In the early 1990s the standup comedian Bill Hicks used to begin one of his skits by suggesting that everyone in the audience who worked in advertising or marketing should immediately kill themselves. The problem, he said, was that any marketers or advertisers in the audience would likely be nodding their heads in agreement – quietly congratulating him for having the sense to court the lucrative anti-marketing demographic.
Hicks was ahead of his time because, in the last few decades, the relationship between alternative culture and the mainstream has changed out of all recognition. Subculture, after all, used to be subculture: in the 60s and 70s there emerged hippies, mods, rockers, punks and casuals, and before long youth culture was buoyed up by a shifting array of tribes, each with their own distinctive dress codes and rituals. What united them was that they existed under the radar of mainstream culture and defined themselves against it. Skinheads shaved their heads to give the finger to mainstream society; hippies ingested LSD to escape it; mods mounted gleaming Italian Vespas to outrun it.
None of this activity on the margins could have taken place, Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson pointed out in their book Resistance Through Rituals, except as a reaction to the steady growth of mainstream culture itself – the rise of mass consumption, expansion of higher education, the formidable influence of broadcast media and a consensus that brought together the major political parties – which seemed to those in the underground to be gathering up everyone it could into suffocating drudgery.
It wasn't long, however, before mainstream culture was trying to gobble the underground up too. As their control over the audience loosened, the big culture and media beasts began to look underground. Here, after all, was a free laboratory to which they could look for inspiration and new ideas.
To some it began in 1991, when a post-punk band from Seattle's grunge scene called Nirvana sold their second album Nevermind to the record industry titan Geffen (their first had been released by the independent label Sub Pop). When it went on to sell 10m copies, the guerrilla war between subculture and the big beasts of mainstream culture seemed to settle into an uneasy but mutually rewarding truce.
As the conveyor belt ferrying morsels from the counter-culture into the mainstream speeded up, it was often difficult to tell who owned what. With its quirky flavours and unapologetic activism, for example, the Vermont ice-cream company Ben & Jerry's has long been seen as an icon of anti-capitalist cool. When, in April 2000, its hippy founders sold off their entire operation to the multinational company Unilever, it seemed as if the last leftovers of the counter-culture had been scooped up and swallowed whole. Then there was Green & Black's, the organic chocolatier that sold up to Cadbury in 2005, which has now been taken over by the US food giant Kraft. Innocent Drinks, the more-holistic-than-thou British smoothie company, would follow its lead in April 2010 by selling off a majority stake to Coca-Cola.
Or take what's happened to the film business. During the 1990s, almost every major Hollywood studio decided they wanted their own art-house division and bought up a small independent studio for the purpose. Since then they've cleverly deployed indie as a marketing tool, discreetly making "indie" films via their boutique labels and then pushing them out to court high-end, niche audiences. Many of these films deliberately mimic the tropes and stylistic tics of indie cinema – alienated teenagers, dysfunctional families, meditations on suburban soulnessness, self-consciously quirky humour, and a generous resort to shock tactics or the taboo .
By 2006, releases from indie studios earned a total of $1.2bn (£739m) at the US box office, accounting for 12% of all movie revenues. In that year the biggest splash at Sundance was made by Little Miss Sunshine, the tale of one family's desperate road trip to a children's beauty pageant. The following year it was Juno, a coming-of-age pregnancy film. Both films wore their indie credentials on their sleeves despite being owned and distributed by Fox Searchlight, the boutique arm of the big Hollywood beast 20th Century Fox.
This is often the cue for a discussion of the voracious appetite of mainstream culture. But that doesn't tell the whole story. The founders of Ben & Jerry's wasn't bought to make it more like Unilever, and its still sound like the same hippy activists they have always been. No longer do the big beasts want to absorb underground culture into the mainstream. Instead they prefer it to stay underground. Likewise the big Hollywood institutions have kept their indie studios in a self-consciously indie kennel outside. The result has been the triumph of a kind of film which, at its best, will be seen by about 10% of filmgoers. Quality films made for everyone, such as Gone with the Wind, have given way to quality films aimed at a high-end audience.
The moles of the cultural underground continue to burrow away and seek each other out underground. But if they imagine they're eating away at mainstream culture, they're doing so oblivious to the fact that its big beasts are now targeting them rather than the other way around – and that their custom has become just another niche in the market.
