The Past Is Groovier

Hippy Kermit works for The Man now, Nick. The use of square fifties signifiers as the foil to the vibrant modern day, a-go-go NOW has become an astonishingly resilient cliché in the advertising world. Current example: Black and white footage of a matronly Donna Reed robot offering children toast is suddenly WAM BAM interrupted some EXUBERANT kids in BRIGHT colors singing and dancing and offering praises to the wonder of POP-TARTS. (There's a recognizably similar commercial out there now for orange juice...and I've seen many many more variations on that theme in the last -- oh god -- maybe fifteen- plus years.)

I'm not sure if the appearance of the Hippy Kermit sketch on something like the Ed Sullivan show necessarily "says something" about the wonderfulness of the times it was created in. In 1970, television was in the kind of historically odd situation that (arguably) forced it to take chances and overreach towards greatness: it was a relatively new medium, increasingly self-conscious about its power and still trying to overcome a severe inferiority complex.

(We could also describe the rock & roll of the sixties in much the same way.)

How can the demographic slice-up be stopped? Two ways spring to mind:

- 'top-down' a trend towards privacy and data protection instigated by governments. This is fairly plainly not happening currently and barring a massive Enron-style data scandal it won't happen.

- 'bottom-up' by the refusal of individuals to surrender data, talk to market researchers etc. This is a double-edged sword though. For one thing you can only refuse to surrender private data - analysis of eg receipts is pretty much out of your hands. In which case refusal to talk to market research people means that the facts of your life are taken into account but your opinions are not. More importantly if you consider the likely demographic profile of the opters-out it is going to be the more counter-cultural (in a broad sense) elements who are aware of and take these options. That's fine of course if what you yearn for is a nice clear delineation of mainstream and underground, so you can make sure you're on the 'right' side. But the crucial thing about the sixties was that the underground invaded the mainstream so thoroughly, rather than walling itself off.

The other trend which might work in culture's favour is, paradoxically, demographic marketing tools getting better. The industry likes to give the impression that their tools are hyper- efficient (so that clients buy them!), and anti-marketing types like to believe it (because it makes their arguments stronger). In my experience, having worked fairly extensively on profiling and segmentation tools, it's mostly bollocks. The fuzziness of the segments and the near-impossibility of using them predictively with more than about 20% accuracy makes them very very blunt instruments. What does this mean? Well firstly that people are much more individual than either 'side' gives credit for - this is one reason focus groups became so popular - and secondly that the bluntness of the instruments mean that companies have to play it very very safe in order to use the information effectively. Actual micro-demographic slicing - which took into account cross-currents and contradictions in taste within the individual - could potentially make mainstream culture more interesting and personalised, not less.

I hope that the author of the above has arranged an easy flexible repayment scheme, e.g. £1 per week for the next 530 billion years.

This is the kind of accusation that once made is impossible for anyone to deny, because denial of it can be immediately countered by the suggestion that they're privileged in the hierarchy and thus blind to it. But regardless I don't see it - I see an unsubtle hierarchy of long-term-posters-taken-more-seriously though which is sadly the norm for any internet community. Maybe that's what you meant but I think you count in the taken-seriously crowd if so, Kerry.

What I think happens is that people take general points for points specifically addressed to them, and that the separation of thread page and answer-posting page means that references to earlier comments are often too vague.

sorry if it seemed that way but I was specifically referring to (admittedly left-influenced) hippie idealists and activists, whose movement fell apart so quickly. The trajectory of the more typical Left is quite different, and if its star waned around the same time I'd guess this was in part because the liberal-left had actually succeeded in achieving its most popular aims with the Civil Rights movement, greater personal freedoms, etc.

"to deny that the advertising and mass media juggernauts were in any way implicated in the defanging of 1960s activism -- or in the mass cultural disengagement of the past 40 years -- would, I think, be mistaken."

I'm not denying that media manipulation is possible, but why couldn't so-called co-option be driven by an enthusiasm from within a culture for excitement and entertainment that doesn't involve socio-political subversion and upheaval? I think the rise of punk & alt. distribution networks (operating within the framework of capitalism) over the past couple of decades, which offers a diverse and easily accessible array of alternatives to the mainstream - much of it subversive or attempting to be – indicates in its persisting relative unpopularity that capitalist media mostly caters to pre-existing preference; it doesn't set out to mould attitudes because it doesn't need to.

I'm willing to accept the point of various posters that Ed Sullivan, although mainstream, was not always very clear about its own demographic. But I think there was something about the 60s which actually galvanised individuals and 'the masses' to be more positive about 'creative values' than they would normally be.

My personal pet theory is that this starts with 50s developments: its a maturation into politics and lifestyle of the 50s marketing demographic 'the teenager'. It's the huge surge in emphasis on creativity caused by the US's humiliation when the Soviets beat them into space with Sputnik. It's a generalisation of the Beats' backlash against suburban materialist 50s values.

Once the tone of the 60s had been established by these (and other) developments, there was a need for figureheads and gurus. Hence you get the odd phenomenon of rather straight old men like Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan lecturing to radical college kids and being treated like countercultural gods. The 60s took McLuhan's Catholic ambivalence about media and turned it into revolutionary media theory. The 60s took Bucky's inventive but solid engineering and recruited it to the quest for anti-corporate utopia.

