It seems a pressing question now that hip is so omnipresent in our lives, lurking in every Starbucks coffee cup, every Urban Outfitters store, every Volkswagen ad. It even finds distressingly fertile ground on the Web, winking out at us from a billion images of light saber-wielding cats.
The suspicion for years now has been that the 1960s were the turning point—the moment when hip quit flirting with the mainstream (à la Dizzy and Kerouac in the '50s), abandoning its bungalows and rat-hole apartments to shack up with capitalism. And because advertising was the medium by which so many square Americans made first acquaintance with hip's delights, Madison Avenue has often been cast as the horse whisperer that lassoed hip, made it behave, and sold it to Peoria and Levittown.
For this reason, it's inevitable we look to the celebrated AMC series Mad Men, set on Madison Avenue in the '60s, for theories about what really went on in advertising in those crucial years. And the good news is the show doesn't disappoint, offering a sophisticated, nuanced vision of a love-hate relationship between the advertising industry and the ultra-hip counterculture headquartered just a few Manhattan blocks away.
As Mad Men sees it, '60s advertising didn't just co-opt and defang hip; it also found a soul-mate in it, was
infiltrated by it, and even learned to do its bidding—just as hip learned to do
Madison Avenue's. In positing a complex
symbiotic relationship between hip and consumer capitalism, not a simple
parasitic one, Mad Men creator
Matthew Weiner throws in with such recent cultural theorists as Thomas Frank,
Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter, and—especially—John Leland.
