Neo-bohemian rhapsody

I suspect it takes a genuine neo-bohemian to perform this task, and for all his skepticism and independence of thought, Lloyd is clearly a member of the tribe he is investigating. He weaves his own personal Wicker Park experiences into "Neo-Bohemia" with a grace few academics can manage; he writes fondly of his first expedition into the neighborhood in 1993 (to see a band called Lost Pilgrims at Phyllis' Musical Inn on Division Street), and admits late in the book, "I myself experience almost unbearable bouts of nostalgia on return to the neighborhood streets."

Basically, the problem with David Brooks and Richard Florida, the twin Jedi knights of the neoliberal end-of-ideology thesis cited above, is that they don't know what the hell they're talking about. Lloyd puts it a little more politely, but that's what he thinks. Both Brooks' "Bobos in Paradise" and Florida's "The Rise of the New Creative Class" now read like utopian manifestoes of the late-Clinton-era economic boom, seeking to justify the sudden ascendancy of an unstarched managerial class that combined software-IPO millions with a taste for fresh-baked baguettes, extra-virgin olive oil and Velvet Underground reissue CDs. Among other things, both seem to argue that in this brave new world old-fashioned politics is no longer important, and American government will henceforth work from the middle, combining social liberalism with fiscal conservatism. Tell it to Judge Alito, guys.

Brooks and Florida were investigating a real phenomenon; there is no question that over the last 30 years or so mainstream American taste has become substantially infected by Euro-American elite influences, in one direction, and bohemian underground influences in the other. But their deductions about this are based primarily on sweeping ZIP code generalities and reprocessed infobytes from the mainstream media, rather than original research or reporting. Florida apparently bases his conclusion that artists are no longer alienated from society, Lloyd says, on the fact that Bruce Springsteen and Madonna work out at the gym. His "creative class" category is defined so broadly that it encompasses virtually the entire professional sector of the American workforce (some 38 million people, he says), including doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists and engineers.

Essentially, Lloyd argues that Brooks' "Bobos" and Florida's "creative class" are valuable pop-sociology concepts, but have almost nothing to say about how and why a neighborhood like Wicker Park exploded over the course of the '90s, or how and why its inhabitants combine forceful anti-establishment views with a newly instrumental economic role. Traditional urban sociology, he suggests, isn't much better. Old-line sociologists of the "Chicago school" focused on American cities as tightly focused centers of industrial production and highly segmented social universes; their successors have become hypnotized by the sprawling cities of the Sun Belt, which seemed to provide a decentered, postmodern model for urbanism.

As Lloyd explains, the reinvention of Chicago -- formerly Carl Sandburg's "city of big shoulders" -- as a center for financial services, advertising, tourism and other intangible industries, and the emergence of a neighborhood like Wicker Park as a player in that economy, suggest that older cities remain surprisingly vibrant and flexible entities. Indeed, while it was widely presumed that the growth of America's "new economy" would mostly occur in suburban office parks and Microsoft-style "edge city" compounds, one could argue that the real centers of innovation in graphic design, video effects, advertising and related fields are found in or near the kinds of neo-bohemian urban neighborhoods Lloyd describes.

Lloyd is certainly not the first to notice that there is a connection between the existence of neighborhoods like Wicker Park or the Mission that lure large numbers of young people with artistic talents and ambitions and an "increased concentration of high-tech enterprise." Brooks and Florida both saw this as well, but Lloyd's understanding of the relationship is far more nuanced. One should not conclude from this, he says, that young artists have abandoned all pretense of bohemian distinction and uncritically embraced capitalism. Indeed, his research in Wicker Park suggests that anti-establishment and especially anti-corporate sentiment is as strong as ever. MTV's filming of a "Real World" series in Wicker Park was greeted with angry street protests, and the inevitable opening of a Starbucks in 2001 occasioned widespread laments that the neighborhood was "over."

If anything, the anti-corporate fervor of Wicker Park's bohemians (which, as Lloyd points out, imagines a paternalistic, regimented vision of the American corporation that no longer conforms to reality) has become more crucial to their identity as their neighborhood has become more tightly bound to Chicago's economy. On the one hand, Lloyd finds significant ideological continuity between past and present bohemians; the "cumulative imagery of the artist in the city" remains important in Wicker Park. On the other, "the new bohemia of the late 20th and early 21st centuries plays a necessarily novel role in enhancing the interests of postindustrial capitalist enterprises, especially property speculation  entertainment provision, and new media production."

Starting around 1990, give or take, mainstream society's relationship to these new artists' ghettos began to change rapidly. As Lloyd details in his fascinating interviews with longtime Wicker Parkers, in the late '80s the neighborhood remained a dilapidated, crime-ridden zone divided between Mexican immigrants and an older generation of Polish-American residents. The newly arriving artists often affected "street" mannerisms, dabbling in hard drugs and often fetishizing the hardscrabble lives of working-class inhabitants, even as they began to change the neighborhood's character and reshape its nightlife, opening cafes and bookstores and taking over the old Polish bars.

As Lloyd acerbically puts it, this "aesthetic relationship to urban vice" is a key element in neo-bohemia, as well as an obviously hypocritical one. Anyone who has done time in these neighborhoods will appreciate his dissection of the racial fetishism, misogyny and masculine bravado that characterize Wicker Park's pioneers. To a person, they tell him they lament the passing of the old neighborhood and dislike the new "yuppies" in their midst, although by almost any cultural measure these neo-bohemians have far more in common with young middle-class professionals than with the poor Mexicans and Eastern Europeans both groups had displaced.

But the economic marginality of neo-bohemia didn't last long, which is after all what makes it "neo." (Lloyd makes the often neglected point that older bohemian districts like Greenwich Village were viewed with disdain by America's puritanical establishment, and to "slum" there was a sign of moral dubiousness.) By the early '90s -- and somewhat earlier in environments like San Francisco and New York -- these neighborhoods had become, Lloyd writes, "distinctly themed spaces of consumption fawningly advertised by the mainstream media." Exactly why magazines and newspapers became so universally entranced by the hipness factor of the East Village or the Mission or Wicker Park is perhaps a subject for another book, but it's clearly not unconnected to America's decade-late discovery of punk rock, in the personage of Kurt Cobain.

Next Page: Why neo-bohemia isn't over when the yuppies arrive

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