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Over the counter culture
Etcetera scrutinises the authenticity of the revolution
Posted 20th May 2008 | Author: Michael Docherty
From Issue 4 of Etcetera (Views: 971)
It's been forty years since Martin Luther King's ideals of peaceful protest dissolved with his assassination, forty years since rioters tore across Paris and Washington while war raged in Vietnam and, not coincidentally, forty years since the term 'counterculture' was coined by the American academic Theodore Roszak. The protests were one means for a generation to express its indignation at the strictures imposed upon it by a conservative society that clung to pre-war values in a Cold War era. But that generation also expressed itself in countercultural music, literature and visual art that sought to fly in the face of the societal norms of the 'mainstream.'
The mobilised, massed counterculture that made itself most abundantly apparent in 1968 owed much to a smaller movement - the Beatniks of the fifties. Yet while the Beats expressed their disillusionment with civilisation through the more exclusive, ostensibly intellectual art forms of jazz and poetry, the movement that followed a decade later invented gonzo journalism and gave the world Jimi Hendrix. This difference says something fundamental about these countercultural movements.
There is both a restraint and a futility in the anger and violence expressed in the fifties: the Beats could certainly Howl, either through Ginsberg's poem, or through the wailing solos of jazz trumpeters and saxophonists, but that lonely, plaintive cry of protest was all they could muster. The very nature of the jazz styles being pioneered by Miles Davis and others in the mid-1950s was one in which improvisations, however impassioned and expressive, were allowed only to soar to a certain point, before being cut down in mid-flight by a return to a refrain. Ten years later, Jimi Hendrix would use the same refrain-improvisation-refrain structures, but he would suffuse them with a direction, with an angry dynamism. He would test the limits of repetitive structure by overpowering it with greater levels of dissonance and distortion. Violence overcame structure – to fantastic effect.
The art of Beat culture lacks a sense of progress towards a singular end-point. The Beats certainly had their aims, but those aims did not include major, widespread, societal change, only to be accomplished by the mobilisation of a mass movement. But the Beats' work didn't need to have the crusading zeal, the dynamic violence of countercultural art of the sixties: their philosophy was less about changing the world than reforming oneself to live more successfully within it.
There comes a moment at which what had once been subversive and left-field grows in popularity to the point at which we must surely question whether it can be called a 'counterculture' at all. For all the ideals of the hippy era, late sixties and early seventies counterculture was a mass-produced, mass-marketed image. Replacing the complex and oft misunderstood philosophising of the Beats with simple slogans of 'free love' and 'give peace a chance,' the counterculturalists of the late sixties and early seventies gathered more people beneath their more easily visible, accessible and understandable banner. But if that was the case, was the supposedly countercultural art created in this era genuinely 'against the grain'?
When something ceases to be in some sense 'underground,' does it remain a credible alternative to the mainstream, or simply become another facet of it? Is it still counterculture? Jimi Hendrix became the poster boy for the coming 'Age of Aquarius' with a supposedly revolutionary sound, yet he topped the pop charts. In this sense he stands as an icon, not of counterculture, but of the moment at which what had briefly been countercultural was brought into the mainstream by the forces of capitalism. This process of absorption was taking place in the literary world too. Despite the controversy surrounding the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, three years later it had been made into a film which went on to win the Jury Prize at Cannes: first accepted by the corporate behemoth of Universal Pictures it was then embraced by the doyens of Europe's cultural establishment. Similarly, in 1969 and in 1975 major film adaptations were produced of two seminal countercultural works of the 1960s, A Clockwork Orange and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest respectively.
The civil unrest of 1968 took hold in 110 American cities, instantly indicating to the world of business the presence of a vast new market for culture that could be packaged as being rebellious, countercultural, 'against the grain.' Here we find the tipping point: subcultures and countercultures have been ripe for corporate bastardisation ever since.
Moreover, the problem with such corporatism is not simply that it sullies the spirit of the works it profits from, but that it keeps them in public view, ensuring that forty year old texts continue to be seen as 'edgy,' 'cool' and 'against the grain' by successive generations of youth, stifling the development of anything genuinely revolutionary, anything 'against the grain' for our time. This is one of the reasons why our era seems to be so lacking any kind of major, genuinely countercultural works of art: we continue to elevate and cling to the likes of Trout Fishing in America and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, books that were products of and reactions to their time. We assign them a contemporary importance that they do not deserve and allow them to dull the instinct in us to construct our own counterculture.
But the staid passivity of the youth of today has some excuse: how can we push against boundaries when it often seems as though all the boundaries have already been obliterated? The sex, drugs and violence of the countercultural literature of both the Beats and the hippies cannot shock us any more; the very fact that authors once sought to test the limits of what could be written and published now means that we are inured to such assaults on our senses and sensibilities. It's now expected that artists may try to shock us with their work, and experiment with new modes of expression, and as a result a counterculture can no longer exist.
What with globalisation and the environment, ongoing conflicts all over the world and atrocities like Guantanamo Bay, there are certainly enough problems with the state of the world to justify us mounting our own political and artistic assault on the established order of things. So why don't we? Partly, as I commented previously, a great many of what were once the tools of against-the-grain artistic expression have been co-opted by the establishment. But by far the biggest difficulty facing the modern counterculturalist is simply that in our blogospheric, multi-channel, podcasted world it's harder than it has ever been to unite a significant portion of the populace behind a single movement for protest and change. There's no lack of desire or ability to pursue countercultural ideas, but those ideas, and the media by which they are shared, have diversified so greatly that 1968 is now unrepeatable. It's easier than it has ever been to discover people across the world who share one's broader beliefs, yet also easier to be individualistic to the point of solipsism. The internet gives a platform on which anybody can voice their own particular 'niche' grievance. Ideas cannot now be painted in the broad, idealising, all-inclusive brush strokes of the late sixties. What's worse is that this universal expressive platform creates a morass of low-quality debate wherein it is perilously difficult to find the pockets of genuine worth. The internet, in a sense, destroys old ideas of counterculturalism. No longer do we have a mainstream culture and a counterculture, we have a multiplicity of alternate mini-cultures, some fairly substantial, some tiny. As such it is easier than ever to be countercultural and yet harder to create a true counterculture. In the days of physical-only media fewer writers achieved publication, but those who did were afforded a large and captive audience; today, the new Kerouacs, Ginsbergs, Vonneguts and Wolfes must surely be out there somewhere, but we are less likely than ever to hear them.
We must accept that what happened around 1968 was not a movement but a moment. It will never be repeated; the world has changed too much. We have more to rail against but fewer ways in which to do it credibly without identifying ourselves with the establishment; we have more access to vehicles for our self-expression but it is harder than ever to put our work in the hands, hearts and minds of a mass readership. Meanwhile, the sacred cows of previous generations' counterculture continue to grow in prominence, stature and exposure: next year we will finally get On the Road: the Movie. It is horribly appropriate, as this undeniably great, but outdated, work of literature slips further into the establishment's canon, casting an ever greater shadow on any modern literary attempts at being truly 'against the grain,' that this film adaptation is being directed by Walter Salles. His last major film, you may recall, was The Motorcycle Diaries, which made a silver-screen, big-business hero out of (who else?) every 13 year-old's favourite T-shirt: Che Guevara. Riot, anyone?
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