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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.' "