Origins in the 1940s[edit]
See also: Hipster (1940s subculture) and Hip (slang)
Hot jazz artist Harry Gibson (at the piano), coiner of the word hipster in the 1940s
The term was coined during the jazz age, when "hip" emerged as an adjective to describe aficionados of the growing scene.[11] Although the adjective's exact origins are disputed, some say it was a derivative of "hop", a slang term for opium, while others believe it comes from the West African word hipi, meaning "to open one's eyes".[11] Another argument suggests the term derives from the practice of lying on one's hip while smoking opium.[17] The ultimate meaning of "hip", attested as early as 1902, is "aware" or "in the know". Conversely, the antonym unhip connotes those who are unaware of their surroundings, also including those who are opposed to hipness.
Zoot-suited hipsters in the 1940s
Nevertheless, "hip" eventually acquired the common English suffix -ster (as in spinster and gangster), and "hipster" entered the language.[11] The first dictionary to list the word is the short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk", which was included with Harry Gibson's 1944 album, Boogie Woogie In Blue. The entry for "hipsters" defined them as "characters who like hot jazz".[18] It was not a complete glossary of jive, however, as it included only jive expressions that were found in the lyrics to his songs.
The same year, Cab Calloway published The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary of Jive, which had no listing for "hipster", and because there was also a 1939 edition of Calloway's Hepster's (an obvious play on "Webster's") Dictionary, it appears that "hepster" pre-dates "hipster". The term used in African-American culture was originally spelled "hep," as in Cab Calloway's famous song (Hep Hep) The Jumpin' Jive recorded on July 17, 1939. 'Hep' is also used in Mezz Mezzrow essential account of underground jazz culture Really the Blues (published in 1946).
Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely black jazz musicians they followed.[11] In The Jazz Scene (1959), author Eric Hobsbawm (originally writing under the pen name Francis Newton) described hipster language—i.e., "jive-talk or hipster-talk"—as "an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders". This group crucially includes white jazz musicians such as Benny Goodman, Al Cohn, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Mezz Mezzrow, Barney Kessel, Doc Pomus, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Chet Baker, Gene Krupa who ought to be counted as some of the true original hipsters as they were instrumental in turning the white world onto jazz and its underground culture in the 1930s and 1940s.
The subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it.[11] Jack Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality".[19] Toward the beginning of his poem Howl, Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". In his essay "The White Negro", Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death—annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity—and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self".[11]
1990s to present[edit]
Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear t-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care.
— Time, July 2009[11]
In early 2000, both The New York Times and Time Out New York ran profiles of Williamsburg, Brooklyn without using the term hipster. The Times referred to "bohemians"[20] and TONY to "arty East Village types".[21] By 2003, when The Hipster Handbook was published by Williamsburg resident Robert Lanham, the term had come into widespread use in relation to Williamsburg and similar neighborhoods. The Hipster Handbook described hipsters as young people with "mop-top haircuts, swinging retro pocketbooks, talking on cell phones, smoking European cigarettes... strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags".[22] Lanham further describes hipsters: "You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration" and "you have one Republican friend who you always describe as being your 'one Republican friend.'"[11] One author dates the initial phase of the revival of the term from 1999 to 2003.[7]
A similar phenomenon occ