The Village Beat Scene: Summer 1960

This essay is both more and less than a portrayal of the beats of Greenwich Village and its environs. More, because much of it holds good for beats elsewhere. Less, because I have not depicted some of the Village beat world’s well-publicized aspects, but have tried for completeness only in regard to the changes that have taken place in that world since my last acquaintance with it (1957). I use the word “beat” for brevity and ask readers to note that it obscures as much as it illuminates.

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The individuals in question resent any label whatever, and regard a concern with labelling as basically square. But insofar as they speak of themselves generically and are forced to choose among evils, they prefer the word “beat.” Until recently “hipster” meant simply one who is hip, roughly the equivalent of a beat. Beats recognized that the hipster is more of an “operator”—has a more consciously patterned lifestyle (such as a concern to dress well) and makes more frequent economic raids on the frontiers of the square world—but stressed their social bonds with hipsters, such as their liking for drugs, for jazz music, and, above all, their common scorn for bourgeois career orientations. Among Village beats today, however, “hipster” usually has a pejorative connotation: one who is a mannered showoff regarding his hipness, who “comes on” too strongly in hiptalk, etc. In their own eyes, beats are hip but are definitely not hipsters.

Although beats are characteristically ignorant of history, even of their own history, most know the oft-discussed origin of “beat” as applied to the postwar disaffected. But all are in the dark about “hip.” The few Village beats with any opinion suppose that it comes from the “hep” of early 1940s jivetalk. Actually “hep” and “hip” are doublets; both come directly from a much earlier phrase, “to be on the hip,” to be a devotee of opium smoking—during which activity one lies on one’s hip. The phrase is obsolete, the activity obsolescent.

As early as 1938 David Maurer noted that due to the rapid decline of opium smoking much of its argot was being loosely transferred to other types of drug taking, “frequently without a full knowledge of the original meanings of the words transferred.”* Today’s use of “hip” extends this process, for now the word has the generalized meaning of “in the know” and even among beat drug users doesn’t always refer specifically to knowledge of drugs.