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

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, Avant Slant (Decca [1968...