The words
hep and
hip are of uncertain origin, with numerous competing theories being proposed. In the early days of
jazz, musicians were using the
hep variant to describe anybody who was "in the know" about an emerging, mostly
African-American subculture, which revolved around jazz. They and their fans were known as
hepcats. In 1938, the word
hepster was used by bandleader
Cab Calloway in the title of his dictionary, ''Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary
, which defines hep cat
as "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive". British author and poet Lemn Sissay remarked that "Cab Calloway was taking ownership of language for a people who, just a few generations before, had their own languages taken away." By the late 1930s, with the rise of swing, hep
began to be used commonly in mainstream "square" culture, so by the 1940s hip rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replace hep
. In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified hepcat
to hipster'' in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk", published in 1944 with the album
Boogie Woogie In Blue, featuring the self-titled hit "Handsome Harry the Hipster". The entry for
hipsters defined them as "characters who like hot jazz." In 1947, Gibson sought to clarify the switch in the record "It Ain't Hep" which musically describes the difference between the two terms. Initially, hipsters were usually
middle-class European American youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely
African-American jazz musicians they followed. Hipsters were more interested in
bebop and "hot" jazz than they were in swing, which by the late 1940s was becoming old-fashioned and watered down by "
squares" like
Lawrence Welk,
Guy Lombardo and Robert Coates. In the 1940s, White youth began to frequent Black communities for their
music and dance. These first youths diverged from the mainstream due to their new
philosophies of racial diversity and their exploratory sexual nature and drug habits. The drug of choice was marijuana, and many hipster
slang terms were dedicated to the substance. The hipster subculture rapidly expanded, and after
World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it. Toward the beginning of his poem
Howl, the Jewish-American
Beatnik poet
Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". In his 1957 essay
The White Negro, the American novelist and journalist
Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American
existentialists, living a life surrounded by
death—annihilated by the
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". ==Racial role reversal==