The New Journalism of the Sixties
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autobiography, part confession, part reportage, “The White Album'’ examines
late 1960s history through the use of internal, or psychic, “artifacts"; an
impressionistic approach to history in which much of the "evidence" resides
within the psyche of the historian. Once again, any notion of the
historian/reporter engaging in objective sense-making has been dismissed.
Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and the Subcultures Decade
The social fragmentation of the Sixties that Didion chronicles also gave
way to a nation of subcultures, with New Journalists Tom Wolfe and Hunter S.
Thompson the major innovators in writing about this phenomenon. Since World
War II, massive infusions of money have flowed into numerous levels of
society. Classes of people whose lifestyles had been nondescript suddenly had
the money to "build monuments to their own styles." By the 1960s, this money
boom fueled teen-agers’ ability to create their own subcultures, which took the
form of “custom cars, the Twist, the Jerk, the Monkey, the Shake, rock music
generally, stretch pants, decal eyes.. .”33 More importantly, the teen-age
lifestyles of the Sixties began having an influence on the life of the entire
country.34 As Wolfe observes in the introduction of his collection of essays on
1960s subcultures, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby:
Nobody seems to know quite what to call it, but the term that
is catching on is Pop Society, this is because socialites in New
York today seem to have no natural, aristocratic styles of their
own—they are taking all their styles from “pop” groups,
which stands for popular, or "vulgar” or "bohemian" group.
They dance the Jerk, the Monkey, the Shake, they listen to
rock music, the women wear teen-age and even “subteen”
styles. .. they draw their taste in art, such as "underground”
movies and "pop” painting, from carious bohos and camp
cultural, mainly.35
However, the subculture phenomenon of the Sixties was not limited to
teenagers; Wolfe describes it spreading to all aspects of Americana, including
stock car racing, gambling, boxing, the art world, and high society.36 Levels of
the American experience previously submerged in obscurity emerged in the
Sixties “out of the vinyl deeps.”37 The eccentric new lifestyles succeeded in
rising above the elite-dominated culture of the past. Thus, Wolfe’s reportage
portrays not only the ascendance of pop culture, but the struggle of the older
cultural guard to preserve the forms of its status. More importantly, however, is
the lasting impact tha