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Dig : sound and music in hip culture / Phil Ford.

by Ford, Phil, 1969-

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Oxford University Press, 2013.

Popular music -- History and criticism.

Music -- Social aspects.

Popular culture -- History -- 20th century.

Expression (Philosophy)

Alienation (Social psychology)

9780199939916 (hc.)

0199939918 (hc.)

xii, 306 pages : illustrations, music ; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Dig (an introduction) -- Koan (what is hip?) -- What is hip? -- The Suzuki rhythm boys -- The devil's staircase -- The black spot -- Somewhere/nowhere -- Precambrian -- Game ideology -- Smart goes crazy -- Irony -- Miles and Monk -- Somewhere/nowhere -- Sound become holy (the Beats) -- Sound become holy -- The sadness of it all -- Digging what they dig -- Astounding and prophetic -- Stenciled off the real -- Hip sensibility in an age of mass counterculture -- Right on, Mr. Horowitz -- The square -- Asymmetrical consciousness -- Elitism -- Mass culture critique -- The decline of midcentury modernism and the birth of postmodernism -- Sound museum -- Mailer's sound -- "The sound is the thing, man" -- Abstraction -- Whiteness -- Mailer's sound -- Enantiodromia -- "Let's say that we're new, every minute" (John Benson Brooks) -- Off-minor -- Music of the isms -- Djology -- Cipher -- Magical hermeneutics -- Technologies of experience -- Practice.

"Hipness has been an indelible part of America's intellectual and cultural landscape since the 1940s. But the question 'What is hip?' remains a kind of cultural koan, equally intriguing and elusive. In Dig, Phil Ford argues that while hipsters have always used clothing, hairstyle, gesture, and slang to mark their distance from consensus culture, music has consistently been the primary means of resistance, the royal road to hip. Hipness suggests a particular kind of alienation from society--alienation due not to any specific political wrong but to something more radical, a clash of perception and consciousness. From the vantage of hipness, the dominant culture constitutes a system bent on excluding creativity, self-awareness, and self-expression. The hipster's project is thus to define himself against this system, to resist being stamped in its uniform square mold. Ford explores radio shows, films, novels, poems, essays, jokes, and political manifestos, but argues that music more than any other form of expression has shaped the alienated hipster's identity. After World War II, hip intellectuals began to conceive of sound itself as a way of challenging meaning with experience--that which is cognitive and abstract, timeless and placeless, against that which is embodied, concrete and anchored in place and time. Through Charlie Parker's 'Ornithology,' Ken Nordine's 'Sound Museum,' Bob Dylan's 'Ballad of a Thin Man,' and a range of other illuminating examples, Ford shows why and how music came to be at the center of hipness."--Book jacket.

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