Ben Sidran: Don't Cry For No Hipster

Ben Sidran

Don't Cry For No Hipster

Although best known in some circles for writing Steve Miller's hit song "Space Cowboy," jazz and rock pianist, producer, singer and composer Ben Sidran is more widely recognized as the host of NPR's landmark jazz series Jazz Alive and VH-1's New Visions series. Here, he addresses a semi-mythical figure in American pop culture: the hipster. Decades before the term was used to describe young cats in small hats, it was used during Prohibition to describe a denizen of the night who arrived at the club with a flask in his back pocket. Hence "I'm hip" meant "I'm carrying." But it soon came to mean much more than that. Jazz, poetry, black threads and berets might have been outward manifestations of the phenomenon during the beatnik craze of the 50s, but they were no more the essence of the movement than the uniform is to the player. And it was a well known fact among hipsters that anybody who self-identified as a hipster was, by definition, not one.

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