Word: hipsterism
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Squares rule the world. This axiom is usually inviolate, but in 1960 a hipster was elected President. Richard Nixon was the very prototype of squareness, yet his rival, John Kennedy, whose amorous adventures infuriated Nixon, defeated him. Warren Beatty once observed--post Gary Hart, pre Bill Clinton--that every American boy could either decide to be President (be square) or have fun (in the Warren Beatty sense of the word). Kennedy managed both, and that puzzled Nixon as much as it enraged...
...different language, and the message of the film, its plot, its humor, come through. So too with music. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is a huge star in his native Pakistan; but although he speaks no English, and his songs are often in Urdu, he has built a following of hipster fans in the U.S. Khan is a singer of qawwali--Sufi Muslim religious music, which, like gospel, seeks to bring listeners closer to God through ecstatic vocals and rhythms. Some American rock stars, perhaps seeking to fill a spiritual void in their own music, have gravitated to Khan. Eddie Vedder...
...remember anything like it," says Ken Kesey, the post-hipster novelist (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) and legendary ingester of psychedelic substances, who paints his old friend in heroic strokes. "Not Elvis, not John Lennon. The Beatles were great, but they were a studio band. And Elvis was great, but he was a good ole boy, not a revolutionary. Jerry has been a revolutionary, a warrior, as long as I've known him. He battled for the American soul, out there on the edge of a dangerous frontier--battling the forces of the Grinch, the forces of darkness...
From its early days, hipness had its aboveground successes -- the movies of James Dean, the comedy routines of Mort Sahl or Mike Nichols and Elaine May. But it took the full emergence of the baby boomers in the '60s to make hipness a force in mass culture. The hipster's stylish alienation was irresistible to youth, for whom style is the best defense against anxiety and alienation is the natural state. For suburban teens in particular, hipness became what romance novels were for Madame Bovary: an antidote to the featureless local realities. In subdivisions where the lawn sprinklers went back...
...those who have discovered it, the new Late Night has found its place as a nightly cultural ritual. It has a personalized and cultivated classic sense fostered by Conan's own penchant for past-hipster 1950's graphics and classic Hollywood photo stills, and a first-rate jazz ensemble fading to commerical with bop-style selections. The peppering of slightly-off Lampoon humor and cutting-edge musical guests propels the show out of the starchy promotion-circuit interview format. After nearly nine months of gestating under constant media scrutiny of the now-hyper-commercialized late night niche, the energy...