This is a terrific article from Salon that's partly memoir about living hip in San Francisco in the 1980s and a review of a book by sociologist Richard Lloyd on the role of "neo-Bohemia" in modern capitalism, focusing on the Wicker Park nabe in Chicago.

Some excerpts:

Lloyd's groundbreaking study, "Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City," focuses on Wicker Park, on the west side of Chicago, which in the early '90s brought the indie-rock world Liz Phair and the bands Urge Overkill and Veruca Salt. It tells a compelling story of one idiosyncratic neighborhood and how it changed; after reading Lloyd's analysis of how the service economy of Wicker Park actually functions, you'll never undertip the multiply pierced waitress at your favorite bar again. It also connects Wicker Park to a larger narrative of the American urban economy, which over the course of 40 years or so has shifted its focus from heavy industry to image production and high-end consumption, a process in which hipster neighborhoods like the Mission and Wicker Park have been crucial. ...

Much has been written about the economic and social transformation of America's cities in the '80s and '90s, often considered under the unhelpful catch-all rubric of "gentrification." This stuff mainly cuts in two directions: Neo-Marxist diatribes about how the force of capital is dividing the city into two zones, one belonging to a homogenized, yupscale Starbucks culture and the other a virtual prison for the dark-skinned poor; and sweeping neoliberal treatises arguing that the longtime contradictions between art and capital have been healed by a benign meritocratic culture of "bourgeois bohemians," or by a "new creative class" that blends 1960s nonconformity with 1980s entrepreneurial ambition. Both of these arguments are transparently ideological, and Lloyd considers both while avoiding the pitfalls of either. Like most sociologists, he has one foot in the stream of post-Marxian theory, and his prose suffers from occasional outbreaks of academic jargon. But his goal is neither to praise nor to bury neo-bohemia, but rather to unpack and analyze its multifarious contradictions and possibilities. ...

Contrary to the way some of its residents feel (to the way I felt in 1995, for instance) neo-bohemia is not "over" when it has been discovered by hordes of Oxford-clad yuppies and blathering newspaper reporters. In fact, it's only coming into its own. Neighborhoods like the Mission and Wicker Park (and even older bohemias like Greenwich Village or San Francisco's North Beach) retain much of their power as bohemian signifiers even when they've become too expensive for many young artists. This is just another of the numerous contradictions they embody; to be neo-bohemian at all, they must remain superficially hospitable to anti-establishment values while becoming both a "bohemian-themed entertainment zone" and a site of postindustrial production.

Some of Lloyd's best work comes in his dissection of Wicker Park's economy, which depends largely on its hip, young residents either working long hours as bartenders or waitstaff, or long hours in various digital design occupations. This is fascinating, original and deeply humane sociology at its finest; he demonstrates that in the name of freedom, young people working in allegedly relaxed service-sector jobs waste years of their lives in a whirl of drugs, alcohol and deceptively low wages. It's a classic example of a circular economy: While a bartender at an upscale Wicker Park club may earn $250 or more in tips from a shift, he or she is likely to go right out to an after-hours club with friends and spend it all on lavish tips to another bartender on the circuit. To anyone who's ever worked in the nightlife business, all this will ring sad but true.

Lloyd also explores how Wicker Park's digital-design sector came into existence, as a sort of hipster offshoot of Chicago's downtown advertising firms. (San Francisco's neo-bohemian fringe also helped fuel many "new-economy" businesses, most of them infamously short-lived. The publication you are now reading could be viewed as a survivor of the early neo-bohemian era.) Companies that began by designing Web sites for artists, or fliers for neighborhood hip-hop shows, became avatars of the street-level authenticity now so desirable to multinational marketers.

One of Wicker Park's hippest graphic-design shops designed a recruitment campaign for Nike at just about the time the company's brutal East Asian sweatshop practices were being revealed, which occasions one of Lloyd's most important sections. Torn between a commitment to bohemian values and a contemporary ethic of success, the designer Lloyd interviews can only mouth generalities: "OK, there's more to these companies than what they're going to tell you. I think there was a certain level of naiveté that was going on for us." As another one says, Nike may be controversial, but it also allows "artists to do cool stuff and pay them lots of money to do it."

Of course these designers in a funky loft in a onetime barrio in Chicago's urban core are not responsible for "the new spatial links and displacements of contemporary capitalism," as Lloyd puts it. It's undoubtedly cheaper for Nike to subcontract to a firm like theirs than to a major ad agency, and more to the point, their neo-bohemian heritage and artsy, "edgy" design aesthetic lends Nike something it can't easily buy elsewhere. Neighborhoods like Wicker Park must remain linked to the bohemian past even as they become image factories producing goods (including the manufactured entity that is the neighborhood itself) for "the global swirl of commodified signifiers."

"The traditions of dead generations," Lloyd writes, in the closest he ever comes to a moment of judgment, "are what make it possible to understand oneself as resisting the stultification and injustice of corporate capitalism while working 12-hour days making recruitment ads for Nike."

Neo-bohemia is always contaminated by nostalgia, by the belief that the scene is over, and has been over since the yuppies moved in, the old bookstore closed, the Starbucks opened and so on. Lloyd writes that bohemia dies a thousand deaths and is always reborn, and that "bohemia is always already over because it always already falls short of its adherents' fantasies of social autonomy." Social autonomy would mean both artistic freedom and cultural power. In the Mission District of the 1980s, we enjoyed a species of freedom, but with it came powerlessness, even meaninglessness. The Wicker Park bohemians of the '90s, in Lloyd's account, gained cultural significance and a kind of power, but lost much of their freedom. In a capitalist economy -- or any other kind one can imagine -- bohemians don't get to have both.