I’m going to take a big stab in the dark and suggest that the first idolized members of the American “In Crowd” were quite possibly those who disdained the boredom and responsibility of middle-class life back in the 1920s. These were the devil-may-care folks who ran with one another in a futile quest for rebellious fun that would somehow prove to be worth all the effort of deliberately trying not to fit into the everyday social landscape.These were the people for whom the prohibition of alcohol meant very little, or nothing at all, and to whom listening and dancing to “devil music” was a freedom they felt they somehow had to earn. Most of the older folks back then, who had to stay home and keep up appearances, were Jazz Era wannabes, moms and dads who would have dropped that broom and apron and abandoned that pipe and those slippers in a New York minute (how I hate that phrase and that’s why I just had to use it here) for a chance to imbibe bathtub gin and cut a rug with someone other than their spouses.
For my money, this is where and when the “In Crowd” cut its teeth. In the “Speakeasy” world of Prohibition. And had I lived back then, I, too, would have been one of them. For me, it would have been mainly for the jazz but also for the beer and Canadian whiskey the holier-than-thou feds should have kept their stupid paws off in the first place. But, for me, it wouldn't have been an effort on my part to be “in” or to “be cool”. For my money, that’s always been a low priority, if not a total waste of time.
Before the Keepers of the Cool were alluded to as “The In Crowd”, they began cutting their wisdom teeth in the basement nightclubs of New York and Los Angeles as part of the 1950's “too cool to care” Beat generation. That would be those goatee-sporting wannabe poets and the long-haired mavens who played flute that they ran with, all wearing trademark black clothing, including the omnipresent black French beret. These rebels were more about being rebellious, in my opinion, than the Jazz Era fun junkies of the Roaring Twenties. But the Beatniks didn’t need to sneak out of the house to act "cool" and be deliberately unfathomable. They were like that at home, too.
Then along came the infamous Sixties where youths, like me, decided that it was high time to turn the world upside down and inside out under the guise of political and social responsibility. Yeah, right. The truth of the matter was that college students of that decade simply wanted to have fun with alcohol, drugs, sex, and loud music while just pretending to have a socially-responsible bone in their bodies. What the hippies and yippies and "freaks" of the 1960s inadvertently caused, however, was the birth of the most famous “In Crowd” of all time. That was the phenomenon called the “Jet Set”.
The "Jet Set" were people (mostly from Beverly Hills, Aspen and The Hamptons) who had so much money and so little time for continued observance of those damn boring American values that the USA was built on that they flew all around the world repeatedly without a mental flight plan just to prove that they could. These people were the parings that were left after the Big Apple was carved up by television and publishing movers-and-shakers who at least did something tangible with their time and money. The unwritten code of the new “In Crowd” was to spend money like it was water and hope that those who were merely middle-class and who lived in the “fly-over country” between New York and L.A. would dare to idolize you instead of wanting you dead.
The “In Crowd” in the 1980s did their bogeying in hotspots like Xenon in New York and their chomping at trendy troughs like Spago in Los Angeles, again in the hopes that their “being cool” was being noticed and worth the all the effort of getting “dressed up” or “dressed down” and spending all that money on door covers, expensive cocktails and food with European names that looked like art on their dinner plates. The “In Crowd” of the 1980s took shallowness to a new level. Their turned-up collars, pushed-up jacket sleeves, glitter makeup and shocking hairdos were part of their visual trademark of not wanting to be like everyone else. Unfortunately, when half the world thinks you’re cool as hell and copies everything you do and say, your coolness begins to wear thin, especially when the “In Crowd” moved to the high schools and shopping malls of the 1990s, where everyone was equal.
This blog is not about the 21st Century but I’ll venture to guess that members of “The In Crowd” in the new millennium are youths comprising the "inked" generation who flock to tattoo parlors the way their great-grandparents flocked to speakeasy nightclubs during Prohibition. These are the sons and daughters who have turned the movie-going experience into a confusing battle between Surround Sound and the high-contrast nano-second images of bellybuttons and butt cracks, a digital vying for what’s left of your caffeine-kicked and sugar-laden mind.
“The In Crowd” somehow grew and grew during the latter portion of the 20th Century until it's now the bigger part of who we are as Americans. That’s the part of us that rebels against just about everything we were once taught and told. How this can be any degree of “cool” is a mystery I, myself, may never fathom.
