Here’s the first in a series on “hip.” It is for educational purposes only. Dangerous Minds cannot guarantee that you will achieve your desired level of hipness by merely reading this material and watching the video. While we have done everything possible to draw on the knowledge of our expert on “hip” (M. Campbell), there will undoubtedly be those among you who simply are incapable of being hip. And for that, we can only offer our profound regrets.

Hip vs. hipster:

The hipster thinks being un-hip is cool. In striving for total squareness, the hipster often dresses like an old man: scraggly beard, thick-framed glasses and a straw hat. He spends most of his time desperately trying to avoid being a cliche and in doing so becomes one. He thinks being cool is not cool. Therefore, he is not cool. The hipster is in a perpetual state of trying to escape himself for fear that he might be tagged a “hipster.” He re-invents himself one Carpenters album at a time.

Hip is eternal, immutable and undeniable. If you were truly hip in the 1960s, you’re still hip. Hip is cool but not ironic. When you see it, you know it, you want to be it. Who wouldn’t have wanted to be Mick Jagger in his twenties? Who wants to be Bon Iver?

Little known fact: Hip people appear to be anywhere from nine to eleven inches taller than they actually are.

While hipness is eternal, maybe the days of hip are over. It’s kind of sad when the hippest living person I can think of is in his seventies, Bob Dylan. Maybe Iggy’s still hip. Jagger certainly ain’t, which signifies that a person can be eternally hip at one point in his life and not at another. Young Jagger = eternally hip. Old Jagger = not hip.

Now is the time for a return to hipness. A time to be cool again, to dress up and be slick. To be sexy. To get out from behind your computers, iPads, Pro-Tools and walk the streets like uncaged leopards, ready for anything, slicker than the pomade on a pimp’s doo-rag. But it is essential to keep it real. To find your own style. We need more Marianne Faithfulls and fewer Lana Del Reys. We need more Kinks, not so many Strokes. I know you can do it. I’m here to help.
 

 
When I first got to Manhattan in 1977 I had no money and good jobs were scarce, particularly for a cat who didn’t like to get his hands dirty. Like many struggling musicians, I ended up working in a clothing store. The joint was on lower Broadway and was huge, a warehouse in fact. I started out selling vintage and surplus clothes and quickly worked my way up to being a buyer for the store. My job: finding cool retro fashions to sell.

I had a knack for tracking down never worn clothes and shoes from the 1950s-60s. I was eventually given my own department at the store. I called it “Rockers.” It became a big attraction for people who wanted hip inexpensive threads to wear and fashion designers from places like Fiorucci who wanted styles to knock-off. My customers included Lux Interior, Ivy Rorshach, Joey Arias, Klaus Nomi, Betsy Johnson, Billy Idol, Joe Strummer, Dianne Brill… virtually every fashion freak in Manhattan and those who passed through it. But the customer that I most cherished was Willy DeVille.

Willy was drawn to the huge inventory of winklepickers and cockroach killers I had in the store: Pointed-toe boots or shoes with Cuban heels. Suburban kids called them Beatle boots. Urban kids knew them as the kind of footwear worn by people you didn’t fuck with. Willy was the kind of person you didn’t fuck with. In many ways, he was a proto-type for the gangster rapper: pimped-out, gold teeth, sinister, street-wise, etc. The public personae wasn’t much different than the personal. He had the kind of nervous grace you associate with people living on the wrong side of the law. Over time, he would lose a lot of that edginess and mellow into a kind of beautiful nobility. And while there were many things one could accuse Willy of being (talk to his friends and foes), he was never ever uncool. As a friend of mine said “Willy was the professor of cool.”

Being hip can both be of the moment and ahead of its time. In Willy’s case, people are just catching up to how totally hip he was. I remember seeing him strike fear into the heart of Mick Jagger at a club, Trax, in 1978. DeVille was on stage and Jagger was in the audience. You could see the awe in Jagger’s face as he watched Willy work the crowd. It was as if Jagger suddenly realized he was not the hippest man on the planet. The cat with the gold tooth, epic pompadour and snakeskin boots was. The devil had met something even he couldn’t deal with. We’ll address this later in the “dark side of being hip.”

Here’s lesson #1 in being hip: How to make cool facial expressions. Watch the video carefully. Practice the moves. Put your own grease on it. Hit the streets.