“Hip” means fashionable, popular at a particular time, as we can read it in the Cambridge Dictionary. But back in the 1900s, the exact definition was “aware” or “in the know”, and became an adjective within the African-American jazz scene in the 30s and 40s to describe people who follows jazz music. 

But how the word “hip” came to this scenario is a bit more complicated as there are many theories about the etymology of the word. In The African Heritage of American English, Holloway and Vass suggested that hip is derived from Senegalese slaves (called Wolof) for whom "xipi" in their native Wolof language meant “to have your eyes open, to be aware”. Another theory comes from those who used opium as the slang term for it was “hop”.

(Read also: The word 'slut', then and now)

Now adding the common English suffix "-ster", we create the word “hipster”. As Lewis Porter, a jazz historian at Rutgers University, says, it is used to describe someone who sees himself as a hip, ahead of the curve in jazz. So as "kat" means in Wolof someone who does something, putting "kat" and "xipi" together we have "xipikat" from where the word “hepcat” is derived. And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is a modernized version of “hepcat,” which had the same meaning as hipster in jazz circles.

After World War II, the authors whose literature influenced American culture were what we call the “Beat Generation”. So literally speaking these guys were the real hipsters. The way I see it they weren’t anything like the media stereotype that Herb Caen started about them in 1958, called "beatnik".

If we start from the beginning, the Beat Generation was a bunch of nonconformist people who rejected pre-packaged life. To understand better the image of what the people of their time called being “radical” we have to travel back in time. After World War I there was a generation named the “Lost Generation”, popularized by Hemingway, who felt like they did not fit in the reality of life after the brutal and horrifying war; it was the beginning of the Great Depression. Jack Kerouac, a pioneer of the movement, felt he identified with this earlier generation and what they went through during the Great Depression, where then he began to wonder how young people like him could reject the new abundance available in America. To be clear, they searched a spiritual meaning of life while the rest of America was searching for materialism. And they were somehow the hepcat of new literature.

The movement started as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg met at Columbia University in 1944, where they were disgraced as Ginsberg was suspended because of a disciplinary action and Kerouac dropped out. They met William Burroughs who graduated from Harvard and lived in the Greenwich Village. They started to read novels, write poetry as they became jazz aficionados and experimented with drugs like Benzedrine. Their literature was influenced by Europeans at the time like Antonin Artaud, William Blake or André Breton. 

(Read also: Seven forgotten jazz albums beyond the jazz standards)

The name of the movement first came from Kerouac in 1948, but it had negative connotations as it was linked to the drug culture. So he made an appropriate vision of the meaning by including the musical association of being “on the beat”. In November 1952, John Clellon Holmes introduces the term to the world by writing an article in the New York Times Magazine called “This is the Beat Generation”. And in 1957 Norman Mailer wrote an article called “The White Negro” where he explains how the Beat poets had a free lifestyle and attitude of black jazz musicians of the 30s and 40s. Three most iconic works from the movement are Kerouac’s "On the Road", Burrough’s "Naked Lunch" and Ginsberg’s "Howl".

"On the Road" was written in 1951 when Kerouac was traveling across America in a completely overwhelming style as it was written in a scroll of teletype paper. His friend and prime influence, Neal Cassady, renamed Dean Moriartry in the book, was his company during the journey. There is amazing descriptive prose about America, jazz music but most of all the feeling of freedom in facing to the open road. The reviewer, Gilbert Millstein, called it “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’, and whose principal avatar he is”.

"Naked Lunch" first appeared in Paris in 1959 with little impact. It got published in the US in 1962 as a controversial drug and sex novel. It’s a classic detective fiction with Burrough’s alter-ego William Lee, full of sexual obsession, degradation and drugs. Where all this ties together with the addiction theme that the author called “the algebra of needs”, where the quest for heroin is a metaphor for just as much destructive obsessions. 

Finally, Ginsberg wrote “Howl” in San Francisco and he read the first section there in public in 1955. It’s full of emotions and is sexually explicit as it explores the anxieties of his time. Writer and critic Luc Sante wrote in one of his essays that "reading 'Howl' aloud or reciting it, you could feel the poem giving you supernatural powers, the ability to punch through brick walls and walk across cities from rooftop to rooftop".

So yes, these hipsters created a lifestyle, a philosophy that became a significant movement, influencing writers like the French Louis-Ferdinand Céline and his famous work "Journey to the End of the Night". And they were more like an indignant generation, than the sense of “cool” that hipsters have these days. They are “hot”, like jazz musicians back in the 40s used to refer to real jazz. They described their time, worlds that no longer exist. 

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