Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture by Phil Ford (2013)

While collecting symptoms of a possible breakdown of society, proof of which can easily be found by simply watching reality TV and Fox News, Phil Ford tries to unveil a whole group of savants who successfully escape this breakdown by establishing and transmitting a certain unequaled knowledge of the world and its mechanics. This wisdom, if we call it that, is known as “hipness,” the people who (allegedly) now are called hipsters.

This group of people truly understands, and therefore rejects, the limits of a life organized around a 9-5 job and seeks the rewarding sides of life instead, the author suspects. The culture of hipsters and their protagonists seemingly is the last barrier that stands in the way of mainstream square society. And so in “Dig” we learn about some aspects of hipsterism, a quality that just as its protagonists remain vague; fortunately the protagonists are easily identified since they all fashion full beards and glasses.

So much for the oversimplified legend.

Since actually the whole story of the emergence of the hipster is much more complicated and has to do with a number of social, commercial, sometimes ethnic, educational and countercultural aspects as we here learn in six chapters. As Ford states throughout his chapters, both hipsters and counterculture needed mainstream and a square culture they could attack. Otherwise their critique, individual style and habitus would have vanished.

In this review, I shall concentrate on the musical aspects of Ford’s theories and conclusions and since this text is published on jive-talk.com, jazz shall be the focus. So look forward to encountering text and ideas by Mezz Mezzrow, Ross Russel, Bernard Wolfe and other writers on jazz too.

Ford has identified a theory of hipsterism, namely they are those who “dig,” meaning those who see, understand, are in accord with the way their own things are done and have absorbed this conclusion in their personal attitude. The term itself is derived from Black English, like many other words that found their way in everyday talk but were once coined and introduced by urban black people in the 1930s. Mostly, because messages and communication were not written, not printed but performed; one of the many aspects of an oral culture that is also easily identified in  jazz music.
By the way “dig” shares the same origins as the expression “jive talk” or “jive talkin’,” which means to communicate in hip slang and be able to understand and realize certain coded linguistic information while in conversation with a (then predominantly black) peer group. This idiom was very widespread in the jazz musician community as early as the 1930s and 1940s. Saxophone master Lester Young was famous for continuously extending the jive vocabulary, while band leader Cab Calloway commercially exploited the matter with a number of dictionaries.

But let’s get back to Ford’s theories; he correctly states the huge impact of music in subcultures and within certain circles of countercultural groups. For a number of youth cultures music suffices as the strongest constipating item that keeps the movement together, while it is part of the mythology, legend and ritual of the particular culture.
To understand certain styles of music coming from a certain political or ethnic background and surfacing as bebop, for example, music became a central part in the texts of the Beat movement, which is portrayed in much detail here.
That Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg and the other originators of this important phenomenon were fond of jazz is widely known. Nevertheless, here we owe to Ford some new insight on the way lyrical and musical experience was actually the foundation of Beat writing. In this case not only as an inspiration through jazz but as the logical step individuals with a white middle-class background would take to put new experience into the medium they were most connected with: namely, text and writing. And here, just as in other subcultures, experience and a different way of seeing life gave way to the recording of experience: “Hipness emerged from subcultural isolation through the intercession of those for whom it was a state of mind they could cultivate and write about.”

(According to Ford, it was also the inability to understand the message of bebop and the African-American experience as a background for the abstract content of the music for some of the writers. He considers that in need of explanations  – hence to “dig” it – most Beat authors tried to grasp the connection with images and ideas from subjects and contexts seemingly close to music, like automatic writing, drug-induced visions and improvisation. So their message was rather verbalized experience based on oral forms of documentation, even though still doomed to remain on the printed page.)
Fortunately, we are introduced to my favorite (and still widely underrated) Beat writer John Clellon Holmes, author of “Go!” and one of the best jazz novels ever “The Horn.” It is from the vaults of Holmes that Ford returns with no little sensation: some acetate recordings from Holmes’ parties back in 1949 with Kerouac, Ginsberg and others scatting, talking and improvising fast paced dialog in just the way we always imagined they had.  As these recordings are unpublished, we have to rely on Ford’s reports on how musically skilled they were, how spontaneous and how valuable such evidence is if we realize the meaning of sound and experience  for this group of people.

In the chapters to follow the author continues on the evolution of jazz in the 1950s and 1960s, devotes a lot of text to brilliant Chicago radio man Ken Nordine and finally picks up the ideas of unique jazz collage artist John Benson Brooks, inventor of DJology (physical musical sampling in 1966) and comes to certain conclusions about the nature of Western (consumer) culture.
Ford does not present entirely new ideas and conclusions; however, Marshall McLuhan, Norman Mailer, Kenneth Burke and other  giants are quoted and referred to widely. Furthermore, much has been written on hipsters in the last years, and hardly a handful of texts has been satisfying, in my opinion.
But it is the new excellent rendering of many different assumptions from various fields, especially sociology, music, and the significance of Western consumer culture that make this book stand out. The style, rather journalism than academic text, has a lot to do with it.
Some may think he oversimplifies matters, others, considering themselves “real” hipsters may even feel insulted.
One may not agree with all points Ford makes but his conclusions on the Beats, popular music in American culture and the ever-continuing onrush of (blindfold consuming) square culture, nemesis of those who “dig” things, are unquestionably worth reading. For he also sees the difficulties for a particular group that stops participating to foster participation: “If hipness is really defined by how thoroughly you reject the mass-culture scene, then the hippest thing you could do would be to throw out your TV, stop going to the movies and concerts, hole up in your study and play Bach on the piano, and read Dante in face-page translation. But then this isn’t what anyone thinks of as hip transgression, because it isn’t something you can do with your friends on TV….”

Review by Dr. A. Ebert (c) 2014

Phil Ford. Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture. Oxford University Press, 2013, 306 p.