LAST NIGHT, strolling at dusk in the small town where I’m vacationing, I passed a half-dozen 14- and 15-year-old boys. Some were walking, some were balancing jerkily on their bikes, struggling to coast at walking speed. They all had that weird adolescent gift for remaining unintelligible while shouting at the top of their lungs. (“Hey, Tyler! Hey! Hey, Tyler!” one said to a friend walking so close that their arms were brushing. “Yo!” said another, scarcely further away. “Hey! Hey, Brandon, yo! Know what?”) If no information could be gleaned from eavesdropping on these kids, it may have been because they had none to impart. Probably all of them had had identical conversations with their parents roughly twenty minutes before:
“Where are you going, Brandon?”
“Nowhere.”
“Are you going to see your friends?”
“I dunno.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothin’.”
But they are doing something. With a few adjustments (e.g., that my friends had names like Bill and Mike), they are doing exactly what I used to do. They’re hanging around.
It heartened me to see it. I had assumed hanging around was a lost art. By the time I was doing it in the late 1970s, it was already giving way to “hanging out.” Sometime during the sybaritic 1990s, hanging out was replaced in turn by mere “hanging.”
Of these, “hanging around” has the worst reputation. This is partly because it was practiced in the two or three decades after the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s. Like many such panics, this one abated at just the moment its worst fears materialized. American parents dropped their guard and became less “repressive” in precisely the years teenage drug use reached its all-time high. (Basically the years I spent in high school, although I deny sole responsibility.)
Hanging around was sometimes shorthand for “hanging around, shoplifting, spray-painting walls, and drinking till you throw up.” But not always. The disrepute into which hanging around fell came mostly from a residual Calvinism on the part of adolescents themselves. To describe oneself as “hanging around” is to admit that there are better things one could be doing, like organizing one’s fellow hangers-around into activities more dignified than hanging around. In the battle against boredom, hanging around was a declaration of surrender by one’s “inner resources.” We conceded as much when we described ourselves as “just” hanging around.
But then hanging around turned into “hanging out.” This was the same activity, but with claims to social dignity and respect. No one ever said he was “just” hanging out. Maybe hanging out = hanging around + a driver’s license. But at the time it felt like an alternative lifestyle, with all the privileges accruing thereto. To hang out was to present oneself in public, to open oneself to experience, as opposed to locking oneself in a room, reading a book, or replicating the “sell-out” lives of one’s parents.
There was a catch, though. While hanging out had connotations of countercultural defiance, it did not offer teenagers an escape from the Calvinist bargain. It demanded constant self-justifications, along the lines of: “Who is to say that my father’s work as a pediatric brain surgeon is more socially valuable than my smoking this excellent ganja and getting my 15-year-old girlfriend pregnant?” or “When you look at how little my father enjoys selling insurance, you have to wonder who’s really crazy, John Wayne Gacy or him.”
Nothing is more exhausting than casuistry in a losing cause. So in the end, “hanging out” ended the way most American alternative lifestyle movements do–its practitioners decided to maintain all their claims on society, while repudiating all their duties. Effrontery was pressed into service where casuistry had failed. That’s how we arrived at “hanging,” as the term is used in rap music, teen movies, and beer ads. (“Whatcha doin’?” . . . “I’m hangin’.”) Hanging means idling, preferably in front of the TV, alone if necessary, waiting for other people to buy you clothes.
There were signs of hanging in the crowd I passed last night–the mind-boggling conformity of their dress, for one–but I took them for hangers-around. Perhaps this is wishful thinking. Perhaps it is extrapolating from the very youngest people I work with, who, in their leisurely moments, seem to be more hangers-around than hangers, generally more virtuous and diligent than the people who came before them–certainly more virtuous and diligent than my generation. Whether or not they have learned from the mistakes of their elders, they have arrived at the conclusion that we must hang around together or we shall hang separately.
–Christopher Caldwell
