Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2006 | Page 65

The New Journalism of the Sixties 61 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