As Leonard Cohen (a poet recruited by the 60s to pop music) put it, there was a war between the left and right, black and white, and this war needed everybody to decide which side they were on. 'Why don't you come on back to the war?' These days it's much harder to know which side to be on.

I do have to say, though, that when I watch the original Sesame Street shows on Noggin, that I get these very similar moments of wonder and awe that Nick does when he watches Henson's "Hippy Kermit" sketch. Henson's grand attempt to infuse children's programming with the spirit of the counterculture delights me to this day, whereas most of the kid's TV I grew up with now only fills me with dismay at how shoddy and slapdash it all was. Puppets who could be as wry and ironic as Woody Allen. Buffy St. Marie playing the moutharp and reminding kids that the Indians were still here. Grace Slick singing songs about numbers. Philip Glass soundtracking abstrakt animations. Other animated segments that had clear bloodlines to sixties experimental cinema. Crying flowers and classical guitar. Getting banned from stations in the South because the show dared to present black and white kids together. Joe Raposa! Joe Raposa, ladies and gentlemen! Above all, SS had the knack for being edumacational for kids yet endlessly amusing to adults.

I do think the conservatives won the Language Wars because the people in the middle are so easily spooked by even the merest identification of a liberal tendency. One of the biggest shocks for me was returning home to America to find that a term that meant equanimity and open- mindedness was bandied about as an insult. Hmm, I thought: easily led and easily bled. No, I certainly didn't grow up in such a climate of fear and prejudice as even my cousins are doing now; they tend to retreat from the things they don't like via solipsistic and narcissitic means rather than actually challenging unacceptable things.

Tom: It's true words for 'spirit of 60s' are difficult, partly because whatever words we use get so quickly co-opted or slurred. Liberal means different things for the left and right, 'creative' is now seen as an advertising industry cliche, 'progressive' posits a positivist and teleological view of history, 'permissive' implies some sort of nanny state telling us what is and is not permitted.

So, everybody, what new words can we use to sum up those colours they had, that can-do spirit in the Kennedy speech about putting men on the moon ('and the other things'), all the values we know to associate with the 60s and some of the 70s? I like the term 'experimental society', but it has undertones of some sort of Pavlovian or Taylorist nightmare so it won't do either. Er, geodesic? Orgonic? Acidic? Freaky? Or are we back to 'groovy'?

i realise my problem which is mine is this: whenever you try and separate the "good" stuff in (say) "experimental" from the "bad", my kneejerk response (and it goes back beyond momus-jerk also) is BUT SAY YOU CAN'T? MAYBE THEY'RE INTRINSICALLY LINKED? SHOULDN'T WE ALSO LOOK AT THAT?

Which really really is how I think, most of the time: I ponce it up myself by thinking of it as "dialectical" but I can also see it might just be annoying, at least for everyone else. \

60s militarism and the anti-war movement WERE intrinsically linked, to take a rather obvious example. Learyan LSD experiments evolved out of similar CIA experiments. Abstract Expressionism and arts generally were funded by the govt as a weapon in the Cold War: Pop Art seemed like a bettah investment, except it actually delivered Warhol rather than the high-cult stars'n'stripes patriotism the funders were probably expecting. Robert Kennedy was assassinated by the TriLateral Commission to distract attention and sympathy from wounded Andy.

Define 'young,' though. ;-)

We need to be precise, though, about what's being co-opted and by whom. New techniques and ideas in art that have their genesis in a politically-driven milieu are naturally going to be adopted by practitioners who aren't in that milieu -- that process is fundamental to art, has been going on forever, and is essentially a positive process by which new idioms and techniques are added to the palette of all artists.

What I'm talking about is more a semi-intentional process on the part of the mass media that saturates the airwaves with ersatz, defanged versions of Alle Menschen werden Brüder and its descendants, and in so doing, hopelessly convolutes the task of anyone trying to unearth the genuinely revolutionary sentiment at the heart of that which has been co-opted. I know that my argument sounds suspiciously like, for instance, that of the conspiracy theorists who claim that the powers that be intentionally disseminate thousands of false comspiracy stories, so that the signal-to-noise ratio is so high that no one spots the real dirty secrets...but there it is.

capitalist media mostly caters to pre-existing preference; it doesn't set out to mould attitudes because it doesn't need to.

But that just isn't true! Need-creation is such part and parcel of the advertising business -- it practically is the business -- that it's a cliché to invoke it: deodorant, the completely self-aware efforts of the auto industry in the '50 to get people to buy new cars more often, and a million other chestnuts. It doesn't take someone sitting in a boardroom, twiddling their mustache and grinning evilly -- there's no Evil Master Plan, it's simply an almost-organic force, one which, through the feedback of profit, will generally encourage businesses to employ any number of tactics to shift people's attitudes to whatever stance is to the businesses' greatest advantage. This isn't the same as claiming that we're hapless consumers in the hands of an angry corporation, but at the same time, it's pretty much fruitless to deny that what we are sold reflects, to some extent, what we're wanted to buy.

And in the political scheme of things, the "alternative distribution networks" just aren't as significant as your argument implies -- if anything, the prevailing tendency is for the government to specifically target them, or at least to take considerable steps to help their competitors. Their decentralized nature practically guarantees that they'll never be able to mount a sustained, effective challenge to the mainstream, and so their position is somewhat analogous to that of alternative political parties in the United States -- every so often, one might surface and provide a brief glimmer of promise, but before long they disappear again, forgotten by all but a few.