Aug. 08, 1994: Cover:Society:Everyone Hip..Is Anyone
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<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
Aug. 08, 1994 Everybody's Hip (And That's Not Cool)
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
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COVER/SOCIETY, Page 48
If Everyone Is Hip...Is Anyone Hip?
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<body>
<p> Once an outsider's rejection of the mainstream, the attitude
has become mall friendly and marketed as everyone's mode of
the moment
</p>
<p>By Richard Lacayo--Reported by Ginia Bellafante and David Gross/New York and Dan
Cray/Los Angeles
</p>
<p> Even if it's hard to take pity on people who expect to pocket
several million dollars, you have to admit the organizers of
Woodstock '94 have a thankless job. In more ways than one, the
first Woodstock was an impossible act to follow. By bringing
together 400,000 people who forever after thought of themselves
as inspired outsiders present at the creation, the concert became
a high-water mark of a tendency that had been building in American
culture for decades. In the years right after World War II,
there emerged from the bohemias of San Francisco, New York City
and a few other metropolises a loose disposition, a convergence
of moods, disaffections, ecstasies and unconventional conclusions,
a willful refusal to act sensibly, that could be collected under
the catchall term hip.
</p>
<p> Though it was always a little hard to pin down, hip was a notion
roomy enough to describe flower children in tie-dye as well
as bikers in black leather, the impeccable cool of John Coltrane's
sax as well as the jerky forward thrust of Abbie Hoffman. All
of it was admissible on the principle that it represented a
heartfelt rejection of the mainstream. The mainstream was understood
to be all-powerful and wrong about everything: politics, art,
religion, sex, drugs and music. It was deaf to the beat, blind
to the truth and dressed by Penney's.
</p>
<p> For those who attended the original Woodstock, it was possible
to imagine that they were present at history's largest convergence
of the privileged few, the hip minority. Of course, they saw
it as the birth of Woodstock Nation, a giant step toward the
hipping of the world at large.
</p>
<p> It's going to be harder to think of next week's festival that
way. Though the crowds will come determined to break whatever
mold they are poured into, it won't be easy to escape the feeling
that this time Woodstock will be history's largest convergence
of the mass market. What else can you say about a gathering
of the tribes that already has its own official refrigerator
magnet, to say nothing of its own condom and kaleidoscope? Whose
organizers test-marketed the proposed lineup of bands to see
which names would get maximum audience response? Which will
be brought to you with the sponsorship of Pepsi, Haagen-Dazs
and Apple computer, and sold to you via QVC's home-shopping
channel?
</p>
<p> If Woodstock '94 becomes a triumph of salesmanship over spirit,
blame it on the curious times in which we now live. Hipness
has become a national paradox, a special condition almost everyone
seems to aspire to. And one that, thanks to a lot of shrewd
marketing, almost everyone can fancy having achieved.
</p>
<p> In the course of four decades, the poses and postures of hip
have moved outward from the back rooms of a few cities to the
great plains of America's cultural space. Ideas and style statements
that 40 years ago might have languished for a while in jazz
clubs and coffeehouses now move in nanoseconds from the dance
clubs and gangsta corners. Through MTV and the trendier magazines,
and whatever other express routes the mass media command, they
get passed over to mass-marketers who shear off the rough edges
and ship them to the malls. So body piercing and ambient technomusic
and performance art and couture motorcycle boots and the huggie
drug Ecstasy are shipped overnight throughout the merchandise
mart that is America.
</p>
<p> In its infinite pliancy, capitalism proved itself well suited
to absorb whatever it was in hip that might fascinate consumers,
while discarding the uncomfortable parts. For every counterculture,
there emerged a corresponding sales counterculture. The appurtenances
of hip--Ray-Bans, leather jackets, this or that haircut--are constantly sent scattershot across America, blurring the
lines between the hip and the square. It was only a matter of
time before espresso moved from Greenwich Village bongo bars
to McDonald's. And did Ollie North really think he could summon
up a lotus land of weirdos by claiming men wear earrings in
the Clinton White House? He should check out the N.F.L.
</p>
<p> But when hipness is embraced from the mainstream, much of the
life gets squeezed from it. If the signs of hip--goatees,
pierced nipples and calf tattoos--are everywhere, what's so
hip about them? If the attitudes of hip--the implacable cool,
the insider's ironies or the in-your-face mania of the wild
men and women possessed by their own truth--are officially
sponsored by the major media, what's so special? The sense that
hipness has got to be a little shopworn can lead to a cross-generational
discomfort, one shared by both the baby boomers trying to stretch
out the adventure of youth by driving a Jeep Wagoneer and by
the twentysomethings who wonder whether they are being led by
their nose rings from one bogus trend to the next.
