Underground culture, or simplyunderground, is a term to describe variousalternative cultures which either consider themselves different from the mainstream ofsociety andculture, or are considered so by others. The word "underground" is used because there is a history ofresistance movements under harshregimes where the termunderground was employed to refer to the necessary secrecy of the resisters.
For example, theUnderground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes by whichAfrican slaves in the 19th-century United States attempted to escape to freedom. The phrase "underground railroad" was resurrected and applied in the 1960s to the extensive network of draft counseling groups and houses used to helpVietnam War-eradraft dodgers escape toCanada,[1] and was also applied in the 1970s to the clandestine movement of people and goods by theAmerican Indian Movement in and out of occupiedNative American reservation lands. (See also:Wounded Knee Occupation).[2]
The filmmakerRosa von Praunheim documented the legendaryNew York underground scene in the 1970s aroundAndy Warhol in some of his films, for example inUnderground and Emigrants (1976) andTally Brown, New York (1979). Since then, the term has come to designate varioussubcultures such asmod culture,hippie culture,punk culture,techno music/rave culture,underground hip hop and alsoneo-nazi.
The unmodified term "The underground" was a common name forWorld War IIresistance movements. It was later applied tocounter-cultural movements, many of whichsprang up in the United States during the 1960s.
The 1960s and 1970s underground cultural movements had some connections to theBeat Generation, which had, in turn, been inspired by the Frenchauthorphilosophers,artists, andpoets asLouis-Ferdinand Céline or theExistentialist movement, which gathered aroundJean-Paul Sartre andAlbert Camus inParis during the years that followed theaftermath of World War II. Sartre and Camus were members ofCombat, aFrench resistance group formed in 1942 byHenri Frenay. Frenay, Sartre, and Camus were all involved in publishingunderground newspapers for the resistance. The French intellectuals which inspired underground american author asJack Kerouac,Allen Ginsberg andWilliam Burroughs in North America in the 1940s was steeped insocialist thinking before theCold War began.
In theEsquire magazine (1958),[3] Jack Kerouac stated:
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 ofWardell 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 veritableWalter the Penniless leading an invisibleFirst 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 theKorean 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 silentconformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.
Today, many aspects of underground culture have become more accessible andcommercialized, often losing their original spirit.Niche musicgenres,fashion styles, andart forms are now widelymarketed to mainstream audiences, which can dilute theirauthenticity.
Moreover, the ease of access to cultural products online has blurred the lines between underground and mainstream. Consequently, what was once considered "underground" is now often integrated intopopular culture, resulting in a loss of theexclusivity and community that originally defined these movements.
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