionary). The book is full of jazz world jargon,

conversational entries about munchies, women and music:
“peppermint candy (n): sweets following a reefer session
(use of weed creates a craving for sugar)”; “v-8 (n): a chick
who spurns company, is independent, is not amenable”; and
“armstrongs (n): musical notes in the upper register, high
trumpet notes.”

Much like “The Hipster Handbook” published in 2003,

Calloway’s guide does the curious job of thickening simple
slang into argot, withholding even as it discloses. Because
the crux of the book, its uninscribed entry, is that only a real
“square” would read a book to understand “jive” — how to be
a real one is the aporia of the text.

All Calloway will write is that a hepcat is “a guy who

knows all the answers, understands jive.”

How the hipster became white

This dictionary encapsulated the contradictions of

being a hepcat. After all, the hepcat was necessarily on the
uncodified fringes of the world, rejecting the old style of
swing for the bold new genre of jazz. Yet a nihilistic set of
postwar politics and literary intellectuals, who included Jack
Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, would soon create conditions
amenable to canonizing this subculture, and culling it from
its racial roots. But in order for this term to reach a new level
of prominence, the aesthetic hold of the hepcat-cum-hipster
needed to be expanded, transforming the Black musician
into a mythic figure who had taste for not only jazz and
chicks, but all of culture.

This strategy is most famously articulated by Norman

Mailer’s 1957 article “The White Negro.” In it, Mailer argues
that the political threat of death — its paranoid clamp on the
Black psyche — inspired the violent and visceral experience
of jazz, an art that short-circuited the “sophisticated
inhibitions of civilization” for the “obligatory pleasures of
the body,” writing that “in (the Black man’s) music he gave
voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage
and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp,
pinch, scream, and despair of his orgasm.”

In 2015, it’s impossible to overstate the discomfort of

reading an article like this, of watching Mailer organize
the aesthetics of jazz by his racist assumptions of Black
psychology, of seeing him brand the stereotype of primitive
Blackness under a guise of progressiveness. Yet it remains
important because it spells out how a section of Whites
co-opted the moral paradigm of the Black hepcat to navigate
their own postwar existentialist nightmare: “The hipster
had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and
for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.”
Within this moral paradigm, the hipster is an individualist
warrior: “Hip morality is to do what one feels whenever and
wherever it is possible, and — this is how the war of the Hip
and the Square begins.”

Even Ann Arbor registered this breaking down of

mores. As Alan Glenn notes in an essay about the history

of counterculture in Ann Arbor, a School of Public Health
professor wrote to The Michigan Daily in 1960 to complain
about the “‘bearded, long-haired, sloppy, unsanitary-looking
students, who appear to be a refugees from some beatnik
cave.’ He wondered “just what kind of future citizens they
will make if they are unwilling or too lazy to present a clean
appearance at this early stage of their lives.” A few years later
the Daily’s fashion supplement announced (with more than a
little sarcasm) that ‘the rigid tradition that had girls wearing
dresses and boys wearing pants has been broken.’”

The hipster today

This all set the stage for our current hipster stock, behind

whose music preferences lurk certain philosophical stakes,
a reflexive cynicism for the mainstream, and a bottomless
appetite for authenticity. This authenticity is of a taste let
loose on a whole new swath of cultural material.

In this current conception, mainstream art has effectively

been plumbed of its merits, its spiritual and intellectual
flesh picked off the bones by a capitalist machine. The
“mainstream” product is designed to assuage our sensitivities
and pleasure centers with unrelenting precision. In the age
of algorithms and predictive analytics, hipsters instinctively
know that the cultural goods floating down the mainstream
have been sent down the river by a corporation and their
business plan.

Think of Nathaniel Rich, writing in this October issue

of The Atlantic about the handful of songwriters behind
a disproportionate number of Top 40 hits, “Ruthless
digitization, outsourcing, focus-group brand testing, brute-
force marketing...have been applied with tremendous
success in pop, creating such profitable multinationals
as Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.” Or think of
the 2005 screenwriting book by Blake Snyder that breaks
down the blockbuster into a 15-beat structure and whose
reverberations still echo in summer mega-hits, or maybe the
patent Amazon filed for “anticipatory shipping,” a method to
deliver packages before shoppers even purchase it.

Together, these revelations confirm what hipsters

always felt in their bones: that cultural popularity is not a
form of American meritocracy so much as it is the result of
an aggressive business strategy. This is why the hipster is
attracted to the elusive substance of authenticity as an acid
to cut through the gunk of consumer waste.

Authenticity is a way of showing things for how they really

are. No longer caught in the morass of consumerism, but also
without the moral compass of mainstream, hipsters find a
new way of determining value, and that way is taste. Taste
is written into the secret language Calloway transcribed,
taste is the dog whistle that only the enlightened can sense,
taste is the result of a finely developed palate, a palate that
registers not in moral terms of good and evil, but well or
poorly executed. Taste cares about form, not function.

But against this optimistic reading of taste as pure

an Ann Arbor etymology

by Catherine Sulpizio, Senior Arts Editor