Hip Off the Rack

“The sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip, they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent. Co-option is something much more complex than the struggle back and forth between capital and youth revolution; it’s also something larger than a mere question of demographics and exploitation. Every few years, it seems, the cycles of the sixties repeat themselves on a smaller scale, with new rebel youth cultures bubbling their way to a happy replenishing of the various culture industries’ depleted arsenal of cool. New generations obsolete the old, new celebrities render old ones ridiculous, and on and on in an ever-ascending spiral of hip upon hip. As adman Merle Steir wrote back in 1967, ‘Youth has won. Youth must always win. The new naturally replaces the old.’ And we will have new generations of youth rebellion as certainly as we will have new generations of mufflers or toothpaste or footwear” [Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 235.]