The Baffler
The Baffler, issue 5.
Semiannual, Chicago-based ascetic journal of cultural criticism (founded in 1988 by University of Virginia undergraduates Keith White and Tom Frank) that tackles the big questions weighing on the minds of indie-rock-loving and -hating intellectuals. Defiant, anti-commerce Baffler mottoes include “Accessorize Your Dissent,” “The Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge,” and, on the back of one of the magazine T-shirts, “Your Lifestyle Sucks.”
Each issue seeks archly to debunk the hip-seeking excesses of the corporate culture business. The early 1994 “Alternative to What?” issue mocked the post-Nirvana commodification of rebellion (or, in Baffler parlance, “consolidated deviance”):
“Alternative” Culture
The Baffler, issue 5
Nineties term for counterculture, often of a non-oppositional nature. Current use of “alternative” in the music and youth-culture world originated in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when it described the strain of post-punk music cultivated by a growing, informal network of college radio stations. The word “alternative” already had a meaning related to culture: commonly associated with the independent, oppositional press of the late hippie era, this counterculture label also came to denote any lifestyle outside the mainstream. As college-rock favorites like R.E.M. and U2 became chart and stadium fixtures in the second half of the ’80s, successive waves of