Where did the scene go?

No one worries about selling out anymore; the political and media landscape changed forever, and made the conditions for it obsolete.

One of the great explorations of nineties culture is the under-appreciated 2008 movie The Wackness, set in New York City in the summer of 1994. It is directed by Jonathan Levine (who has done nothing remotely as important since); Josh Peck plays Luke Shapiro, a lonely teenage drug dealer who pays for his psychotherapy by selling weed to his equally lonely shrink, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley.) At one point a depressed Luke makes a late-night call for help to Dr. Squires, who suggests they go for a drink. “I know just the place,” Dr. Squires says. 

Cut to them sitting in a dead, dingy bar. 

“Strange,” Dr. Squires says, his voice quiet with drink and melancholy. “This place used to be packed! The city’s not the same anymore… this place REALLY used to be something down here… the drugs, the girls, the music…”

He trails off, then wanders over and puts a song on the jukebox. It’s the Boomer classic “Season of the Witch” by Donovan. They keep chatting, then suddenly a bunch of Luke’s friends stumble into the bar. One of them (played by Mary-Kate Olsen) comes over to hug him as she says “Luke I can’t believe you’re here! We came here to check out all the old weird people.”

The whole film is painful, but this part is an almost unbearable reminder of how life goes. Everyone eventually gets that feeling of revisiting old haunts and wondering: where did the scene go? Worse, everyone eventually has to endure the commodification of their scene’s elements — the bars, the fashions, the music — by larking teenagers playing a scenester version of mock the stock. 

As we discussed in our last dispatch, the heart of the Gen X worldview was the fear of selling out to, or being co-opted by, The System. And as we saw, that reaction stemmed from Xers revulsion at seeing the counterculture values of their Boomer parents used to sell sneakers and SUVs. But where Gen X agreed with the Boomers was this: The System did in fact exist, and it had to be resisted. While the Boomers had allowed themselves to be co-opted, Gen X would have to just double down on their efforts at refusing to sell out.

The Gen X worldview, and the scene it activated, dissolved over the first half of the noughts, in the political and cultural aftermath of 9/11, with the exhaustion of the antiglobalization protests, and — most crucially — the rise of Web 2.0. 

You can’t separate the demise of the fear of selling out from the end of cool as a major source of social capital. And it happened around 2005, when cool was declared decidedly “Not” in many end-of-2005 Hot/Not lists. Just before Christmas that year, a widely circulated article from the LA Times (entitled “Fads are so yesterday”) argued that coolhunting was itself just a trend. That piece ended with a quote from the Boomer futurist Faith Popcorn, who said: “It’s like everybody’s hip now. It’s exhausting. There’s no discovery. It’s not original.”

The notion of cool only ever made sense as a foil to mass society and a culture dominated by mass media such as national television stations, wide-circulation magazines and newspapers, and commercial record labels and publishing houses. It was the classic oppositional stance, the rejection of the mainstream in favour of the alternative, the contrarian, the underground. The counterculture, both in its original sixties form and through its successors (from seventies punks to nineties grunge kids) tried to portray its quest for cool as deeply political, but in reality, it was just the central form of status-seeking in 20th century urban life.

To see this, one must appreciate that there was always a tremendous amount of friction in the transmission of cultural information. It took a long time for subcultural trends in fashion or music or speech to move from the streets of London or New York to the suburban basements of Omaha or Ottawa. The phenomenon we call “cool” was a consequence of that friction, finding a home in that short period between the creation of a scene, its discovery by the early adopters (the cool kids) and its inevitable cooptation by the lamestream. 

But that mass-media ecosystem more or less disappeared in the noughts, replaced by the rip/mix/burn culture of Web 2.0. The key innovation there was the capacity for real-time user-generated content, which gave the ability for greater interactivity, collaboration, and sharing at scale. The old distinctions between cultural producers and consumers, and between the local and the global, more or less evaporated overnight; there was no longer any friction protecting a cool scene from the cultural window shoppers. By the mid-noughts, the self-serious Gen X cool culture had given way to a much more playful world of hipster cosplay and indie-sleaze, largely filtered and mediated by a wonderfully creative online blogosphere.  (Social media ruined that, but that’s a story for another time.) 

For our purposes here, the really interesting bit is not, as Faith Popcorn had it, that everyone is cool; it’s that no one is. The kids today know all of this instinctively. Having never really experienced the tyranny of mass society, they don’t feel any great urge to stand against it. As for selling out, when was the last time you heard that said unironically? Nobody talks about selling out anymore, for the same reason nobody seriously talks about trying to be cool. In an age where everyone is on the make, as an Instagram Influencer or a YouTuber or a podcaster or a Substacker or an OnlyFans-er, what would selling out even mean? Sell out what? To whom? Worry about selling out — how square can you get?

But in the meantime, poor Gen Z  is going to have to wait for their increasingly nostalgia-obsessed predecessors to get a bunch of stuff out of their system. Just this morning, the trendspotting newsletter from Axios announced that the big theme right now is “Newstalgia… as boomers, Gen Xers and millennials recall food faves of yesteryear” — things like pickles, and espresso martinis. And apparently indie-sleaze is back, while the search for the “authentic” — despite being revealed as a hoax well over a decade ago — is Merriam-Webster's word of the year. 

Where did the scene go? 

It went the way of all things. The new replaces the old, and everything that was once an organic and unconscious whole becomes reworked as irony, and pastiche, and contempt.

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I want to start a Gen X Holiday Gift Guide! If you have any ideas, please put them in the comments. If we get enough good ideas I’ll put it together as a dispatch and mail it around. And as always, If you like this newsletter, please share it around. — ap