Leland, John 1959–

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Leland, John 1959–

PERSONAL: Born 1959; married; wife's name Risa; children: Jordan. Education: Attended Columbia University.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Ecco Press, 10 E. 53rd St., 7th Fl., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Journalist. Spin magazine, columnist, until 1989; Newsday, journalist, beginning 1989; Newsweek, lifestyle section editor, beginning 1993; Details, former editor-in-chief; New York Times, currently reporter.

WRITINGS:

Hip: The History, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: John Leland is a well-known entertainment writer whose work has appeared in major periodicals for over two decades. When his literary agent suggested he write a book defining and tracing the origins of the term "hip," Leland was at first reluctant. Yet as he began researching, he found it to be a fascinating topic. "As I learned more, especially about the West African roots of the word hip, I began to see hip as a story we create about ourselves to get around the official racial narratives that we have thrust on us," Leland told RockCritics.com reporter Joe Estes, adding, "In this sense, I saw hip as ahead of—and in some cases a remedy to—the limited views of race that infuse government, school, church and the workplace. It seemed very central to who we think we are as Americans. And so, important." With this piqued interest, Leland approached the project seriously, first defining in Hip: The History, the term's African origin (from the Wolof "hipi"). Thus Leland writes, "Hip is an awareness or enlightenment across cultural lines. It means that you know more than you're supposed to about the other guy's game," whoever that "other guy" might be. Leland further defined the book this way: "To a great extent it's a book about race and pop culture, and about a paradox that seems to shape so much of America: Even as the nation's history has been defined by racial division and antipathy, in our pop culture, which we invent to tell stories about ourselves, we are at our best wildly hybrid. I question the popular assumption that what we call black culture and white culture are really separate." Indeed, Leland proposes that Blacks and whites have long been borrowing facets of each other's cultures and transforming what has been taken. This back-and-forth action is "the heat of hip." He continued, "The book's thesis is that hip emerges originally as an awareness that bridges binary polarities: black and white mainstream and margins, insider and outsider, conformist and rebel, etc. The binaries no longer shape our lives. We're much more complicated ethnically, and the forces that once lined up against hip behavior—church, capital, parents, role models—now all want to see themselves as hip."

In the work, Leland discusses such topics as slavery's effect on the blues; Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman as the original gangsters (read individualists); the Har-lem Renaissance; bebop; tricksters; the criminally hip (outlaws, gangsters, players, and hustlers); hip ladies; the drug connection; digital hipness. The work caught the attention of many reviewers, including Booklist reviewer Mike Tribby, who praised it as "a highly readable, provocative resource," Library Journal commentator Carol J. Binkowski, who called it "absorbing analysis," and Boston Globe reviewer Renee Graham, who dubbed it "entertaining and enlightening." In the Washington Post Book World John Strausbaugh elaborated, calling Hip "an impressive achievement—thorough, exhaustively researched and eventually a bit exhausting," and added that Leland "seems to know everything there is to know about hip. He's read all the books, listened to all the music, seen all the movies. He manages to lay it all out with a detached authority that's just a hair shy of the know-it-all smugness implied by the book's title." Yet not all reviewers were so laudatory. For instance, a Kirkus Reviews critic described the work as "comprehensive but over-wrought." Even so, School Library Journal reviewer Emily Lloyd predicted that Hip will be "a surefire way to excite teens about the forces at work in American history."