“And here he was ruined. The frantic praise of the impotent meant recognition—actual somewhereness–to the hipster. He got what he wanted; he stopped protesting, reacting. He began to bureaucratize jive as a machinery for securing the actual–really the false–somewhereness. Jive, which had originally been a critical system, a kind of Surrealism, a personal revision of existing disparities, now grew moribundly self-conscious, smug, encapsulated, isolated from its source. It grew more rigid than the institutions it had set out to defy. It became a boring routine.
The hipster–once an unregenerate individualist, an underground poet, a guerrilla–had become a pretentious poet laureate. His old subversiveness, his ferocity, was now so manifestly rhetorical as to be obviously harmless. He was bought and placed in the zoo. He was somewhere at last–comfortably ensconced in the 52nd Street clip joints, in Carnegie Hall, and Life. He was in-there…he was back in the American womb. And it was just as unhygienic as ever.”

-Anatole Broyard, “A Portrait Of The Hipster” (Partisan Review, 1948)