Hippies vs. Punks: A Digression on the Avant-Garde

Every Friday evening we've been exploring that short period of time in the 1970's -- 1975 to 1979 -- when the Hippies were wiped out as the avant-garde in the West by the Punks. The hope is that by understanding why it happened -- and happened so quickly -- we might gain insight into how it is that the larger paradigm, what we have named neoliberalism, has us in a chokehold today. What's the connection you ask? Because neoliberalism was launched at the same time that the Hippies were wiped out by the Punks.

Tonight a digression; we're going to jump a decade forward to the late 1980's, the last hurrah of the Punks. I say Punk but what I'm really talking about here is underground rock'n'roll, and in particular hardcore as practiced by those bands featured on SST Records. If ever I considered myself belonging to an avant-garde it was when I was a young man in the late 1980's listening to hardcore.

I forgot how passionately I felt about guys like Mike Watt and George Hurley until I posted a letter that described seeing them play at Columbia in the spring of 1990. D. Boon had died at the end of 1985, but Watt and Hurley carried on as fIREHOSE with ed fROMOHIO handling the lead guitar and most of the singing. I considered them true artists, pure and above reproach. They were blazing the trail, and I was dutifully trying to follow along.

When I had a record player I owned a copy of If'n. It came out while I still lived in Berkeley, but I didn't get into it until I moved to New York City in 1988. The album cover represents everything about that time for me. I look at the album cover and I remember what it feels like to be of the avant-garde.

The kachina dolls, the flannel shirts, the pictorial homage to Hüsker -- add Surfer Rosa, drunken devotion to Neil Young's Ditch Trilogy and Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation and you get an idea of where I and a lot of other people were at; the same place that provided the last rock'n'roll "Great Barbeque" for the corporate Leviathan; the place that created Grunge.

It's painful to contemplate.

But before Grunge, and its corporate excess and crass commercialism, there was a hardcore vanguard in this country. Yes, it was predominantly white. Yes, it was urban and university-oriented. But it was a vanguard nonetheless. To hear what it sounded like listen to the last track off If'n, "Thunder Child," sung by Watt: