Geist, Guise and Guitar
Friedman, Neil
Many students today are more interested in examples to follow than ideas to promote. They look for styles of life that will allow them the substance or illusion of personality. They search...
...What has been happening is that all the external attire and pursuits previously associated with the avantgarde have been assimilated into our proverbial melting pot...
...boatneck sweaters and sockless sneakers are publicly acceptable attire...
...Which leads us finally to a consideration of the effects this superficial acceptance has had on those who are really in revolt...
...rather, it has been embraced by them...
...As Paul Goodman puts it, "The style of life resulting is obsessional conformity . . . with no goal...
...There have been numerous hypotheses advanced as to why the contemporary rebellion has, instead of producing new revolutionary "isms," remained entirely vapid...
...That somewhere there are genuine beats I do not doubt, just as somewhere there may be genuine hipsters...
...They search for external marks that may validate a hoped-for internal distinctiveness...
...Zen, distilled out of its cultural milieu, has become a household item, no bigger than a breadbasket...
...When a Boston impresario announces that "all folk singing is a form of social protest," he is deluding either himself or his rapidly growing audience...
...There is a general cultural fascination with the beatnik: coffee houses are overrun with people watching people watching people...
...Just as Elvis Presley's primitive gyrations have met a need in an over-civilized society, so the call for a return to kicks has attracted those in (or about to enter) the rat race...
...Anything really protestant in his style has been filtered out in the process of popularization...
...But since that article's publication it has become increasingly difficult to tell which team a player is on from his uniform...
...Their immorality has to become a conspicuous immorality...
...For as more and more of their labels have been expropriated by the society at large, those who still wish to proclaim their personal rebelliousness have been pushed to further and further limits...
...The war, the threat of the bomb, our prosperity have all been blamed...
...Just as Zen cannot be extricated from its milieu without a loss in its meaning, so it is with avantgarde pursuits...
...The resulting imitation remains a superficial one: that of beat-garbed individualists who seem dedicated neither to art nor to theater but to a measured effort to appear nonchalant...
...They look for styles of life that will allow them the substance or illusion of personality...
...But anyone familiar with an American campus these days knows that, most of the time, what one encounters is a mimicry of the beat style—and one, it is no surprise, that comes almost effortlessly...
...And it is this situation which explains the curious popularity of beatnik styles among such students...
...folk song albums by the Kingston Trio are at the top of the EP hit parade...
...They have diverted their energy from the creation of ideas to the maintenance of a marginal differentiation from their square imitators...
...I would suggest that we now have an additional factor: mass fascination has been the kiss of death...
...Digging jazz has become a popular avocation and so the die-hard beatnik has to approach his digging as a deadly serious responsibility...
...churches and synagogues are holding "beatnik dances...
...Despite the hostile sermonizing it has evoked, the beat style has not been shunned by the campus squares...
...their dissipation must become a public ritual...
...It is a shortbreathed desire, eager for quick and dramatic manifestation, for outbursts of resentment or ecstasy rather than long-range expectations...
...Tommy Sands (of "Sing, Boy, Sing" fame) has recently recorded "Sinner Man...
...Villager" shirts are the latest bestsellers in men's fashions...
...Of course, the end product of this assimilation is a very domesticated version of the beatnik...
...He has become so entangled in questions of guise that he has ceased to have his own unique geist...
...For to the great majority of his dungareed converts "folk music" is just an amiable way of filling in their leisure time...
...In fine, it seems that the Bohemian has become caught up in his own kind of rat race, an imitation of the Org Man's rat race which he despises so much...
...One is Hip or One is Square" is how Norman Mailer categorized mankind in "The White Negro...
...Many students today are more interested in examples to follow than ideas to promote...
...Hollywood has just issued "The Beat Generation...
...The problem of distinguishing themselves from their look-alikes has led to a fixation upon style and a concomitant disregard for content...
...In turning his attention almost entirely to developing his style, he has come up with merely another manner of gaining status rather than an attack on a status-seeking society...
Vol. 7 • April 1960 • No. 2
