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IN_THE_NEWS

                                             March 9, 2004
                               Rearranged:   June 19, 2006


Subcultures may be an attempt at dropping
out of the mainstream, but the very
definition of those subcultures have a lot
to do with consensus reality, the broad
judgement of the public about what the
subculture is about.

The "insider" members of the beat scene
probably noted with some amusement that
their classification kept shifting
(beat-beatnik-hippie) while they themselves
remained largely unchanged.

Nevertheless, their lives were directly
influenced by these shifts in the overground
consciousness of the underground: the kinds
of kids they were likely to find in their
old hang-outs, the kinds of paying gigs they
were likely to get, the kinds of police
attention they had to deal with... all of
this depends on the clueless judgements of a
bunch of brown-shoe squares working press
offices way uptown if not on the other side
of the continent.



Judgements about when something
is "over" are inevitably subjective.

In some circles, in the
mid-70's there was a
fair amount of regret at                        JUST_MISSED
having "missed" the 60s.

I had a young artist girlfriend in 1976,
who asked me earnestly what being a
hippie meant to me... her definition was
that it was just about "being a loving
person".  The hippie "sterotype" was
still an icon of some power for this
particular teenage girl.


By the time I was excitedly reading
articles in the Village Voice about punk
bands, the writers working on those
articles were already getting bored with
the subject ("Oh, man, please, not
another punk survey.  Come on, that
shit is years old now.")



I think you *have* to bring chronology into it, but the
chronology is the chronology of "discovery", particularly
discovery by the outside, mainstream, media.

                          THE_SAUCE 


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