Historians who have studied post-World War Two youth cultures have looked to the quietly turbulent 1950s as a precursor of the openly turbulent 1960s. In this view, the cultural contradictions of the 1950s—and the struggles that grew out of them—were the first shock waves of the countercultural earthquake that shook mainstream American society in the 1960s. Teen films and rock'n'roll served as oppositional benchmarks for the emerging counterculture (Gary, 1994). For those historians who are fans of the oppositional—as most historians of youth culture today are—1950s middle-class youth are not dull conformist patsies for the corporate consumerist state, but pre-revolutionaries, as it were. While some of these historians note the complex nature of 1950s rebellion that combined oblique resistance to mainstream culture along with accommodation, most assume that the legacy was positive.
The influence of mainstream culture in Hip-Hop culture has been the catalyst responsible for much of the deterioration that Hip-Hop has undergone (Peter, 1991). Mainstream ideology is powerful because of its appeal to those who are less independent in thought and behavior. Its phenomenal quality is that in addition to being a cultural entity within itself, it has the ability to deter the focus of or infiltrate and destroy other cultures through its sheer force as a conformist presence. Mainstream ideology values three things above all else: capital, image and sex. These three things define a person’s status or are what makes a person “successful” in life; the more you embody these things, the higher your status. For the most part, the mainstream has proven to be one of the most powerful cultures to ever exist, judging from its massive number of constituents.
Scholars studying the 1960s counterculture have largely divided between two seemingly dissimilar perspectives. One view attacks the counterculture as being the....
