Phil Ford’s research while affiliated with Indiana University East and other places

Dig interprets hipness as a sensibility by which postwar Americans have understood themselves in opposition to a cultural mainstream. This sensibility is particularly oriented to music: music matters because it is made of sound, and sound models the energetic processes of life as it is experienced in the moment. After World War II, younger dissenting intellectuals sought a new critical stance in art and politics and found it in the hipster’s attitude of cultural disaffiliation. They opposed a mass culture shaped by the abstraction of meaning from human experience. If abstraction was the disease, they believed, participation in unmediated experience would be the cure. Hip sensibility in the 1940s and 1950s was skeptical, ironic, and individualistic: listening to jazz offered the freedom of experience in the moment, but bebop’s dialogue with listeners was conceived in modernist terms, as a challenging confrontation between individuals alienated from mass culture. In the 1960s, the hip sensibility took a populist turn, and those within the culture it made—hip culture—now imagined that the mainstream could be overcome by mass counterculture: youth might merge into a worldwide collective through shared participation in recorded sound.