Hip to be Square

Hip to be Square

Huey Lewis is four years older than me but, as it turns out, he did follow an early path very similar to mine. He entered Cornell as an engineering student as Hugh Anthony Cregg III, having gotten an 800 on the SAT math test. That bests my score by fifty points. The rest of his career was quite a bit different from mine, but presumably at the age of 71 now he takes some degree of pride in his accomplishments. After all, the man, along with his band, The News, hit triple platinum in 1986 with five songs the year after he broke through on the soundtrack of Back to the Future, perhaps the definitive 80’s Pop movie soundtrack. One of those songs, along with The Power of Love and Stuck With You, was Hip to be Square. Lewis has explained the he wrote the song to parody hippies who go mainstream. These are people he called bourgeois bohemians. Who among us doesn’t know of a few of these people. The black activist Tom Jones, who notably took over the Willard Straight Hall Student Union at Cornell in 1969 (a year when Huey was at Cornell) and became the symbol of the Black Power Movement of the late 60’s (brandishing his weapon and bandoliers on the cover of the nation’s newspapers). Huey had probably learned that by 1986, Jones was a successful bank executive at Citicorp. My guess is that he might well have felt that the way hip Jones was then hip again by virtue of his “sell out” to the man. Presumably by that time Huey was beginning to like his star-studded life of luxury.

I remember about a dozen years ago going to Mexico City on a business trip and staying at the W Hotel there. Westin had gotten the jump on everyone in hospitality by creating the W brand and setting it off as very hip. The bellmen and valets all wore black over black and sported communication headsets to make them look entirely efficient and focused on your personal comfort by using all the latest technology to your advantage. It looked hip. It felt hip. It was hip.

Yesterday when we checked into the Brooklyn Hilton, where we are staying for our weeklong visit to New York, I recognized that I was staying in the hippest borough, but my kids happen to live in Brooklyn. Everyone assumes we are staying at the Brooklyn Bridge Hotel, that Starwood star that cost $500+ per night for a basic room. That is simply too pricey for my blood, especially fora week’s stay. Last time we came we stayed at the Marriott Brooklyn, which is near the bridge, and quite nice, new and functional, but at $200 per night cannot qualify as being too trendy no matter how decent (in size and fit) the rooms may be. This time our pal Phillip insisted that we stay at the Brooklyn Hilton since he is the new Corporate Accounts manager fir the brand and felt it was a big upgrade from the Marriott several blocks away. We booked the recommended room style with concierge floor services and after full friends and family discount, cost us $250 per night.

Our first impression on late arrival last night was that this was a very hip hotel that felt like a W of yesteryear. When we got to the room, we were a tad confused as the decor, which was reasonably new, was an eclectic blend of old New York (the wallpaper accents had a distinctive NewAmsterdam feel) and Soho, with a single painting with teal scattered random letters. The furniture was modern, but the carpeting had a pirate rope theme going on. Don’t get me wrong, it was a perfectly serviceable room with a small, but efficient bathroom and just barely enough room to qualify it as a King Deluxe room. I figured that the acid test for value would be the quality of the concierge lounge service.

In the morning I managed to get to the bathroom without waking up Kim, which means the room was well-designed. The bathroom was, as predicted, efficient. So I headed down for breakfast to the lounge. That’s where my trouble began. The front desk person said the lounge was in the dining room. The hostess said I could sit anywhere, but that the lounge was technically the back room where the buffet had been set up. Finally, I stopped a server and asked what the deal was with the concierge lounge. He fessed up that due to COVD they weren’t operating the lounge as a separate area, but not to worry, they would give me a $15 per person credit to compensate me. By my calculus, they were giving me $30 of credit for my $50 upgrade.

What I noticed then was that of the ten or so tables that were occupied, there was only one other one besides mine that was filled with not-particularly-hip English-as-a-primary-language people. The other was a Midwestern family who opted for take-out rather than stay in a place where they didn’t fit well. The rest were a menagerie of foreign souls ranging from a French couple to an older Indian couple, to a group of Asia-Minor folks who seemed to talk a variety of languages that neither seemed similar nor resembled English. The common element at these other tables was that there wasn’t a tucked shirt in the bunch, everyone had jagged but stylish hair and no one was eating anything that looked remotely like breakfast, at least not like anything I could recognize. All these people were clearly Brooklyn hipsters even though I was just barely hip enough to recognize them as such.

I don’t like being the square in the room any more than anyone else does. I stop short of calling myself hip, but I like to feel as hip as I can. I might well pay a bit extra to stay at a hip and cool hotel, especially if it made me feel on my game more than the average bear. But overpaying for services and special features not truly given, is simply not cool or hip. I don’t know Huey Lewis and for all I know he’s a guy who never met a Hilton he didn’t like. Now I have to find a way to tell Phillip that the Brooklyn hotel with his chain’s brand is more square than hip despite all its hipster clientele. Maybe if I’m lucky someone who reads this (Matthew) will tell him for me.

Huey ends his classic pop song with lyrics that resonated with me this morning;

Don’t tell me that I’m crazy

Don’t tell me I’m nowhere

Take it from me

It’s hip to be square….and pay extra for the privilege.