Hippies vs. Punks: Disco-Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes 1975

To recapitulate. Hippies vs. Punks. In a very short period of time, from 1975 to 1979, the Punks replaced the Hippies as the vanguard youth movement in the West (though on Fridays to come we will consider the possibility of the continuation of a Hippie vanguard, albeit greatly shrunken, contemporaneous with the Punks). This is the same period of time, the late Seventies, when our current (now exhausted) Zeitgeist takes wing. Call it neoliberalism, or a political economy defined by the hyper movement of wealth from working people to the top tier, the rent-seekers, the 1%.

The idea I introduced earlier is that 1975 is the last hurrah of Hippies. What happens in 1975? The Vietnam War officially ends with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. And what makes a Hippie a Hippie? Being a longhair and being antiwar. Hippies are said to have got their start the summer of 1964 when Ken Kesey took his Merry Pranksters cross country in the psychedelic bus Futhur destined for the New York City World's Fair. While Babbs, Cassady, Kesey and the rest fried on acid Congress passed The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing LBJ to rapidly escalate the military conflict in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. When the "war" ends ten-years later so does a main reason for being a Hippie.

But the social characteristics -- such as long hair, promiscuity, and recreational drug use -- popularized by the Hippies not only remain but spread throughout Middle America. It is a mass libertinism minus any revolutionary ideology or social critique. This is Disco, a vital interregnum between the Hippies and the Punks, and crucial to understanding why the Hippies disappeared as a vanguard movement as quickly they did.

From the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1975, coming in at #100, is "Get Dancin'" by Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes. I was in 6th grade in 1975. That year I purchased a cheap copy of Disco-Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes; it was a cut-out bargain bin LP that I found at Tower Records in San Jose. When I wanted to drive my older sisters crazy (one was a prog rocker, the other was a Joni Mitchell devotee) I would put "Get Dancin'" on the turntable:

The Punks are coming.