The underground was immediately co-opted by mainstream media and commerce.

Evidence

As heralded by the Life magazine spread “Squaresville U.S.A. vs. Beatsville,” autumn 1959 was the Season of the Beatnik. Pull My Daisy was even reviewed in Time—the magazine’s fourth piece on the Beats that year. A few months after it opened, the New York Times Book Review devoted its front page to Lawrence Lipton’s quasi-sociological account of beat life in Venice, California, The Holy Barbarians. Inspired by Ted Joans’s beatnik loft parties, Fred McDarrah created Rent-a-Beatnik, a service that provided extroverts like Joans to enliven suburban cocktail parties. A few months later, a Voice reader spotted a “Beatnik Kit”—beret, sunglasses, and paste-on beard—in the window of a downtown novelty store. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 79

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the gentrification advance-guard thesis — the underground as unwitting raw material for commerce that then repackages it.
• CANDY: Rent-a-Beatnik and the paste-on-beard Beatnik Kit are delightfully absurd, elevator-conversation details.
• SHARE: Rent-a-Beatnik, a service hiring beatniks to liven suburban cocktail parties in 1959, is the kind of narrow detail a friend writing about counterculture commodification would relish.
• SEED: The speed of co-optation — Season of the Beatnik to Beatnik Kit in months — is an essay angle on how fast the market absorbs subversion.