</p>
<p> To be sure, there are still large stretches of pop culture for
which hipness is beside the point: The Bridges of Madison County,
The Lion King, almost anything by Wynonna Judd. And to be sure,
the corruption of hipness does not mean that creativity itself
is in any peril. In every other American garage there is a band
plotting the next revolution; in every other American basement
a desktop publisher is turning out a private magazine for her
personal niche market. For the imaginative, in fact, hipness
has always been irrelevant anyway. Such self-conscious artifacts
of the hip sensibility as Bret Easton Ellis' novel Less Than
Zero or Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, date badly
in no time. If such writers as T. Coraghessan Boyle, such artists
as Jenny Holzer or such choreographers as Bill T. Jones are
hip, it's because they are attuned to rhythms deeper than the
latest beat.
</p>
<p> But at a time when the pavements are worn thin by Doc Martens,
when every open door admits a file of backward baseball caps
and soul patches, when jocks sell attitude and all of rock is
supposed to be alternative--hipness is bigger than General
Motors. So big, in fact, that at this moment of triumph, when
the ironies of Jerry Seinfeld and David Letterman occupy the
best time slots on television, and even the President's daughter
is named after a Joni Mitchell song, hipness is giving off an
arthritic creak. It's true that nothing is more difficult to
pin down than the sensibility of an era, and nothing harder
to trace with certainty than its rise and fall. But in a society
so adept at distributing the very latest thing and bestowing
an edge upon the most unremarkable consumer fodder--Miles
Davis wore khakis!--it's impossible not to recognize that
hip is losing its force, muddling its message, becoming just
another sales pitch. Or a decoration on the edges of the most
conventional ways of life.
</p>
<p> Say the word hip to Henry Rollins, manic stage monologist and
now the tattooed front man of the Rollins Band, a group sacred
to many college radio stations. He winces. "Hip has become a
lot of asses to kiss, a lot of places to be, a lot of parties
to go to." Try it out on the poet Allen Ginsberg, who helped
invest the idea with meaning in the '50s. After carefully distinguishing
some current notions of hip from the outcast's lucidity that
was his vision of it all, he lets loose. "An upper-bourgeois
life-style con. A camouflage for egocentricity and commercial
theatrics." Propose it to a younger writer, Mark Leyner, who
has had two appearances on Letterman and three smart-funny books
(including Et Tu, Babe). He goes ugh. "We have allowed for a
hipness that's produced in vitro. It has no basis, it's made
from scratch."
</p>
<p> The atmosphere of cultural confusion was palpable one recent
night at the party to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Paper,
the magazine of culture formation among the seriously hip. A
good many of the names that show up in clubland gossip columns--Veronica Webb, the model! Joey Arias, the drag queen!--had shown up at the Supper Club, a party space in Manhattan's
theater district. They were mixing with some of the high-concept
personalities who have edged into more publicized realms. Like
Lady Kier of Deee-Lite! (The recording group, something like
the B-52s of house music.) Ricki Lake, the rising talk-show
host--look out, Oprah--was chatting with John Waters, who
starred her in his fondly remembered camp comedy Hairspray.
And there was--yes!--Shannen Doherty, the Lucrezia Borgia
of nighttime TV, the Kilimanjaro of problems, as skinny as Kate
Moss these days, chain-smoking in a little black dress.
</p>
<p> Yet despite all efforts, the mood was a little shaky. Granted,
at the big party a few weeks earlier for some liquor company,
there were mud-wrestling drag queens. (No kidding.) But the
problem that night didn't seem to be any lack of diversions.
The very notion of 10 years on the downtown scene had led to
melancholy reflections about what hip has come to. There was
grumbling in the room along the lines of been-there/done-that.
And if talk-show hostesses and prime-time starlets are hip--Ricki Lake? Shannen Doherty?--then what exactly can hip still
mean? "I wish there was a department in the government that
would tell people what is cool as far as culture and fashion
goes," said one of the guests, Spencer Tunick, a photographer
who came to publicize a nude photo shoot in front of the U.N.
"It seems like we're all over the place."
</p>
<p> If hip is something different now from what it once was, what
was it? By most accounts, it first emerged among urban blacks,
for whom it could be both a defense against a hostile world
and the sum of the special insights of life under pressure.
Ginsberg, who with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs forms
part of the Holy Trinity of Beat literature, recalls that the
term hip migrated into mainstream speech from the drug culture
and the jazz world it intersected. "There it meant tolerant.
It was a word used among junkies. It implied a knowingness and
understanding."
