THE MARRIAGE OF HIP AND SQUARE
From The Conquest of Cool, by Thomas Frank, to be published this month by the University of Chicago Press. Frank is the editor of the quarterly The Baffler.

By Thomas Frank

For as long as America is torn by culture wars, the 1960s will remain the historical terrain of conflict. Although popular memories of that era are increasingly vague and generalized, we understand "the Sixties" almost instinctively as the decade of the big change, the homeland of hip, an era whose tastes and discoveries and passions have somehow determined the world in which we are now condemned to live. And whether the Sixties are celebrated or lamented, the counterculture composed of anti-institutional radicals of all stripes, from campus leftists to New York bohemians to California hippies‑is invariably cast as the agent of change.

For conservatives, the world that the Sixties left us is a distinctly unhappy one. The decade represents nothing so much as a fall from grace, the loss of a golden age of consensus, the end of an Edenic epoch of shared values and safe centrism. Dark images of the treason and excess of the Sixties fill shelves of bestsellers from Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind to Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah. And the fable of the doubly victimized soldiers in Vietnam, betrayed first by liberals and doves in government and then spat upon by members of the counterculture, has become such a routine trope that its invocation‑and the resulting outrage‑requires only the mouthing of a few standard references.

By contrast, the leftist myth of the counterculture is one of personal transformation through ecstatic nonconformity, through rebellion against the "mass society" of the 1950s and everything it stood for: racial, religious, and sexual intolerance; look‑alike commuters clad in gray flannel suits; identical prefabricated houses stretching moderately and reasonably to the horizon. The only character who offered hope of resisting this oppressive tepidness was the figure that Norman Mailer, in his seminal 1957 essay "The White Negro," called the "Hipster," an "American existentialist" with a taste for jazz, sex, drugs, and the slang and mores of black society. In this myth, the Sixties' revolt of the young against the mass society is thus seen as a joyous and even a glorious cultural flowering, albeit one that, tragically, was quickly co‑opted by the mainstream itself. The story ends with the noble idealism of the New Left in ruins and the counterculture sold out to its original antagonists, Hollywood and the networks and the rest of corporate America.

Conflicting though they may seem, these two accounts of Sixties culture agree on a number of basic points. Both assume that the counterculture was what it said it was; that is, a fundamental opponent of the capitalist order. Thinkers on both sides concur, further, that the counterculture is the appropriate symbol‑‑if not the actual historical cause‑‑of the gigantic cultural shifts that' transformed the United States and that permanently rearranged Americans cultural priorities. They also agree that these. changes constituted a radical break with existing American mores, that they were just as transgressive, menacing, and revolutionary as both countercultural participants and foes believed them to be. And all agree, lastly, that the role of American business was a peripheral and secondary one.

But the actual story is quite a bit messier, and our ignorance of it is largely the product of an odd tendency on both the left and the right to ignore the particulars of American business history. American capitalism was hardly the unchanging and soulless machine imagined by countercultural leaders; it was as dynamic a force in its own way as the revolutionary youth movements, undertaking dramatic transformations in both the way it operated and the way it imagined itself. What we know about business is this: From the beginning of the counterculture down to the pre sent, business dogged it with a commercial replica that seemed to ape its every move for the titillation of the TV‑watching millions and the nation's corporate sponsors.

But to understand corporate behavior in the Sixties as co‑optation in which countercultural values and symbols were mimicked and mass‑produced by corporate America in order to cash in on a particular demographic and subvert the great threat that the "real" counterculture represented‑is to miss an important point. In fact, the counterculture, instead of being the singular catalyst for change that it is assumed to be, was only one manifestation of a larger cultural shift that was already being felt in the most advanced reaches of the American corporate world. Many people in American business, particularly in advertising, also deplored conformity, distrusted routine, and encouraged resistance to established power. They imagined the counterculture not as an enemy to be undermined or a threat to consumer culture but as a hopeful sign, a symbolic ally in their own struggles against the mountains of deadweight procedure and hierarchy that had accumulated over the years. They welcomed the youth‑led cultural revolution, because they perceived in it a comrade in their own struggles to revitalize American business and the consumer order generally.

