(6 of 8)
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.