Hipness is ever with us, an energizing, subversive force that prods us on from the margins (and quite often these days, from the gentrified centers) of contemporary U.S. culture. As Phil Ford demonstrates in his recent monograph, Dig: Sound & Music in Hip Culture, hipness has a long and variegated history, in which its sequential iterations are held together less by specific content than by a set of family resemblances, a loose constellation of shared predispositions. From the vantage point of postwar jazz musicians and Beat poets, to which Ford devotes much of his attention, our current manifestations of hipness may defy recognition: it is hard, for instance, to know how a midcentury hipster, attuned to the logic of modernism, would respond to the retrospective gaze of postmodern hip culture, as realized in post-millennial indie rock's meticulous reproduction of such bygone styles as postpunk or vintage soul. In both midcentury and postmodern contexts, though, a prevailing hip sensibility is at work, a quality of pretension: to pretend is to work on a terrain of imaginative suspension, to give oneself over to the now-time of play.

In delineating and documenting this ethic of spontaneous play and its diverse manifestations in the midcentury counterculture, Ford's new book serves as a brilliant and methodologically distinctive contribution to the literature on twentieth-century U.S. musical culture. Ford's text departs from earlier texts on hip culture, which have tended to focus upon its social and institutional locations, and which tend to define hipness primarily in terms of the authenticity of its claims to cultural resistance.Footnote ¹ Instead, Ford addresses the ways in which sound and music provide us with useful windows onto hip culture's distinctive structures of feeling. Readers of the blog Dial “M” for Musicology (dialmformusicology.com), which Ford coauthors with Jonathan Bellman, are already familiar with the witty, elegant, and humane qualities of Ford's prose, and it is here put to work in the service of an intellectually adventurous exploration of his topic.

In hipness, Ford has located an especially elusive and contradictory subject. To begin, there is the problem of how to write a history of an idea whose cultural location is inherently difficult to delimit. In this context, Ford has argued that sound asserts itself as the privileged medium of hipness for reasons having to do with its own phenomenology. The various forms of postwar cultural critique that serve as the backdrop to hip culture tend to assume a posture of resistance to the “mass” and, really, to any unambiguous critical position. From the vantage point of many postwar intellectuals, the assumption of an unequivocal stance always threatens to congeal into something resembling ideological fixity, something uncomfortably proximate to the totalizing ideologies of the interwar years. As Ford maintains, it is here that the hip privileging of sound becomes particularly salient: unlike written language, for which the fixity of representation commits one to an immobile, “stational” position, sound promises access to the fluid, the polyvalent, the ephemeral.

Ford's central insight about music and sound as the privileged loci of hip serves as a compelling point of cohesion for what follows. Chapters 1 and 2 outline some of hip culture's creative and intellectual points of departure, extending from the wry humor of Cab Calloway's early-1940s radio programming to D. T. Suzuki's take on Zen Buddhism. Further on, chapter 4 expertly traces the paradoxical transformation that hipness underwent in the 1960s, as its stylistic locus moved from jazz to rock, and as its elite obscurantism and focus on individual alienation were translated into the terms of a mass countercultural populism.

Particularly noteworthy are two chapters that bring resourceful archival research and critical dexterity to bear in equal measure: chapter 3 takes up a series of acetate recordings documenting the Lexington Avenue parties of Beat cultural luminary John Clellon Holmes, parties in which Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and others engaged in a kind of improvised literary performativity. As such, the chapter provides readers with a singular aural perspective upon a Beat literary culture preoccupied with the failures of its written medium, its inability to tap into the vibrant temporalities of improvised music. Chapter 6 introduces us to John Benson Brooks, a little-known musician and intellectual whose copiously self-documented life gives us a unique window onto a distinctive thinker, a figure held in tension between deeply rooted modernist instincts on the one hand, and his own proto-postmodern insights into an emerging culture of the media sublime on the other.

