The 1970s File Feature
What Is Hip?
What Is Hip?: Tower of Power and the Brass-Driven Funk of the Oakland Sound Tower of Power emerged from Oakland, California, in the late 1960s as one of the …
01 The Story
What Is Hip?: Tower of Power and the Brass-Driven Funk of the Oakland Sound
Tower of Power emerged from Oakland, California, in the late 1960s as one of the most musically accomplished horn-driven soul and funk ensembles in American music. Their 1973 album "Tower of Power" on Warner Bros. Records produced the single "What Is Hip?", which was released in early 1974 and made its Billboard Hot 100 debut at number 98 on February 23, 1974, peaking at number 91 the following week during its brief two-week chart appearance. While the Hot 100 performance was modest, the song achieved far greater success on the R&B chart and established itself as one of the most enduring and frequently cited recordings of the early 1970s funk and soul era.
The band was founded by saxophonist and vocalist Emilio Castillo and Stephen Kupka in Oakland in 1968, and by the early 1970s had assembled a large ensemble that typically included a four or five piece horn section alongside the standard rock rhythm section. This commitment to an expanded brass lineup distinguished Tower of Power from many contemporaneous funk acts and gave their recordings a specific sonic character that drew on the jazz and soul traditions of the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly the music that had been produced by Sly and the Family Stone, who had also emerged from the Oakland-San Francisco corridor.
"What Is Hip?" was written by Emilio Castillo, Stephen Kupka, and drummer David Garibaldi, a rhythm section player whose approach to the drum kit was as compositionally sophisticated as any aspect of the band's work. Garibaldi had developed a distinctive style that incorporated elements of jazz drumming's polyrhythmic complexity into a funk context, and his performance on "What Is Hip?" in particular demonstrated how a drummer could contribute to the rhythmic argument of a funk recording in ways that went considerably beyond time-keeping.
The song's horn arrangements, which combined to create the signature Tower of Power sound, were notable for their rhythmic precision and their use of the horn section as a percussive as well as melodic element. The brass ensemble played interlocking phrases that reinforced the rhythmic grid of the track while adding harmonic color, a technique that drew on the tradition of Count Basie's riff-based big band writing but applied it to the tighter, more groove-oriented context of early 1970s funk.
Lead vocalist Lenny Williams joined Tower of Power in 1972 and appeared on this recording, his powerful voice adding an expressiveness to the lyrical content that matched the musical sophistication of the arrangement. Williams's tenure with the band was relatively brief, but his vocal contributions to their most celebrated recordings, including "What Is Hip?" and "So Very Hard to Go," were central to establishing their commercial and artistic reputation during the early and mid-1970s.
Warner Bros. Records distributed Tower of Power's recordings during their most commercially productive period, giving the band access to a national promotion infrastructure that could secure radio airplay across major markets. However, the band's musical complexity, particularly the horn-dominated arrangements that were their defining characteristic, positioned them somewhat outside the mainstream of early 1970s pop radio, which was tending toward either harder rock or smoother soul material. Their Hot 100 performance on "What Is Hip?" reflected this positioning: the record was enthusiastically received in markets with strong R&B and soul audiences but did not achieve the crossover penetration of more streamlined funk recordings.
Tower of Power has maintained remarkable longevity as a performing ensemble, remaining active through the subsequent five decades with various lineup changes. Their horn section has become one of the most sought-after in the professional musician community, contributing to recordings by artists ranging from Elton John to Santana to Otis Redding. The band's pedagogical influence has also been significant, with their arrangements and rhythmic concepts studied in music education contexts as examples of sophisticated brass writing within a popular music framework.
"What Is Hip?" has been covered and sampled extensively, and its title question has become a kind of cultural shorthand for the self-referential paradox of attempting to define and categorize coolness. The song's continued presence in compilations, film soundtracks, and commercial applications confirms its status as one of the defining recordings of the Oakland soul and funk tradition.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of What Is Hip?: Authenticity, Self-Definition, and the Impossibility of Cool
The question posed by Tower of Power's "What Is Hip?" is not merely rhetorical. It is a genuine philosophical inquiry into the nature of authenticity and self-definition in American popular culture, and the song's enduring fascination lies partly in the fact that it poses the question with full awareness that any answer will immediately undermine itself. The defining property of hipness, as the song implicitly demonstrates, is that it cannot be achieved through conscious pursuit. The moment you ask what is hip, you have announced your uncertainty, and uncertainty is the one condition incompatible with actual hipness.
This paradox was particularly resonant in the context of 1973-1974 American culture, when the counterculture of the late 1960s had been absorbed into the mainstream sufficiently to generate a thriving industry of hip signifiers available for purchase and adoption. Fashion, music, language, and lifestyle choices that had once marked genuine cultural outsider status had become commercial products, and the question of what distinguished authentic cultural identity from its imitation had become genuinely complex. Tower of Power posed this question from a position of considerable musical credibility, which gave the inquiry a self-aware quality: a band whose musicianship was incontestably sophisticated asking whether musicianship is what hipness consists of, or whether it is something else entirely.
The lyrics sketch a portrait of someone who has accumulated all the available external markers of hip: the right clothes, the right associations, the right knowledge of cultural currency. But the song's narrator observes that this accumulation does not produce the thing itself. Hipness, the song suggests, is not a property that can be acquired from the outside in; it must emerge from some authentic internal quality that resists definition and therefore resists imitation. This is both true and conveniently circular, as anyone who has encountered a genuine hipster can attest.
The musical setting of the inquiry is itself a kind of argument. Tower of Power's musicianship on this recording is so thoroughly internalized, so clearly the product of genuine mastery rather than acquired style, that it functions as a demonstration of one answer to the title question. If anything is hip, it might be the kind of musical competence that makes this performance possible: knowledge so deeply embodied that it no longer requires conscious deployment. Drummer David Garibaldi's polyrhythmic precision, the horn section's interlocking phrases, the rhythm section's collectively negotiated groove, these are the products of musicians who have moved beyond conscious technique into something closer to instinct.
The song also addresses the relationship between hipness and the Black American cultural traditions from which the concept derived. Much of what mainstream American culture had defined as hip in the postwar decades was drawn from African American music, language, fashion, and social practice, often with inadequate acknowledgment of these origins. Tower of Power, performing from within one of these traditions, could pose the question of hipness with a specificity and authority unavailable to those observing from outside.
Decades of revival and reference have confirmed "What Is Hip?" as one of the shrewdest self-examinations that American popular music produced in the early 1970s. Its title has become a cultural reference point precisely because the question it poses remains unanswerable, which is, in its own way, the most satisfying possible answer.
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