Hip
The History
By John Leland
Harper Perennial
Copyright © 2005
John Leland
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780060528188
Chapter One
In the Beginning There Was Rhythm
Slavery, Minstrelsy and the Blues
Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without
enough Africa in him or her ... You know why music was the
center of our lives for such a long time? Because it was a
way of allowing Africa in. - Brian Eno
Toward the end of 1619, John Rolfe, the first tobacco grower
of Virginia, noted the arrival of a new import to the British
colonies. Rolfe (1585-1622) is best known as the husband of
Pocahontas, and it was his experiments with growing tobacco
that saved the Jamestown settlement from ruin. The incoming
cargo he noted on this day would change the course of tobacco
and the colonies as a whole. "About the last of August," he
wrote, "came a Dutch man of war that sold us twenty Negroes."
These slaves, likely looted from a Spanish ship or one of the
Spanish colonies to the south, were not the first African
slaves in North America. The Spanish explorers Panfilo de
Narvaez, Menendiz de Avilis and Coronado had all brought
slaves into what is now Florida and New Mexico. Yet the 20
Africans who were brought ashore at modern-day Hampton,
Virginia, then carried upriver for sale in Jamestown, formally
marked the beginning of what would be 246 years of America's
"peculiar institution" of slavery. Five years after their
arrival, a 1624 census of Virginia recorded the presence of 22
blacks. Before the country banned new imports in 1808, leaving
still the illegal market, around 600,000 to 650,000 Africans
were brought to the states in bondage; by 1860, on the eve of
the Civil War, there were almost 4 million slaves in the
United States, out of a total population of 31 million.
A pressing question in the evolution of hip is, why here? Why
did hip as we know it, and as it is emulated around the world,
arise as a distinctly American phenomenon? Many of its
signature elements existed among the bohemians of the Left
Bank in Paris - or, for that matter, among those of Bohemia,
now a part of the Czech Republic. The European capitals
embraced the romance of scruff at least as early as Henri
Murger's 1840s literary sketches,
Schnes de la vie die bohhme,
or Giacomo Puccini's 1896 opera based on the sketches,
La
Bohhme. Yet it is impossible to imagine Europe producing the
blues or the Beats, the Harlem Renaissance or the Factory.
What distinguished the United States is both simple and, in
its ramifications, maddeningly, insolubly complex. That
difference is the presence of Africans, and the coexistence of
two very different populations in a new country with undefined
boundaries. Without the Africans, there is no hip.
To be finer about it, there is no hip without African
Americans and European Americans, inventing new identities for
themselves as Americans in each other's orbit. These
first-generation arrivals, black and white, and their second-,
third- and fourth-generation heirs, learned to be Americans
together. As a self-conscious idea, America took shape across
an improvised chasm of race. Some of the most passionate
arguments over slavery were economic rather than moral: Adam
Smith argued that it undermined the free market for labor;
defenders countered that the peculiar institution was more
humane than the "wage slavery" of northern factories. But on a
practical level, people on both sides of the divide needed
strategies for negotiating the conundrum that held them apart,
interdependent but radically segregated.
These strategies are hip's formative processes. While we often
think of hip as springing whole into the world in the 1920s or
1950s, its roots go back at least another century. Hipster
language, stance and irony begin not in the cool poses of the
modern city but on the antebellum plantation, in the interplay
of these two populations. For all their difference in
standing, the black and white foreigners taught each other how
to talk, eat, sing, worship and celebrate, each side learning
as it was being learned. Customs passed back and forth. Though
history texts talk of Africans becoming Europeanized, or of
Europeans stealing the blues, the ways the two populations
dealt with each other were more complicated than that. Such
borrowing is never indiscriminate, nor the copying exact. Like
digital samplers, the borrowers pick and choose what works for
them, and shape it to their own ends; the final product
comments on both its origins and its manipulations.
This produced the feedback loop of hip, which centuries later
gives us white kids sporting doo rags. Against the larger
story of racial oppression and animosity, there was also one
of creative interplay. The two populations had something to
take from each other. In the decades bracketing the Civil War,
when a maturing America began to stage stories about itself,
it created two idioms that reflected exactly this unresolved
vortex. The first is the blackface minstrel show, which
surfaced in the 1820s and 1830s and is considered America's
first popular culture. The second is the blues, which appeared
toward the end of the century. These two forms, nurtured on
American soil, are the twined root stems of hip. We live among
their branches to this day.
If hip is a story of synthesis in the context of division, its
origins lie in the unique structure of slavery in America,
which pushed the two populations together. In the massive
sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean, which accounted
for the majority of the transatlantic slave trade, slaves
lived in overwhelmingly black worlds. Owners ran these
plantations from a distance, working their slaves to death in
the tropical climes and then importing huge waves of
replacements. African cultures and languages, constantly
replenished by new arrivals, survived relatively undiluted,
and do to this day. In North America, by contrast, until the
invention of the cotton gin in 1793 spurred the growth of big
plantations, most farms were small and required few slaves.
Owners worked the land, often without overseers between them
and the slaves ...
Continues...
Excerpted from Hip
by John Leland
Copyright © 2005 by John Leland.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.