</p>
<p> Ginsberg credits the Beat writer Herbert Huncke with transmitting
the notion in the late 1940s through autobiographical reminiscences,
later anthologized as The Evening Sun Turned Crimson. In one
story the teenage Huncke watched the police bust a hermaphrodite
junkie in a seedy hotel. "The tolerance of the kid was juxtaposed
with the brutality of the cops," says Ginsberg. "The sympathetic
observer, Huncke, became an exemplary illustration of what was
hip." Huncke's own take on the idea is a bit darker. "It meant,"
he recalls, "a certain awareness of everything most people were
frightened of speaking of, or of admitting to knowing." No wonder
then that hip unfolded largely through the work of the usual
suspects--not just blacks but also Jews, gays and a few disaffected
Wasp refugees--people whose view of things was off-center
by definition.
</p>
<p> Further fine-tunings of what hipness might mean became an offhand
intellectual pursuit of the '50s. In a commentary on his much
discussed 1957 essay, The White Negro, Norman Mailer distinguished
between the lower-class origins of the people he termed "hipsters"
and the middle-class, college-educated, moralizing Beats. But
he figured they both shared "marijuana, jazz, not much money
and a community of feeling that society is the prison of the
nervous system."
</p>
<p> From its early days, hipness had its aboveground successes--the movies of James Dean, the comedy routines of Mort Sahl or
Mike Nichols and Elaine May. But it took the full emergence
of the baby boomers in the '60s to make hipness a force in mass
culture. The hipster's stylish alienation was irresistible to
youth, for whom style is the best defense against anxiety and
alienation is the natural state. For suburban teens in particular,
hipness became what romance novels were for Madame Bovary: an
antidote to the featureless local realities. In subdivisions
where the lawn sprinklers went back and forth, back and forth--the metronomes of the trudging suburban eternity--a Bob
Dylan album and a late-night movie performance of Putney Swope
could seem like blows against the Empire.
</p>
<p> So the boomers armored themselves in hip--after substituting
rock for jazz--in the hope, perhaps, that the right attitude
and the right wardrobe might protect them from mortality itself
as they moved through the years. By the time the boomers got
to Woodstock, an event that immensely overran the commercial
calculations that spawned it, it was possible to believe an
entire countercultural universe was being born.
</p>
<p> And at that very moment, in the very heart of downtown, the
figure who would crucially assist in its undoing was adjusting
his silver wig. Through most of the '60s, Andy Warhol had epitomized
an arctic cool so detached it could give equal attention to
soup cans and electric chairs. But Warhol's indifference was
incomplete. There was never an artist more starstruck and money
mad. Just three months after Woodstock, in November 1969, he
published the first issue of Interview, his monthly that would
lump together '40s screen goddesses, lustrous Europeans of vaguely
aristocratic background and the very latest shoe designers.
By virtue of the fact that Warhol had turned his placid gaze
their way, the imprimatur of hip was attached to them all.
</p>
<p> With Andy's help, the hip crowd of the '70s became just a cocaine-addled
update on the old cafe society. The entourage admitted through
the velvet rope at Studio 54 would be Liza and Halston and Bianca,
and so on down to--why not?--Roy Cohn, the aide-de-camp
of Senator Joe McCarthy and arguably Satan's first lieutenant.
The meaning of hip was reconfigured to embrace the greed and
swank and snobbery it used to reject. It would be summed up
later in a song by Billy Joel, who may or may not be hip but
was hip to this: "All you need are looks and a whole lotta money."
</p>
<p> When the counterrevolution of punk appeared in the later years
of the decade, even it could be reduced to a fashion statement.
The ethos of punk, like that of the Beats and the hippies, would
remain lodged in memory as an exemplary refusal, an inspiration
to grunge and rap in later years. But its initial force was
diverted quickly enough into the more market-friendly notion
of new wave: here came the dance-beat torching of Blondie instead
of the primal screeching of the Sex Pistols, red sneakers instead
of the safety pin through the cheek. The ground was well prepared
for the appearance of MTV in 1981, which ushered in the age
of video rock stars, such as Duran Duran and Adam Ant, for whom
the right look might outweigh all else. The perverse machinery
that would simultaneously make hipness hard to avoid and harder
to achieve was complete.