Take the case of Bill Bernbach, the towering figure of the 1960s advertising world and the guiding spirit of the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency. Bernbach founded his agency in 1949, eight years before Mailer's essay appeared, and dedicated it to the principle that all the old rules of scientific advertising henceforth were to be scrupulously ignored. Bernbach was the first adman to embrace the mass-society critique, to appeal directly to the powerful but hitherto unmentionable public fears of conformity, of manipulation, fraud, and powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing, By inventing anti‑ advertising (most memorably in the landmark 1959 Volkswagen campaign, which held up the "bug" as an anti‑car, the automotive symbol of consumer rebellion), he harnessed public mistrust of consumerism perhaps the most powerful cultural tendency of the age‑to consumerism itself. As an ideologue of disorder, tirelessly repeating his mantra that advertising was equivalent to modern art, Bernbach was the enemy of technocracy long before the counterculture raised its own voice in protest of conformity and the Organization Man.

By the mid‑1960s the anti‑principles of creativity had become rule‑book stuff in their own right. In a 1966 handbook for copywriters, a Young & Rubicam creative leader instructed readers that "the first rule for copywriters is to be suspicious of rules." The primary goal of unleashing all of this creativity was not to overthrow capitalism, of course, but to jump‑start the engine of change‑the "permanent revolution"‑that drove the consumer culture. Talk of creativity and perpetual innovation became ubiquitous in the industry literature, and the imagery of "youth" began to serve as a marketing symbol, an abstraction of commercial speech, a consuming vision for Americans of all ages, not simply the somewhat narrow demographic of consumers between ages eighteen and thirty.

Admen settled on the counterculture as the signifier of choice for hip consumerism partially because they believed, contrary to the assertions of countercultural theorists, that the hip young were good potential consumers. More importantly, though, and despite the counterculture's suspicion of advertising and material accumulation, admen used its external markings to represent new consumer values that the industry itself had already internalized. Caught up in the frenzy of advertising's creative revolution, admen looked at the counterculture and saw ... themselves. They also saw a perfect model for consumer subjectivity, intelligent and at war with the conformist past, and a cultural machine for turning disgust with consumerism into the fuel by which consumerism might be accelerated. Hip capitalism wasn't something on the fringes of enterprise, an occasional hippie entrepreneur selling posters or drug paraphernalia. Nor was it purely a demographic maneuver, just a different spin to sell products to a different group. What happened in the Sixties is that hip became central to the way capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public.

Today, the legacy of the consumer revolution of the 1960s is unmistakable. There are few things more beloved of our mass media than the figure of the cultural rebel, the defiant individualist resisting the mandates of civilization. Commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright "revolution" against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming. Nike shoes are sold to the accompaniment of words delivered by William S. Burroughs and songs by the Beatles, Iggy Pop, and Gil Scott‑Heron ("the revolution will not be televised"); peace symbols decorate a line of cigarettes manufactured by R. J. Reynolds and the walls and windows of Starbucks coffee shops worldwide; and the products of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft are touted as devices of liberation. The music industry continues to rejuvenate itself with the periodic discovery of new and ever more subversive youth movements, and our televisual marketplace is a twenty‑four‑hour showplace of transgression and inversion of values, of humiliated patriarchs and shocked puritans, of screaming guitars and concupiscent youth. However we may rankle under the bureaucratized monotony of our productive lives, in our consuming lives we are no longer merely affluent, we are rebels.

As it turned out, the mass‑society critique of the 1950s was one with which American capitalism was singularly well prepared to deal‑which is why it sometimes seems that we will never be rid of it. Hip and square are now permanently locked together, like the images of Coke and Pepsi, in a self‑perpetuating pageant of workplace deference and advertising outrage. Our celebrities are not just glamorous, they are insurrectionaries; our police and soldiers are not just good guys, they break the rules for a higher purpose. And through them and our imagined participation in whatever is the latest permutation of the rebel Pepsi Generation, we have not solved the problems of mass society but defused them. Impervious to criticism of any kind, and virtually without historical memory, hip has become the public philosophy of the age of flexible accumulation.