(3 of 8)
Say the word hip to Henry Rollins, manic stage monologist and now the tattooed front man of the Rollins Band, a group sacred to many college radio stations. He winces. "Hip has become a lot of asses to kiss, a lot of places to be, a lot of parties to go to." Try it out on the poet Allen Ginsberg, who helped invest the idea with meaning in the '50s. After carefully distinguishing some current notions of hip from the outcast's lucidity that was his vision of it all, he lets loose. "An upper-bourgeois life-style con. A camouflage for egocentricity and commercial theatrics." Propose it to a younger writer, Mark Leyner, who has had two appearances on Letterman and three smart-funny books (including Et Tu, Babe). He goes ugh. "We have allowed for a hipness that's produced in vitro. It has no basis, it's made from scratch."
The atmosphere of cultural confusion was palpable one recent night at the party to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Paper, the magazine of culture formation among the seriously hip. A good many of the names that show up in clubland gossip columns -- Veronica Webb, the model! Joey Arias, the drag queen! -- had shown up at the Supper Club, a party space in Manhattan's theater district. They were mixing with some of the high-concept personalities who have edged into more publicized realms. Like Lady Kier of Deee-Lite! (The recording group, something like the B-52s of house music.) Ricki Lake, the rising talk-show host -- look out, Oprah -- was chatting with John Waters, who starred her in his fondly remembered camp comedy Hairspray. And there was -- yes! -- Shannen Doherty, the Lucrezia Borgia of nighttime TV, the Kilimanjaro of problems, as skinny as Kate Moss these days, chain-smoking in a little black dress.
Yet despite all efforts, the mood was a little shaky. Granted, at the big party a few weeks earlier for some liquor company, there were mud-wrestling drag queens. (No kidding.) But the problem that night didn't seem to be any lack of diversions. The very notion of 10 years on the downtown scene had led to melancholy reflections about what hip has come to. There was grumbling in the room along the lines of been-there/done-that. And if talk-show hostesses and prime-time starlets are hip -- Ricki Lake? Shannen Doherty? -- then what exactly can hip still mean? "I wish there was a department in the government that would tell people what is cool as far as culture and fashion goes," said one of the guests, Spencer Tunick, a photographer who came to publicize a nude photo shoot in front of the U.N. "It seems like we're all over the place."
If hip is something different now from what it once was, what was it? By most accounts, it first emerged among urban blacks, for whom it could be both a defense against a hostile world and the sum of the special insights of life under pressure. Ginsberg, who with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs forms part of the Holy Trinity of Beat literature, recalls that the term hip migrated into mainstream speech from the drug culture and the jazz world it intersected. "There it meant tolerant. It was a word used among junkies. It implied a knowingness and understanding."