You know it when you see it.....

My Kindle had to remain at home today, charging, so I was forced to entertain myself on the train with an old-fashioned book made of paper and the shattered dreams of the publishing industry. The book plucked from my personal library this morning was “Hip: The History,” which I purchased after reading a review in my college newspaper, but heretofore failed to tackle. Now, I’m only a semi-awake hour into the book, but it’s got me thinking about what it means to be cool. Why are some things obviously hip (e.g. Lou Reed) and others obviously unhip (e.g. Phil Collins)? More importantly, why would someone like me care?

I’m sure I’m not the first to define hip the way the Supreme Court defines pornography: you know it when you see it, and we have a sort of intergenerational, possibly innate cultural understanding that some things are hip (or pornographic) and others are not. Few would disagree with my decision to consign poor Phil Collins to the desperately unhip column, while placing Lou Reed on the other side. This isn’t a judgment of their respective musical achievements – when it comes right down to it, they’re both tedious and obnoxious – but a commonly-understood fact. The question is, why?

Well, Phil Collins is bald and that never helps matters, but on the other hand Lou Reed is a Jew which is the albatross he has to bear, if you’ll allow me to mix metaphors. It’s true that Lou Reed is more avant-garde, in that he will shamelessly release 4 sides of grating noise, not punctuated by anything as pedestrian as music, but then again Phil Collins got his start in progressive rock, which retains to this day a certain cachet among geeky hipsters. Phil Collins has written songs for Disney movies, but Lou Reed performed for the Pope, and we all know the only thing less cool than Judaism is Christianity. When it comes right down to it, I have no idea why Reed is hip and Collins is not, but I know it to be true.
By all rights I shouldn’t be giving this matter more than a calorie or two of brain energy. After all, I completely understand the allure of the suburbs, rarely venture out past 9PM, and talk shit about smokers behind their backs. I recognize that this is not hip, but I can’t help myself. Just like I genuinely prefer Nancy Sinatra to her abysmal father, I prefer tree-lined streets, daylight, and nonsmokers, and I suspect that, at least on some level, this has always been the case. I periodically ventured out of the box in my early 20’s, but with age comes the realization that a life spent trying to impress people you don’t actually like is no life at all.

Maybe the reason I’m still interested in hip, interested at least enough to blog about it, is that I fear I’m coming dangerously close to losing touch with it entirely. I have absolutely no idea what kids these days are up to. Presumably the bulk of them are sexting and listening to the Justin Bieber, both of which are completely alien to me, but I suspect not especially hip. So what are the odd kids doing, apart from dreaming about moving into the city, staying out all night, and smoking? Maybe, just maybe, they’re doing what their counterparts did 15 years ago, namely watching “La Dolce Vita” in an attempt to understand what people mean when they describe things as “Fellini-esque” (Hint: They don’t really mean anything, but are trying to make stupid people think they’re smart.) If I’m right, there may be hope for me yet.