he lived ‘for kicks’ - jazz, sex, marihuana, or any other stimulants going

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

At all events the hipster described in the post-1945 years is not the same man as the one whose ‘fraternal order’ Mezz Mezzrow joined around 1930. He is the collective ‘outsider’. He does not live in this world, but escapes from it into a world of bop music, which the square cannot understand, and pot (marihuana), of ‘kicks’ — sensations — which the square cannot feel. ‘He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a roustabout, or a free-lance moving man’, it does not matter how, for the hipster (whose very essence in Mezzrow’s description was action) no longer acts, but simply exists. Even his one triumph, jive-talk, seems to have contracted into a featureless, simplified vocabulary of monosyllables, grunts, and tacit gestures, which serves almost exclusively to differentiate him from the square. Only two things remain of his former self: a total refusal to conform to the squares and a savage integrity about his own standards and the things he likes.