</p>
<p> In the time since then, things haven't got any easier. Such
bands as Pearl Jam and Fugazi may be able to maintain their
position without submitting to every industry demand for videos
or major-label distribution. But for the most part, and with
ever greater efficiency, the new is discovered, distributed
and disarmed. (Hear that, Seattle; Athens, Georgia; Austin,
Texas? Make one new move, and we'll send a planeload of advance
scouts.) That in turn makes it harder to come up with much that's
new. ("Unless people start wearing lumber," says the performer
and fashion watcher Sandra Bernhard, "there's not much more
designers can do.") Even the growth of multiculturalism can
make hip more difficult. It's harder to feel genuinely alienated
at a time when almost everyone can claim membership in some
ethnic or sexual subnation, leaving the fearsome notion of an
all-powerful mainstream to shrivel accordingly. All this could
be called the Lollapalooza conundrum, in honor of the alternative
rock tour and its organizers, who are always wondering what
will make the thing alternative in a culture that constantly
muddies the question. As Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell
recently told an interviewer, "now the underground is like a
menu with too many things on it; after a while you don't know
what to eat."
</p>
<p> The predicament of a Los Angeles hangout called Bar Deluxe shows
the problem in miniature. It had found the right location for
a hip outpost--a seedy Hollywood neighborhood, surrounded
by crack dealers on corners and prostitutes strolling the pavement.
And the right decor--heavy black iron gates and a garbage
bin next to the door. In no time, it got crowds. But not even
six months after its January opening, disaster struck: an enthusiastic
write-up in the Los Angeles Times. Owner Janice DeSoto expects
to survive the blow, but she knows there will be a price to
pay. "I've already had customers who have said, `Well, I guess
it's over. I think it's time for us to move on.'"
</p>
<p> Hip culture grew best like mushrooms: in darkness. The pursuits
of the old bohemias in Manhattan, Mexico and San Francisco,
or in rural outposts of the avant-garde such as Black Mountain
College in North Carolina, were generally satirized by the mass
media when they weren't ignored altogether. Hip outlooks were
communicated through an insider's language that squares just
didn't get. In 1964, when Susan Sontag published her now famous
essay Notes on Camp, the tongue-in-cheek appreciation of Busby
Berkeley musicals, Aubrey Beardsley prints and funny furniture
was still such an exotic notion that she opened in the tone
of a river guide about to lead a boatload of church ladies down
the Orinoco. Camp was "a private code," Sontag cautioned. "A
badge of identity even, among small urban cliques...To talk
about camp is therefore to betray it."
</p>
<p> Today, after Pee-Wee's Playhouse, Mystery Science Theater 3000
and the entire film career of John Waters, is there anyone who
still needs to be clued in about old Japanese monster movies
or zebra-upholstered '50s love seats? Camp is the required second
language of mass culture, the means by which otherwise intelligent
people justify the hours and hours they spend watching old episodes
of The Brady Bunch.
</p>
<p> Rapid exposure means new developments are rapidly exhausted.
"At this point, they've pierced all the body parts they can
pierce," figures Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. "They've done
just about everything they can do with their hair. They have
adopted just about as revolting an attitude as they can adopt.
So how much further can you push it?" The problem was summed
up in the melancholy question asked by Kurt Cobain on Nirvana's
last album: "What else can I say?" For any number of reasons,
he decided the only fitting answer was to silence himself in
the most uncompromising way.
</p>
<p> Meanwhile, like buzz saws on automatic, the cutting edges of
culture go slicing down the same well-worn channels: shock,
gender bending and style revivals. The potty talk and ugly riffing
of Howard Stern is what's left of that blaspheming hipness that
descended from Lenny Bruce and kept on descending, converging
in the late '70s with the frat-boy gross-outs of Animal House.
In the case of Bruce, his ferocious comedy was the natural format
of a man in every way dispossessed, a wound with lips, whose
most authentic publicity portraits might be his several police
mug shots. When he gave the finger, it was just a more pointed
way of shaking his fist. With Stern, profanity is an act of
commercial cunning by a man with a happy marriage, a best-selling
book and the nomination of the Libertarian Party in this year's
New York State Governor's race. King of the Pig People? It's
just a job.
</p>
<p> If you don't choose naughty ranting, the alternative might be
ever more rapidly recycled nostalgia. This is how everyone from
Tony Bennett to Tom Jones and Wayne Newton--all once the polar
opposite of hip--can qualify as hip, given time. But this
approach presents the danger of not only turning the avant-garde
into a permanent revival tent but also having old mistakes pop
right back up. Of course, then you have to rationalize them.
"The '70s clothes that are being rehashed are so incredibly
ugly, so intentionally ugly, that they actually could be perceived
as a rebellion against propriety," the designer Todd Oldham
offers hopefully. "A rebellion against conventionally understood
ways of dressing."
