Underground Culture

Underground culture, or just underground, is a term to describe various alternative cultures which either consider themselves different to the mainstream of society and culture, or are considered so by someone. The word underground is used because there is a history of resistance movements under harsh regimes where the term underground was employed to refer to the necessary secrecy of the resisters. For instance, the Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes by which African slaves in the 19th century United States attempted to escape to freedom. Also "The underground" was a common name for World War II resistance movements, by extension, the term was subsequently applied to counter-cultural movement(s) many of which sprang up during the 1960s. The phrase "underground railroad" also turned up again in the 1970s being used in reference to the clandestine movement of people and goods by the American Indian Movement in and out of occupied Native American reservation lands.

These 1960s and 1970s underground cultural movements had some connections to the "beat generation" which had, in turn, been inspired by the philosphers, artists and poets of the Paris Existentialist movement which gathered around Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in the years after World War II. Sartre and Camus were members of Combat a French resistance group formed in 1942 by Henri Frenay. Frenay, Sarte and Camus were all involved in publishing Underground newspapers for the resistance. The French underground culture which inspired Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in America in the 1940s was steeped in socialist thinking before the cold war began, but this wasn't the monolithic socialism of the totalitarian Soviet state, but rather the free-thinking and expressive socialism of artists and dreamers attempting to re-think society.

Jack Kerouac (In Esquire magazine in 1958) said: "The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about it--But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of the American underground--In actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet's 'peace' officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number." It took a few years more, however, for the culture Kerouac describes to grow in numbers and redefine itself variously as the underground culture or the freak scene etc.

Since then, the term has come to designate various subcultures such as mod culture, hippie culture, punk rock culture, techno music/rave culture and underground hip hop.

Applied to the arts, the term underground typically means artists that are not corporately sponsored and generally do not want to be.

Perhaps the best way to define it is a quote by Frank Zappa:

Etymology

The use of underground as adjective meaning "subculture" is attested is from 1953, from World War II application to resistance movements against German occupation, on analogy of the dominant culture and Nazis and, at least, as far back as the Underground railroad.

Underground comix

Underground comics (or comix) are self-published or small press comic books that sprang up in the US in the late 1960s. The movement was centered in San Francisco, but also included important artists and publishers in New York, Chicago and Austin, Texas. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Robert Crumb, Robert Williams, S. Clay Wilson, Rick Griffin, Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman, Kim Deitch, Jay Lynch, Spain Rodriguez, Bill Griffith, Justin Green and Trina Robbins. Mainstream comics were typically produced by a team (writer, penciler, inker, letterer, editor), while underground books were often done by a single person, such as Dave Sim's Cerebus (1977-2004). Underground artists also contributed shorter works to thematic anthology comic titles, such as Funny Aminals (1972), edited by Terry Zwigoff with work by Crumb, Griffith, Lynch, Spiegelman and Shary Flenniken.

Underground comix reflect the concerns of the 1960s counterculture: experimentation in all things, drug-altered states of mind, rejection of sexual taboos, ridicule of "the establishment." The spelling "comix" was established to differentiate these publications from mainstream "comics." The notion of comic books outside the mainstream was suggested by Harvey Kurtzman when he used the headline "Comics Go Underground" on the newspaper-format cover of Mad 16 (October, 1954). The term "underground comics" was created by writer-editor Bhob Stewart during a panel discussion at the July 23, 1966, New York comics convention. On a panel with Ted White and Archie Goodwin, Stewart predicted the birth of a new type of comic book: "I want to say that just as mainstream movies prompted underground films, I think the same thing is going to happen with comics. You will have underground comics just as you have had underground films. This would be more like James Joyce in comic book form. You can see the beginning of this in some of the cartoon panels that have been appearing in the East Village Other."

The underground comix were largely distributed though a network of head shops which also sold underground newspapers, psychedelic posters, and drug paraphernalia. In the mid-1970s, the Vietnam War was over, no longer a rallying cause, sales of drug paraphernalia was outlawed in many places, and the distribution network for these comics (and the underground newspapers) dried up. Although many of the underground artists continued to produce work, the underground comix movement is considered by most historians to have ended by 1976, to be replaced by a rise in independent, non-Comics Code compliant publishing companies in the 1980s and the resulting increase in acceptance of adult-oriented comic books.

Countercultures