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hipster, in the context of Tom Waits, has little to do with the twenty-first century subculture of vegan eateries, handlebar mustaches, and fixed-gear bicycles. The term “hipster” is generally thought to have come from a misprint of “hepster,” a devotee to the Harlem jazz lifestyle in the ’30s. Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary—accompanied by a song of the same name—was written to introduce white America to the slang of Harlem jazz in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance. Therefore, “hipster” originally meant someone who was knowledgeable of a rising cultural tide (i.e., hip). However, over the decades—and due to a myriad of cultural events both seen and unseen—the term "hipster" was twisted and regrounded in elitism, cultural inauthenticity, and fauxhemianism. In the words of Mark Greif, cofounder of n+1, “[the hipster moment] did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.” Essentially, the hipster has become a performance of conspicuous consumption using culture as currency. This cultural transaction—among other events—is what poisoned the hipster well. The word is rarely used without its toxicity of inauthenticity.
On the surface, Waits would appear to have under this persona of a pseudo-artist straining for attention while lacking any actual talent. Waits’s way of moving, talking, and especially singing is unique, to say the least. This type of quirky uniqueness would easily fall under the category of Weirdness for Its Own Sake or pretention, a trademark of the twenty-first century hipster. However, his personality as the weirdo—the outcast—permeates his music to create something infinitely creative, inventive, and, after all is said and done, relatable and authentic. This relatability of his music is what creates the space between him and the cultural toxicity of hipsterism. Thus, Tom Waits is not a hipster, but the proto-hipster. His expression as an artist—whether in his music or acting on stage and in film—never truly strays from his formative years playing piano in smoky bars. Terming Waits a hipster applies the definition of the word before it was diluted with inauthenticity. He evolved, challenged, and experimented, but never lost his personal and cultural core that grew up playing blues in the middle of the night.
However, much of the image of a Portlandian hipster can remain intact. He is consistently pictured wearing a flatcap or fedora, skinny jeans, and the kind of European boots I like to call “skin socks.” I believe they are called Jefferson boots on the label. His weirdness is what makes his image so iconic. A cigarette loosely flailing between his fingers as he makes his way onstage, hat askew, dressed in a slim-fitting suit: this is the man we’ve come to love and partially know. His appearance is therefore undoubtedly hipster-esque, though in an endearing and authentic way rather than an alienating and annoying one.
Of course, the nuclear argument for his hipsterdom is in his art. His voice is the most recognizable aspect of his music. He sings with lungs so full of gravel and diesel smoke you could barely call it singing, let alone when he added the megaphone. In his middle to later years, he was also known to use a variety of odd instruments. For example, on Blood Money, he uses a pneumatic calliope—a steam-powered piano used in circuses back in the 1930s—and some sort of giant Indonesian seed pod for percussion. However, none of this was just for the sake of a hollow artistic performance to reinforce his image. These weird elements destabilize the audience through the use of the uncanny. The easiest example is in comparing Waits’s “Downtown Train” to Rod Stewart’s cover by the same name. Stewart’s version, though it did hit number three on the Billboard Hot 100, was distinctly lacking in edge due to the absence of Waits’s famous, gravely voice. It has a poppy element that strays far away from the dark, rainy streets of Waits’s world. These unusual and unique instruments and sounds are what tether Waits to the gritty, industrial atmosphere he creates.
Waits’s music and voice weren’t always as dark and gritty as his later years. He began in 1973 as primarily as a one man act, with little more than a sparse rhythm section to back him up as he tickled the ivories—usually in a jazz mode. He had the occasional early song that featured a guitar, but they were sparse at that point. As he moved through the seventies, he began to expand the instrumentation more often, with Blue Valentine featuring a cover of “Somewhere” from West Side Story. Somewhere between the release of Heart Attack and Vine in 1980 and 1983’s Swordfishtrombones, something inside Waits changed. As the legend goes, he met and married his wife, Kathleen Brennan in 1980. She became an inspiration to his music by introducing him to new music and handling much of his managerial duties. As a result of the new Waits, Swordfishtrombones became the tipping point, sending him into a new musical phase, lacking saxophones or swing beats. This is where his eccentricity hit its stride—timed perfectly with his break into film and stage, allowing him to also explore other media. He went on to produce the bulk of his work—music, acting, and score composition—in this industrial, experimental style. He ended his music career (as far as we know) in 2011 with his last album, Bad as Me, a gritty destination he was bound toward for decades.
While he lives in these dark, dingey atmospheres, and experiments with old circus instruments, Waits’s brand of weirdness manages to sound good, and these elements became his late-career signature. We don’t listen in spite of these often grotesque and unnerving musical elements—we listen because of them. He is an unnatural inventor and a musical mad scientist. It doesn’t distract from his deft musicality either, and much of the time his creepy tonality and attitude remains intact even in the deep, instrumental tracks like those on Night on Earth—the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s film of the same name—where his signature rasp is often left out. His ability to use his weirdness (dare I say hipster-ness?) to create an undeniable masterpiece is unparalleled, let alone creating sixteen masterpieces over the last few decades.
Waits’s musical inclinations build on the foundation of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart’s innate sense of tone beyond notes, while retaining an overall sense of outcast relatability. To generally compare Zappa and Beefheart to Waits is impossible. They work in different locations, play different sports. However, at the risk of overstepping, a piecemeal comparison can help explain Waits’s evolution as the proto-hipster.
