What is “cool” in the 21st century? Might it be the number of likes and notifications on your “Facegram?” Or the newest techno-gear from innovative platforms? In the bustling setting of 60’s New York City, “cool” was the counterculture. In fact, counterculture was the main-culture in the adolescent community.

Through her memoir “Just Kids,” Patti Smith, pays homage to the artistic lifestyle of the post-Beat and pre-punk generation. Her shared “artist’s experience” with avant-garde photographer Robert Mapplethorpe paints the real, poverty stricken setting of ‘60’s Chelsea. Smith presents this impoverished reality simultaneously with the “childish” appreciation of the ‘70s’ emerging music scene. The “situational irony”–between her circumstances and response– highlights the innocence of youth: a question challenging materialistic culture of 21st century-adolescents.

Smith’s memoir is a revisit of Beatnik philosophy.

Throughout most of the memoir, the Beat poets [i.e. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Jean Cocteau] are frequent visitors of Smith’s pages. The Beat generation, a collection of radical poets, manipulated art and literature to “rebel” against social standards in the ‘50’s. Beat arguments revolved against consumerist culture and conformity: “the military-industrial machine civilization,” according to Ginsberg. It also embraced sexual freedom and pacifism, [against the Vietnam War] expressed with the unique, “Beat flair”.

“Just Kids” encompasses all of these qualities, beginning with Smith’s androgynous demeanor, following her journey in punk rock and poetry, and tailing Mapplethorpe’s exploration of his sexuality through photography. In the socially-turbulent setting of the 50’s-60’s, the memoir demonstrates how young people found solace in art, as a platform for advocacy and exploration.

In fact, the foundation of Smith’s musical genre [punk rock] is only another variation of Blues jazz, in itself a platform for awareness against racial discrimination. As it gained attraction in mainstream culture, jazz was an artistic outlet to break racial prejudice and hate. In 1929, Louis Armstrong famously altered the lyrics of “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue” to call attention to these discriminatory realities.

Smith portrays her position for sexual, racial, and artistic freedom through meshing counterculture music and literature, like many other artists in her generation. As Ginsberg influenced Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters inspired Mick Jagger, and the collective rock generation galvanized Smith, social advocacy married the arts in the mid-20th century. Investment in aesthetics and phonaesthetics was what was “in” the socio-political scene. 

21st century, a direct refutation of Beatnik culture

Throughout the piece, Smith graces herself along the border of controversy and art. Her work reminisces the powerful social reform, psychedelic work ethic, and intense spiritual curiosity of 60’s artists. It projects the “counter-movement” of mid century youths rebelling against typical “American standards”: mass-consumerism, orthodox spirituality, and war. Smith’s generation embraced adolescence as a phase of experimentation and rejection of the “social clock” to homogenize identity.

As an adolescent reader in the 21st century, I wonder if artist-led social reforms have become a literal counterculture amongst youth. Has the experimental transcendentalist era really ended? As we approach an increasingly materialistic world, our generation seems to be breaching from the “Beatnik evolution.” Breaking the line of Beat poets and hippies, our consumer culture online seems to be consolidating a shared “second-hand experience.” We live off the media that others feed us and collectively believe it to be our own: a new trend. In a sense, our unified conformity to online standards shouts “counterculture!” to the previous generations. So, might this be the birth of something new? A counterculture to the parent rebels?

Whatever the case, the reckless age of radical art is no longer a prevalent force in the youth community. 

“Just Kids,” Smith’s formal eulogy to Mapplethorpe, and an informal ode to counterculture, is a remnant of “what was” in both the art and reform community. A love letter to the 60s’ reckless youth, the memoir shares Smith’s innocence in NYC’s unexplored art scene and questions the changing meaning of art in current society.