Deviants, Inc.

Tattooing migrated to the Edge when the first modern sailors and explorers encountered tattooed "primitives" and made the decision to "go native." Decorating your skin wasn't something that respectable people back home did. But these sailors weren't respectable people, and they didn't mind wearing the badge of the misfit on their skin (or under it).

Several Edge dwellers can be credited with moving computing over from the Fringe. The most likely carrier of the devox was Charles Babbage, who designed his "Difference Engine No. 1" in 1821. Babbage never actually produced a working model of his machine, which owed much to other inventors (including Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French weaver who pioneered the first punch cards). But Babbage clearly played a seminal role in transferring the idea of computing machines from the Fringe to the Edge, headed toward the Realm of the Cool -- the next stop in its continuing evolution.

As the devox enters the Realm of the Cool, it acquires a small but rapidly growing audience, in part because the idea is starting to win slightly more favorable media coverage. What was once unconscionable is now considered to be daring and provocative. It's at this point that real markets begin to form, nurtured by Cool Hunters and other for-hire trend spotters and culture vultures.

You can almost trace the evolution of rock and roll into the Realm of the Cool on a map of America, tracing how jazz, blues, and "race records" (early rhythm and blues) migrated up U.S. Highway 61, from towns like Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta north to St. Louis, Chicago, and New York. The blues buried itself in Chicago's South Side juke joints. Jazz found its way to New York's Cotton Club. Rhythm and blues began to ferment into what would one day become the vintage Motown sound in Detroit's Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. Whatever the city, the pattern was the same: White audiences were hypnotically drawn to what were primarily segregated venues, lured by a chance to hear the raucous joy of African-American music as it matured and evolved. (Never mind that it was being played and sung by people they would never live next door to or let their daughters marry.)

Tattooing entered the Realm of the Cool immediately after World War II when legions of rather sheepish servicemen returned to respectable society bearing the indelible mark of one or more nights of mixing a dangerous blend of testosterone and alcohol. The members of the Greatest Generation may have publicly wished that they had never gotten that anchor, eagle, hula dancer, or remembrance of "Mom" on their arms, but there it was -- a graphic reminder of a time when they were young and life was more exciting.

In 1927, computing edged its way into the Realm of the Cool when Vannevar Bush designed "Product Intergraph" -- an analog computer that could solve simple equations -- with the help of two colleagues at MIT. Product Intergraph and its 1930 successor, the Differential Analyzer, proved to be so popular that they served to slow down the development of digital-computer models.

Once the devox achieves audience size and market scale in the Realm of the Cool, it's ready to move on to the Next Big Thing. At that point, the original deviant is little more than a distant reference point, and the devox has become sanitized, commercialized, and packaged. Conventional society may flirt with the devox when it's in the Realm of the Cool. But when the devox hits the Next Big Thing, those in the mainstream become genuinely engaged with it.

Rock and roll entered the realm of the Next Big Thing when Elvis Presley (whose career is in itself an interesting example of a human devox moving from the Fringe to Social Convention and beyond) jump-started the engine built by early rockers such as Bill Haley. Elvis was the dream incarnate of Sun Records' founder Sam Phillips: a white boy who sang as if he were black. True, Elvis's version of "Hound Dog" was less menacing than the original version recorded by Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, an enormous African-American woman who routinely appeared onstage dressed as a man. Big Mama's growling delivery of "Hound Dog" on Peacock Records left no doubt about the song's subject: the pleasures and pain of backdoor sex. But it fell to Elvis to smooth out the menace from the message, to slide the devox from the Realm of the Cool to the Next Big Thing, and to ride the song to teenage mass-market glory.

If Elvis was rock's triumphant carrier, then Cher can take equal credit for moving tattooing into the arena of the Next Big Thing. Here was a card-carrying member of the "beautiful people" tribe who chose to adorn her skin with ink after she had already become famous! All of a sudden, athletes, actors, and musicians used body ink as a way of telling the world that they were big enough and powerful enough to reject social taboos. Tattoos shifted from being badges of guilty pleasure (or nights only dimly remembered) to being visible status symbols proudly worn.