Beefheart and Zappa are probably the two best-known names in avant-garde rock and roll. Take, for example, Beefheart’s album Trout Mask Replica, which was inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2010. While Beefheart proved to be one of the most complex composers of the late twentieth century, his music is fundamentally inaccessible to the average person. It’s often both polyrhythmic—the rhythm and lead guitars playing in entirely different time signatures—and polytonal—they’re playing in different keys. Furthermore, the lyrics are often complete nonsense. For a short example, “Ella Guru” is a bizarre story about shooting rats with shotguns, sung by Beefheart and what seems to be Elmo the Muppet on a lethal dose of Benzedrine. As the band is starting to back off, a new voice recites, “Ha ha, right right, just dig it / That’s right the Mascara Snake, fast and bulbous / Tight also.” The use of these outrageous elements to create something that is original but doesn’t actually sound good—at least in the generally accepted definition—is essentially Dada. It’s humorous and whimsical, but you have to be in on the joke. Which is to say it’s certainly creative and experimental, but there’s almost too much complexity to the point that it’s basically incomprehensible to the average person, bordering on sarcasm.
Tom Waits, on the other hand was able to use some of these foundations of weirdness, mostly through his voice, sense of humor, and bizarre instrumentation, to create something entirely unique, but still accessible both emotionally and musically. In Swordfishtrombones, which kicked off the new experimental, industrial version of Waits, he opens with a pounding beat on “Underground.” This song lays the foundation for the world that Waits operates in musically: “They’re alive, they’re awake / While the rest of the world is asleep . . . There’s a world going on / Underground.” Every song in the album that comes after it works in that underground, after-midnight world. “Dave the Butcher”—an instrumental circus tune consisting of Waits dancing maniacally on a de-tuned organ while Victor Feldman follows him on the bass boobams—is followed up by “Johnsburg, Illinois,” a succinct, sorrowful love song, and it works because the world is cohesive. It has a natural narrative arc that connects the weirdness. That’s what sets Tom Waits’s weirdness apart from the avant garde or the hipsters—it all comes together to form a cohesive story.
This can be seen through “Frank’s Wild Years,” the spoken-word poem on Swordfishtrombones that tells a brief story of used office furniture salesman who finds himself unsatisfied with his life, his wife (“a piece of used jet trash”), and their blind chihuahua. Over a jazz tune on a Hammond B3 Organ, Frank goes to a gas station, torches his house, and laughs maniacally across the street. He then drives North into the night, away from Los Angeles. Not quite satisfied with the narrative ending there, Waits wrote a play of the same name that debuted in 1986, which follows Frank post-arson, with the soundtrack album following in 1987. He’s a storyteller at heart, and his sense of narrative is what gives the listener a feeling of being at home with the weird.
These elements of weirdness and intense emotion in his music twist and carry through every album in different ways. It’s not that he’s recycling the same material over the years. He continuously circles these strange ideas and characters to gain a multitude of different perspectives on a similar tone of ideas. This is his over-evolution. The listener gets a sense that his perspective on subjects such as lost lovers is not trite, but carefully considered, built upon kaleidoscopically, often presenting multiple angles in the same album. The second track of his first album—and most popular song—“I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You” ends with a woman leaving the bar and the main character sitting alone at a bar. On the more recent album Real Gone, the song “Green Grass” is a love song from a corpse, dead and buried, somehow retaining the hope that he will be reunited with his lover someday. This feeling of lost love—sometimes to the level of despair—is quintessentially Waitsian. He often plays on a lot of dark themes that give his music mortal stakes and, if the listener dives in, they can feel the gravity of it. Even his funnier songs, like the aforementioned “Frank’s Wild Years” or “Better off Without a Wife” still contain darker, more serious undertones. In these cases, the freedom of losing everything on purpose and the sorrow of loneliness, respectively, give a depth to something that could be seen as simply silly. His use of the similar themes with different—often opposing—perspectives over the course of thirty years, coupled with his incorporation of wildly creative musicality and bizarre instrumentation, creates an overall sense that he evolved leaps ahead of his time, both in emotion and creativity.
These elements of weirdness and intense emotion in his music twist and carry through every album in different ways. It’s not that he’s recycling the same material over the years. He continuously circles these strange ideas and characters to gain a multitude of different perspectives on a similar tone of ideas. This is his over-evolution. The listener gets a sense that his perspective on subjects such as lost lovers is not trite, but carefully considered, built upon kaleidoscopically, often presenting multiple angles in the same album. The second track of his first album—and most popular song—“I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You” ends with a woman leaving the bar and the main character sitting alone at a bar. On the more recent album Real Gone, the song “Green Grass” is a love song from a corpse, dead and buried, somehow retaining the hope that he will be reunited with his lover someday. This feeling of lost love—sometimes to the level of despair—is quintessentially Waitsian. He often plays on a lot of dark themes that give his music mortal stakes and, if the listener dives in, they can feel the gravity of it. Even his funnier songs, like the aforementioned “Frank’s Wild Years” or “Better off Without a Wife” still contain darker, more serious undertones. In these cases, the freedom of losing everything on purpose and the sorrow of loneliness, respectively, give a depth to something that could be seen as simply silly. His use of the similar themes with different—often opposing—perspectives over the course of thirty years, coupled with his incorporation of wildly creative musicality and bizarre instrumentation, creates an overall sense that he evolved leaps ahead of his time, both in emotion and creativity.