</p>
<p> But scarcely has that rebellion been declared than someone else
is declaring that the real rebellion is...conventionally
understood ways of dressing. So this year's most up-to-the-minute
design-wear house, X-Girl, owned by Kim Gordon of the rock band
Sonic Youth, is hawking brightly colored tennis sweaters, polo
shirts and floral-print shifts that hark back to the Lilly Pulitzers
of the horsey set, circa 1973. "Our dresses are very country
club," explains X-Girl's chief designer, Daisy Von Furth. "People
are tired of finding the oldest, grungiest T shirt in a thrift
store." She adds, "A lot of young people are rediscovering golf."
</p>
<p> This kind of thing can give newness a bad name, even as we eagerly
scarf it up--in fact, because we eagerly scarf it up. "When
a trend went out of style, we used to be forgiving of it and
think it was quaint, like pink skirts with poodles and crew
cuts with white socks," says Steve Hayden, chairman and CEO
of BBDO Los Angeles and creator of the famous Orwellian Apple
computer commercial that perked up the 1984 Super Bowl. "Now,
we actually hate the last trend. It goes from the top of the
chart to nothing."
</p>
<p> Some people are still trying their best to patrol the borders
of hip, keeping out the pretenders. No sooner was Evan Dando,
lead singer of the Lemonheads, identified by MTV as the next
sensitive stud-muffin than some anti-fans started Die Evan Dando,
Die, an anti-fan magazine. "I have nothing against teen idols.
It's just that he was so publicist-ejaculated," says publisher-editor
(and most other titles) Jeff Fox. "He was being forced down
the throats of the American public as hip, and I couldn't take
it anymore."
</p>
<p> Such healthy cynicism about media manipulation may be a sign
that hipness is still alive. Did we mention that Jeff Fox has
been scarfed up already? A hip ad exec is bankrolling him to
edit a hip magazine. This is where we came in.
</p>
<p> Sensibilities have a life-span. It's hard to credit, but before
World War II it would have seemed odd for the mass culture to
be dominated by whatever came from its scruffy nether reaches.
The model to imitate then was a vision of the upper classes.
(Look at what you wore to the prom, which almost certainly owed
something to somebody's fantasy of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne
drinking champagne in a multitiered nightclub while a bandleader
in white tie waved a baton.) That fantasy lost its hold. As
it grows more threadbare, the omnipresent urge to be "with it"
may pass too. "It probably won't happen until the next century,"
says Penelope Spheeris, once the ultrahip filmmaker of such
punk/metal documentaries as The Decline of Western Civilization
who is now the cheerfully mass-market director of such films
as Wayne's World and the upcoming The Little Rascals. "Oh, well,
only six more years of recycled boredom--I can take it. I
might get rich by then."
</p>
<p> The common view is that one likely successor for the old hip
culture is the world of the Internet. Notwithstanding their
enduring image in some minds as keyboard geeks, technos of both
sexes have many of the qualifications for a hip culture. They
speak an arcane language (batch modes, binary log-ons). They
possess a messianic vision of what they do. And for all the
media hype the cyberworld has already got, the faceless privacy
of your own keyboard is something like the blessed inattention
the hip fringes once enjoyed.
</p>
<p> Revenge of the nerds--there are people ready to tell you Bill
Gates is the hippest guy in America. Those people have a point,
if you keep in mind one interesting difference. The hip culture
of the '50s and afterward prided itself on possession of arcane
knowledge, whether via Buddhism or peyote or the ecstasies of
art, in which the industrial bureaucratic mainstream had no
interest. The cyberheads constitute a community, and their secret
is that they possess the special aptitudes of the technological
culture in the highest degree. Revenge of the nerds indeed.
</p>
<p> That present notions of hip might eventually give way altogether
doesn't trouble Jerry Seinfeld, who made everyday life itself,
well, hip--at least by the standards of prime-time network
television. "Just like anything good, hip is a rare and constantly
changing substance," he says. "It's got to be sought after,
and by the time you get there, you'll probably have to move
on and look somewhere else." How much longer will it be before
Seinfeld has to move on? "Not much longer." True enough--the
cast of his show already looks back at you from the cover of
a cereal box.
</p>
<p> Sometimes the crowd muses a bit about the durability of hipness
at Beyond Baroque, which is--uh-oh--a poetry-reading center
in Venice, California. With its close association to the old
Beat scene, poetry comes with an instant hip pedigree. The spoken
word is already being sniffed at by MTV, which devoted one of
its Unplugged sessions to spoken-word artists. Not everybody
is sure that's a good thing. After Eric Rossborough reads a
few of his poems, he gets asked whether those are hip and squirms.
"I try not to be hip," he says. "Hipness today is people not
being hip."
</p>
<p> Quick, get me my editors; I think I've spotted a trend here.
