immediacy-were toned down in
bebop. Bebop's style seemed to con–
sist, to a great extent, in
evading
tension, in connecting, by extreme
dexterity, each phrase with an–
other, so that nothing remained,
everything was lost in a
shuffle
of
decapitated cadences. This corre–
sponded to the hipster's social be–
havior as jester, jongleur, or pres–
tidigitator. But it was his own fate
he had caused to disappear for the
audience, and now the only trick
he had left was the monotonous
gag of pulling himself-by his own
ears, grinning and gratuitous-up
out of the hat.
The elan of jazz was weeded out
of bebop because all enthusiasm
was naive, nowhere, too simple.
Bebop was the hipster's seven types
of ambiguity, his Laocoon, illus–
trating his struggle with his own
defensive deviousness. It was the
disintegrated symbol, the shards, of
his attitude toward himself and the
world. It presented the hipster as
performer, retreated to an abstract
stage of
tea
and pretension, losing
himself in the multiple mirrors of
his fugitive chords. This conception
was borne out by the surprising
mediocrity of bebop orchestrations,
which often had the perfunctory
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quality of vaudeville music, played
only to announce the coming spec–
tacle, the soloist, the great Houdini.
Bebop rarely used words, and,
when it did, they were only non–
sense syllables, significantly paral–
leling a contemporaneous loss of
vitality in jive language itself. Blues
and jazz were documentary in a
social sense; bebop was the hipster's
Emancipation Proclamation in dou–
ble talk. It showed the hipster as
the victim of his own system, vol–
ubly tongue-tied, spitting out his
own teeth, running between the
raindrops of his spattering chords,
never getting wet, washed clean,
baptized, or quenching his thirst.
He no longer had anything rele–
vant to himself to say-in both his
musical and linguistic expression he
had finally abstracted himself from
his real position in society.
His next step was to abstract
himself in action.
Tea
made this
possible. Tea (marihuana) and
other drugs supplied the hipster
with an indispensable outlet. His
situation was too extreme, too
tense, to be satisfied with mere
fantasy or animistic domination of
the environment. Tea provided him
with a free world to expatiate in.
It had the same function as trance
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