Throughout Dig, Ford remains committed to a critical approach that privileges the aesthetics of hipness's politics over the politics of its aesthetics. In taking this approach, Ford is in a sense remaining faithful to hipness's own aesthetic priorities, its nimble refusal of any tightly circumscribed political definition. This strategy accounts for much of the sophistication of his analysis and its attunedness to the phenomenological intensities of hip discourse. For instance, in both chapters 2 and 4, Ford's work contributes in interesting ways to a longstanding scholarly debate over the cultural-political valence of bebop. For scholars such as Eric Lott, Scott DeVeaux, Guthrie Ramsey, and Eric Porter, bebop is generally positioned in relation to concrete socioeconomic conditions and their more tangible political resonances, in contexts ranging from DeVeaux's account of bebop as a kind of niche-market alternative to the monolithic swing industry, to Porter's citation of bebop as a midcentury African American cultural posture of “critical ecumenicalism.”Footnote ² In contrast to his predecessors, Ford is less inclined to view bebop as something that primarily distills or reflects such tangible and specific social forces. Rather, he chooses to approach bebop's articulation of meaning as a largely immanent and cryptic affair, a practice of hip performativity that generates meaning by withholding meaning, abstracting from recognized gestures in order to place a hurdle before the listener's understanding of those gestures. There is an element of magic to this practice, in its positing of a secret knowledge, and the idea of “magical hermeneutics” is key to Ford's analysis throughout.

Ford's determination to privilege the aesthetics of politics, rather than its inversion, may seem provocative for readers who come at the aesthetics/politics polarity from a different direction. For instance, in his reading of Norman Mailer's provocative 1957 essay “The White Negro,” Ford argues that the reactionary essentialism of Mailer's argument—its identification of blackness with criminal pathology, set in a marked, particularized contradistinction to an unmarked, universal whiteness—is part of a deliberate tactic that sets binary oppositions in complex dialectical interplay.Footnote ³ Ford's close reading of Mailer's text, which stresses its enactment of socio-aesthetic critique, rather than its sociological claims to truth, allows him to highlight an aspect of Mailer's racialized binary that might otherwise be overlooked: running in tandem with the black/white binary is a binary of reading and listening, in which the hipster's attention to the sound of what is spoken allows him or her to tap into a field of energy that is inaudible to the “square.”

This insight goes on to yield richly productive dividends for Ford in the argument that follows, highlighting the ways in which Mailer's openness to the now-time of hipness provided him with a powerful avenue of critique, a rejoinder to the evils of a regimented, temporally frozen Cold War technocracy. But in turning away from the more immediate social implications of Mailer's racial analysis, Ford's approach perhaps comes at a cost: we can lose sight of the potentially damaging effects of Mailer's discourse, which anticipates the language (if not the alarmist spirit) of the so-called “Moynihan report” just a few years later, with its notorious citation of a putative “tangle of pathology” at the core of the black family.Footnote ⁴ I recognize that the sociological truth-content of “The White Negro” is not what Ford is seeking to interrogate, given his preoccupation with aesthetic critique, and given that the racist implications of “The White Negro” have been ably problematized by others.Footnote ⁵ Nevertheless, there is a case to be made that the cultural work performed by Mailer's racial binaries is ultimately difficult to separate from any proper accounting of the text's aesthetic impact.

Along these same lines, I would note that one conclusion that becomes inescapable, as the reader makes their way through Dig, is that hipness is gendered as a very masculinist thing, its practices unfolding in a highly homosocial milieu.Footnote ⁶ Ford is, of course, “hip” to this gendered dimension of hip culture, but one could still imagine a version of Dig that more thoroughly weaves gender critique into its sustained aesthetic critique, not as a distraction from Ford's prevailing methodology, but rather as an enhancement of its already multivalent richness.

What Dig offers to scholars of U.S. music is its indispensable modeling of a nimble, oblique, and resonant approach to cultural critique. Ford's work reminds us of the galvanizing interchange that always tacitly binds music to ideas: it reads the intellectual discourse of an era as something with the properties of music, something mobile, volatile, and alive. For this reason alone, Ford's Dig promises to become a canonical entry in the field of early twenty-first century musicology.