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^ Sensibilities have a life-span. It's hard to credit, but before World War II it would have seemed odd for the mass culture to be dominated by whatever came from its scruffy nether reaches. The model to imitate then was a vision of the upper classes. (Look at what you wore to the prom, which almost certainly owed something to somebody's fantasy of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne drinking champagne in a multitiered nightclub while a bandleader in white tie waved a baton.) That fantasy lost its hold. As it grows more threadbare, the omnipresent urge to be "with it" may pass too. "It probably won't happen until the next century," says Penelope Spheeris, once the ultrahip filmmaker of such punk/metal documentaries as The Decline of Western Civilization who is now the cheerfully mass-market director of such films as Wayne's World and the upcoming The Little Rascals. "Oh, well, only six more years of recycled boredom -- I can take it. I might get rich by then."
The common view is that one likely successor for the old hip culture is the world of the Internet. Notwithstanding their enduring image in some minds as keyboard geeks, technos of both sexes have many of the qualifications for a hip culture. They speak an arcane language (batch modes, binary log-ons). They possess a messianic vision of what they do. And for all the media hype the cyberworld has already got, the faceless privacy of your own keyboard is something like the blessed inattention the hip fringes once enjoyed.
Revenge of the nerds -- there are people ready to tell you Bill Gates is the hippest guy in America. Those people have a point, if you keep in mind one interesting difference. The hip culture of the '50s and afterward prided itself on possession of arcane knowledge, whether via Buddhism or peyote or the ecstasies of art, in which the industrial bureaucratic mainstream had no interest. The cyberheads constitute a community, and their secret is that they possess the special aptitudes of the technological culture in the highest degree. Revenge of the nerds indeed.
That present notions of hip might eventually give way altogether doesn't trouble Jerry Seinfeld, who made everyday life itself, well, hip -- at least by the standards of prime-time network television. "Just like anything good, hip is a rare and constantly changing substance," he says. "It's got to be sought after, and by the time you get there, you'll probably have to move on and look somewhere else." How much longer will it be before Seinfeld has to move on? "Not much longer." True enough -- the cast of his show already looks back at you from the cover of a cereal box.
Sometimes the crowd muses a bit about the durability of hipness at Beyond Baroque, which is -- uh-oh -- a poetry-reading center in Venice, California. With its close association to the old Beat scene, poetry comes with an instant hip pedigree. The spoken word is already being sniffed at by MTV, which devoted one of its Unplugged sessions to spoken-word artists. Not everybody is sure that's a good thing. After Eric Rossborough reads a few of his poems, he gets asked whether those are hip and squirms. "I try not to be hip," he says. "Hipness today is people not being hip."
Quick, get me my editors; I think I've spotted a trend here.