Phil Ford is well-known for the searching and sometimes raw posts that, over many years, he has contributed to Dial M for Musicology, the blog he runs with Jonathan Bellman. The speculative tussle that characterises his writing there is not much changed for this book, a committed, idiosyncratic study of ‘hip’ in the 1950s and 1960s. If the critical approach is unusual in academic work, that's in part owed to the subject matter: Ford worries at length about how far it is possible to write about – that is, to theorise, parse and articulate – a hip culture that would lower its shades and raise an eyebrow towards such square methodology. Hip didn't deliberate so much as just see; hip knew, but it didn't always need to speak. Yet Ford shows that something hip is possible even in academic terms. Arguments are approached elliptically, and departed from having been given only impressionistic treatment, a writerly equivalent of the bebop phraseology the author nails in transcribing a few bars of Charlie Parker. Sound is interrogated both analytically and poetically, Ford describing well, judging well, dealing with musical meaning in a way that's bread and butter to critics but often anathema to academics. By turns ebullient and reserved, illuminating and gnomic, the book itself is one answer to the question Ford poses at the outset: ‘what is hip?’

The central narrative tracks the emergence of a distinctive postwar counterculture. To 1950s leftists in the United States and across the West, mass culture was so much false consciousness. After hip, Ford argues, it became possible to articulate a politics of resistance through that kind of cultural production, not just in the face of it. Yet hip's identity was ambiguous then, and it remains so now. Ford rejects tendentiously expanded canons for the concept (‘skate punks, Herman Melville’, p. 23) to claim, as did LeRoi Jones in his 1963 classic Blues People for the closely related ‘cool’, that hip was first an African American project of opposition – indeed, survival – allied with marginal musical cultures, most obviously jazz. Yet a strength of Ford's book is its location of other, sympathetic ideas which were easily imported into a growing (American) counterculturalism. These included Zen, like jazz prioritising the moment, revelling in the mutability of things; expressionism, and its idea of music as the sounding of an inner psychological flow; and French existentialism, which recognised that in a world without God, one had to pioneer one's own route into meaningful living, that imperative coincidentally resonating with an older American individualism. Common at least to every insider's understanding of hip – apart from the advertisement of understanding itself, enshrined in the repurposed verb ‘to dig’ – was the certainty of being in but not of a hypocritical contemporary society, of having worked out the game and a way around its rules. The hustle that resulted, performed through artistic endeavour or on-scene demeanour, was not an add-on or a wink, but a total way of being. There were no 9-to-5 hippies, at least not in theory.

Yet the truly hip, the terminally hip, were lucky if they made it to 40, and Ford is not afraid to sort the smart original insight from its numerous stoned, drunk, sad reiterations. There is real empathy here for the beat poets who so extensively worked to make the hip life last, yet so too is there disdain for the beats’ frequent recourse to phatic little nothings, or their untutored attempts to inhabit a taut framework of jazz sound and rhythm. Kerouac, Ginsburg, and later on, Norman Mailer, are at the book's heart. Yet while Ford constantly acknowledges those writers’ fascinations with black American culture, it's surprising that he does not likewise stage blackness – the performed, constructed, imagined and fetishised condition of black American being – as central to the hip project.

True, this is to an extent addressed in the discussion of Mailer's infamous 1957 essay, ‘The White Negro’. There, Mailer drools over a somewhat ridiculous jazz hipster of his own imagining – albeit based on Miles Davis – one who would offer a new way of existing in the shadow of the bomb. This figure was numbed, superironic, animated by sex drive and death drive in equal measure. Mailer's latter-day primitivism has often been critiqued, and Ford doesn't much get involved on the grounds that, just as expressive writing from inside hip culture made no claim to ethnographic realism, so its historical assessment need not be limited to a portrait of hip's social world as ‘really’ shaped and lived (pp. 21–2). Fine: this is an essay on an idea, not a history per se.

Still, if our attention is held by those few whose words have come down to us in a torrent, we're never going to hear hip in the full complexity of its formulation. And here we come to some important omissions. Whatever Ford's angle of approach, so few black figures are appraised in their own right – this in contrast to Scott Saul's methods in his fine Reference Saul2001 discussion of the jazz-outsider as hip practical critic – that the table should have looked tilted from the off. The Chicago journalist and subcultural observer Dan Burley gets a nod, and so does Cab Calloway. Nevertheless, the book is primarily a study of hip as mediated by a rather white intellectual milieu, populated by commentators often at easy remove from key areas of the activity they observed. Those who had really thrown their hand in, musician-writers like Babs Gonzalez, Hampton Hawes and Charles Mingus, go unmentioned, despite the richness of their lives and work as hip's practitioner-theorists.

The most serious oversight, though, lies in the near-total absence of women. Hip was a macho idea emanating from a macho world, but artist-scenesters like Hettie Jones – whose 1990 memoir is a magnificent portrait of the Greenwich Village demimonde – aren't present in any way. The point is not just that the cast of historical characters needs filling out, though that would be something; it's that, without thinking about gender and its experience, the book's central topic is simply not comprehensible. To be hip, or to theorise hip, was to ask how life might be lived in all its fullness (p. 156). Yet nowhere here is there any extended acknowledgement that such fullness was generally available only to men, indeed, that such fullness was imagined as male. The ways that fullness's opposite was staged as female – often in the form of the newly developing suburb, and the alienated, passive consumerism it signified – is acknowledged only in passing. Given that so much of the work Ford is interested in comprises the full-bore performance of masculine self-making, a more nuanced discussion of gendered agency and its limits would surely be in order.

I'll admit that my complaint here is launched from inside a glasshouse: many of us jazz historians writing about this moment have come up against the same issue. However, reading this book, and through it reflecting on my own work, I kept asking myself how feasible it can be to continue to compile historical accounts that describe discourses and practices in more-or-less the shape they are found back there – rather than tearing up the historical script in order to completely rewrite it, as a scholar like Sherrie Tucker (Reference Tucker2000) has demanded. Perhaps, after all, what we need to know about is that social world as ‘really’ experienced, by all its inhabitants, rather than as channelled by this or that man self-memorialising in prose.

The book closes with a study of the diary-philosophy and patchy musical output of the composer John Benson Brooks. A work given particular attention is the long-gestating 1968 Decca LP Avant Slant, a jazz/12-tone/pop/poetry collage that sounds now like it's playing professor to Zappa's contemporaneous fratboy (although as Ford shows, there's more to it than that). In Brooks, Ford finds a figure who ‘blended the hipster's stance of sullen disaffiliation from the cultural mainstream and the Partisan Review’s intellectual critique of mass culture and society’ (p. 186). Yet Brooks also recognised that this postwar (jazz) modernism was ceding to a new kind of (pop/rock) postmodernism, in which mass culture might not be rejected, but reused and meaningfully remade. It's not always easy to care about the composer's years of notes-to-self towards enlightenment, but Ford develops this material into a concluding meditation on a private ‘practice without perfection’ (p. 220), and a return to the book's Zen beginnings. The author's final message is here, in a defence of simply doing culture, and doing it outside the late-capitalist, whitebread world. If there's a naivety to the notion that a quiet, personal, artistic practice can somehow exist as pure agency outside social structure, then that's part of the writing's heart-on-sleeve hopefulness. The book's hazy historical vision clarifies at moments like this into a sharper critical mode, one which is contentious but – as those hipsters might have said – kind of beautiful.