What Is Hip?

Tower of Power sax players Emilio Castillo and Stephen "Doc" Kupka wrote this song. In our interview with Castillo, he said: "I would give most of the credit for that concept lyrically to Doc. He said he wanted write a song about being hip and I said, 'About being hip?' He said, 'Well, what I mean is being hip is so short lived. You can be hip by wearing your hair a certain way today and then in three months that style's gone and you're as unhip as you could possibly be. I want to write a song about that.' It's saying what's hip today might become passé."

The group's drummer, David Garibaldi, helped out with the rhythms. Castillo told us, "It was his idea to get Rocco to play those sixteenth notes on the bass. There was a song out at the time called 'Going Down' by Freddie King and it had that bass line. Girabladi's idea was to hit those sixteenth notes and then rather than hitting a big one, you know one, two, three, four, one... He says, 'We're going to push it one sixteenth in front of the one every time.' So it'd be, one, two, three, four, boom, two, three, four, boom... and that sort of prevailing thing throughout the tune is what made that song drive. And then on top of that we had the classic horn arrangement and Lenny Williams singing it."

Sheila E. intended to cover this tune on her 1991 set, Sex Cymbal, but TOP's horn section was unavailable. She opted to redo Labelle's "Lady Marmalade" instead.