The Square Is the New Underground

The Square Is the New Underground
by Buzz Drainpipe

You can keep your feedback shriek and your art-school sneer. I’m telling you, the real revolution came in a three-quarter-time sway, played politely at medium volume. The underground, my dear deviant, put on a cardigan and got a library card.

See, there’s a lineage the textbooks skip. The covert ops of culture. The ones who never looked dangerous — they sounded safe, smiled for the cameras, and slipped transcendence into the supermarket speakers. The seemingly square. The Rod McKuen brigade.

McKuen was the first to crack it. A poet for the gift-shop rack, sure — but in that soft-spoken voice was the whole ache of modern man. A folk existentialist disguised as your aunt’s favorite guest on The Mike Douglas Show. He taught us that sincerity, properly weaponized, can short-circuit irony.

But the line goes back further: Hoagy Carmichael, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee — all crooning civil disobedience in plainclothes. And forward it goes through the chrome corridors of the 1980s, where the likes of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays built sonic cathedrals out of shopping-mall gloss. Miles Davis wore pleather, played funk, and let the future leak out through the seams. Jon Hassell made Fourth-World hymns you could play in a boardroom without scaring the boss — unless the boss listened.

That’s the trick. The revolution was never about volume; it was about frequency. The Squares were transmitting on a subtler band. Sakamoto, Bacharach, Talk Talk, Stereolab — all of them laundering cosmic information through polite harmonies and major-sevenths. By the time the world noticed, the virus of beauty had already uploaded itself.

Now it’s everywhere: lo-fi kids strumming heartbreak into laptop microphones, ambient producers making prayer rugs out of pink noise, pop idols singing sincerity so straight it bends. The whole system can’t tell if it’s being mocked or healed. That’s power.

So don’t sneer at the easy stuff, old man. Listen closer. Beneath the brushed snare and the smiley compression, something’s humming. It’s the secret resistance: elevator music plotting its escape, a thousand synth pads conspiring toward grace.

The Square is the new underground. Always has been. Always will be.
Now excuse me while I put on some Lyle Mays and overthrow the empire — quietly

The Square Is the New Underground, Part II: Page and Screen

by Buzz Drainpipe

The thing about art that looks “safe” is it gets through the metal detector. Nobody checks the old paperback with the sunset cover, nobody suspects the middlebrow movie with the nice lighting. But that’s where the subversion lives now — in the books your aunt reads on the train, in the films you could show your mum without blushing. The avant-garde went to ground years ago. These days it hides in plain sight, wearing beige.

Take literature. The secret radicals aren’t the ones bleeding onto the page anymore — it’s the ones who iron their shirts. Richard Yates writes suburbia so quietly you don’t notice the scream until three pages later. Anita Brookner whispers like a librarian and leaves you gutted. Kazuo Ishiguro builds novels like hotel lobbies, every sentence perfectly upholstered, until you realize you’re trapped in the moral architecture of postwar England. Even Marilynne Robinson — Bible prose, Midwestern calm — she’s smuggling theology into secular America like contraband compassion.

That’s the McKuen effect on the bookshelf: restraint as resistance, politeness as camouflage.

And film? The same infiltration. Ozu’s family dramas — camera three feet off the ground, revolution in the teacups. Hal Ashby directing Being There, turning small talk into apocalypse. Jonathan Demme making optimism feel punk. The 80s brought the subversive square to multiplexes: Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, Field of Dreams — all weaponized sincerity in the Reagan era. Then came The Truman Show and Pleasantville, mainstream parables about media hypnosis that played on the very screens they were condemning.

Even now, the tradition hums along. Greta Gerwig, Kogonada, Kelly Reichardt — they make quiet look like a Trojan horse. The Florida Project disguises revolution as a kids’ movie. Columbus looks like architectural porn but it’s spiritual geometry. Barbie pretends to be a toy commercial and turns out to be a treatise on metaphysics and marketing.

All of them are practicing the same trick: the Velvet Revolt. Not noise, but nuance. Not smashing the system, but teaching it to dream.

Because that’s what the Squares always knew: you can’t scream forever. Eventually, you’ve got to slip the truth into something beautiful, or no one will let it through the door.

So the next time you see a film described as “gentle” or a novel as “quietly devastating,” take note. That’s code. That’s where the underground’s gone. They traded leather for linen, distortion for daylight, but the spirit’s the same.

The system runs on spectacle. The real dissidents run on subtlety.
And somewhere, between a teapot and a tracking shot, the revolution continues — softly, politely, persistently