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

