Hip Semantics

"Have courage, great warrior!"

I just finally got a book/CD on Lord Buckley, after waiting for months for Amazon to track one down. For you language lovers Lord Buckley’s hipsemantics has to appeal. If you don’t know the man who influenced Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and many others…I can only say try to seek him out (hard to find). I know you can Google as good as me, but try these: Richard Henzel has done him on stage, and you can see a reconstruction of one of his earlier acts when he ‘puppets’ four innocent members of the audience – not the full flight riffing, but gives you the vocal tones and attitude. Transcriptions of the pieces you can find here Try Subconscious Mind, or The Bad Rapping of the Marquis de Sade, or oh, any of it, once you know what he sounds like.............
He does Shakespeare like this:

"Hipsters, flipsters, and finger popping daddies, knock me your lobes, I come to lay Caesar out not to hip you to him”

“to swing or not to swing, that is the hanger"

Another version of hip slang, jazz riffing and bopping comes from Slim Gaillard, scat singing in his own version of the hip argot, which he called Vout Orenee. Again, I can only recommend that you track him down. Try the Ethnopoetics page here

Oh, the flat foot floogie with a floy, floy,

Flat foot floogie with a floy, floy,

Flat foot floogie with a floy, floy,

Floy doy, floy doy, floy doy.

In the UK we heard a very strange performer on the radio in the 50s-60s, called Stanley Unwin. He may not have the hip cool of the american jazz men but he mimicked the jargon of bureaucrats or technicians in an elegant gibberish language he called Unwinese. He loved James Joyce and Edward Lear. You can catch him on the second side of The Small Faces album “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake” (ah, the 60s!) where he tells a linking story between the tracks or check him out here sound samples here

Hi ho and a jolly welcode to all you surfwide'n interwebber lopers. Here beholdy manifold things Stanley Unwinmost - all deep joy and thorkus for great laugh'n tittery. O yes.

Deep Joy