If Everyone Is Hip . . . Is Anyone Hip?

By Richard Lacayo

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.' "

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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."

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."

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.

^ 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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

Quick, get me my editors; I think I've spotted a trend here.

With reporting by Ginia Bellafante and David Gross/New York and Dan Cray/Los Angeles