Shadows'n'Majorities: Well, Who Said That...

Once upon a time, to be hip meant to be radical, radically revolutionary, revolutionary decadent, decadently intoxicant, toxically fiery, fiercely dedicated, decidedly transgressive. Not so long ago, in 2005, Stewart Home writes in his book Tainted Love about swinging London, beats, and other revolutionaries heavily engaged in the sweeping revolutionary tornado generously fueled by the underground pharmaceutical industry. He casts light on the eerie dynamism resulting in the officialdom’s complicity in the criminalization of drugs, that, at a dialectical stroke, sucked the underground—up on the surface! Namely, the authorities persecuted and prosecuted decadent revolutionaries, as much as they amplified the anti-subversive sentiment that culminate in its latter day, mainstreaming turn.

Modern day mainstreaming brought an inversion of the criminalization of drugs as we know it. The anti-subversive climate has conquered the underground, which is now overground. What once was persecuted and prosecuted as the black market is now a sophisticated version of legalized, scientifically improved, medically tested, user friendly, technologically advanced range of pharmaceutical  and/or chemical products at anyone’s disposal. William S. Burroughs, that obscure prophet of divine toxicity, once claimed that drugs were going to be demonized, used in a reckless right wing politics as a means of social control (Gus Van Sant, Drugstore Cowboy 1989). Today, nobody cares about that fact. Why would they? Would you? When drugs have been mainstreamed, having found fertile soil in anti-subversive minds susceptible to legally available crutches—mental flux blockage aids’n’supplements. Consolation at anybody’s disposal. Silently sedated, accelerated, excited, dazed, hazed…you name it…according to one’s tastes.

To be hip is not to be hip. To be hip is to accept what a free culture of today offers to free-minded individuals. Only its self-proclaiming free character does not justify the underlying investment in nominalism. Or, does it? Can it define a choice to resist what it can offer?