Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture.
Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture. By Phil Ford. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xii, 336 p. ISBN 9780199939916. $29.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.Phil Ford's Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture is both brilliant and challenging. Ford could almost be describing his own book when he writes about Thelonious Monk's rendition of "I Should Care," "We know it is supposed to mean something, but on first hearing we know just as surely that we do not know what" (pp. 75-76). Summarizing the book is tricky because the arguments spill from one chapter into the next, and many riddles are left unsolved. (To paraphrase the group Tower of Power: What is hip? Hipness is what it is, and sometimes hipness is what it ain't.) Music is an important presence throughout the work, including long sections of analysis of music by such artists as Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis (pp. 67-76), but it is more a study of counterculture than a study of music. Although chapter 2 begins in the 1930s, most of the action takes place between the 1940s and the 1960s, in Cold War America. The subjects of Ford's research include some of the highest profile artists of the period--Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac--as well as much lesser-known figures, most notably John Benson Brooks, the jazz artist who serves as the focus of the book's final chapter.
In the introduction and first chapter, Ford lays the intellectual framework for the rest of the book. Because hip style is constantly changing, it is difficult to define or theorize, and because hipness is fundamentally resistant to squareness, writing a book about hipness may seem antithetical (pp. 3-4). Yet Ford has plenty to say, as did the artists he quotes throughout the book. Much of the first chapter connects hipness to Zen Buddhism, a practice that interested many mid-century hipsters. (See especially Ford's list of seven points of contact between Zen and hipness on pp. 29-32.)
The remaining chapters are arranged in roughly chronological order with some overlap, and "collectively they narrate the history of a change in how Americans understood themselves from the 1940s through the 1960s" (p. 17). Chapter 2 recounts hip styles of the 1930s and early 1940s, especially among African American jazz musicians. In chapter 3, hipness gets co-opted by Beat poets, who were most often white and, although many were ardent fans of music, not accomplished musicians. Here the stakes seem especially high because of the almost mythic aura surrounding the Beats and their connection to hipness. Hipness then explodes from small pockets of counterculture into mainstream America, the part of the history chronicled in chapter 4, including a wide stylistic swath from Charlie Parker to Bob Dylan. Even a figure as square as Vladimir Horowitz attempts to don a mantle of hipness, or at least that is how his record label clothes him ("Vladimir Horowitz is hung up on Chopin," quoted on p. 109.) Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" (in The White Negro [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957]) plays a minor role throughout the book, but it steps into the spotlight in chapter 5. Ford methodically reconstructs Mailer's creative process to show not only how Mailer's ideas developed over time but also how concerned he was with the sound of those ideas. Ford concludes, "Even though Mailer's writing leaves the impression of improvisation, it does so through a carefully calculated and painstakingly crafted rhetoric of spontaneity" (p. 170).
Like chapter 5, chapter 6 focuses on a single figure, this time John Benson Brooks. "[Brooks] knew almost everyone you've ever heard of in the postwar New York jazz scene while remaining relatively unknown himself.... Brooks had a Zelig-like habit of appearing off in the corner of now-legendary historical tableaux" (p. 180). He had a brief career as a jazz performer and composer, but Ford focuses especially on his final album, Avanl Slant (Decca [1968], LP). Using a technique Brooks called "DJology" (p. 192), the album combines a range of audio materials, from spoken word to twelve-tone jazz pieces, and although it was a commercial and critical failure, it anticipates aspects of collage, mashup, and sampling. Ford also devotes a meaningful segment of his closing chapter to Brooks's mystical beliefs and practices, such as divination. Whereas earlier in the book, Ford occasionally sounds dismal ("Mass culture is a narcotic that makes the mass docile and ready for manipulation," p. 133), the last several pages of the book take an unexpectedly optimistic turn. Ford shifts his attention from the perceived failure of Brooks's album to the inherent success found in the joy of practicing a skill. Ford notes, "To understand Brooks's practice is to see culture in a new way, not as the sum of things to be collected and exchanged, but as the processes we can enact on all the information we receive" (p. 225).
Although the book's history ends in the 1960s, some issues it addresses seem remarkably current. For example, Ford contrasts the 1950s with the 1960s in a way so reminiscent of the popular television series Mad Men that an example could almost be a character analysis that two coworkers concocted while standing around the 2014 equivalent of a water cooler. It is easy to visualize Betty Draper (played by January Jones) as the imaginary character Ford describes as the square's wife:
She is a great believer in "togetherness," which she has read about in her magazines. She waits on her husband and tends to her children without asking whether she might not be wasting her life living for others as a virtual domestic slave. Maybe she suspects that something is amiss, that on some level she is not really as happy as the good wives whose rigid smiles reproach her from every advertisement. She consoles herself with shopping binges and rebels against her captivity by keeping a watchful eye on the neighbors and punishing transgressions of neighborhood standards with her malicious, gossiping tongue. Some vital part of her has died: the repression of her instincts, the channeling of her creativity and love into meaningless acquisition and enforced togetherness, finds expression in sexual and emotional frigidity, (p. 119)
The nod to smiling advertisements, which are the products that Betty's husband makes for a living, further reinforces the comparison. Elsewhere in the book, Ford brings his work into the present with references to The Simpsons and Family Guy.
Ford's research comes from an impressive variety of sources. As is typical, the bibliography contains many published works, particularly in the area of cultural criticism, but there are a number of surprises as well. He makes use of primary sources, such as radio talk shows and newspaper columns, as well as works of fiction. Ford cites twelve archival caches, which do not even include the acetate recordings he analyzes. Made by John Clellon Holmes around 1950, the recordings feature Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others, talking, reading aloud, and attempting to improvise vocal jazz solos. In addition, Ford includes materials that seem completely off the conventional researcher's radar, such as a discarded record sleeve and the lyrics of music by Public Enemy and Jay-Z. These various sources allow Ford to juxtapose starkly different approaches in his work. For example, he begins chapter 5 with "the sound is the thing, man" (p. 151), an utterance that points to the spirit of the times, if only vaguely. Only a few pages later, Ford is deep in the trenches of archival research, quoting unpublished writings held at the University of Southern California (p. 154) and at the University of Texas at Austin (p. 165).
Ford's writing style can be demanding; it is precise, but he is not afraid to make his readers work to understand his meaning. He writes, for example,
Kerouac's mode of writing is not so much phatic as deictic; rather than assert meaningful propositions about experience that can be tested or refuted, he simply points, with great praise and enthusiasm, at an experience that must always remain partially undefined.... Beat writing makes immediacy in time and space its great theme and performs the impossibilistic gesture of moving beyond its own inherent abstraction from that immediacy. It attempts an alchemical transmutation of pure experience into words and words back into experience, (p. 87)
Ford is making an important point here, and his analysis is spot on, but readers might need a second cup of coffee to recognize it.
Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture is an important, rewarding, and meaningful piece of scholarship, but readers should be prepared to work at digesting the material. As Ford shows, "Hipness is about a lot more than recreational drug use, funny haircuts, weird lingo, and the hipster's infuriating attitude of superiority" (p. 43). To find out exactly what else hipness means to Ford, read the book. Dig is recommended for scholars of jazz, the Beats, and/or post--World War II culture in the United States and for libraries wishing to build their collections in twentieth-century American musical culture.
Joseph R. Matson
Millikin University
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Author: | Matson, Joseph R. |
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Publication: | Notes |
Article Type: | Book review |
Date: | Nov 28, 2014 |
Words: | 1515 |
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