Hippies vs. Punks: Wire's Pink Flag

All week I've been listening almost continuously to Pink Flag (1977) by Wire. Whether running, nodding off on the train, napping in the darkened file room at lunch, working at my desk, I have immersed myself in the album. I've also listened to Wire's second and third albums -- Chairs Missing (1978) and 154 (1979).

Previously I have said that there are two timeless monuments to Punk from 1977 -- Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols and The Clash. Actually there are three. The third is Pink Flag.

Released at the end of 1977, the same month the Sex Pistols embarked on the U.S. tour that led to their demise, Pink Flag sounds like it was recorded today. Whatever the soundtrack of the last six years is, Pink Flag is it. It's the sound of cyberliterate Occupy Wall Street youth; the sound of the ear-bud generation; a sound resistant to puncture. Minimalist is often used to describe Pink Flag; it packs 21 songs in less than 40 minutes of music -- a perfect antithesis to the Hippie guitar wank.

But first, let's get our bearings. I made some promises for Hippies vs. Punks at the outset. I said I would explore why it is the Punks wiped out the Hippies in such a short frame of time -- 1975 to 1979 -- and what connection this has to the ascendance of neoliberalism and neoconservatism with which it coincides.

While I was a junior-high dropout riding motorbikes in the mountains and listening to Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life (1976), the First Wave of English Punk bands were putting a torch to the Hippies who had taken up residence in the corporate Hotel California (1976). I used Steve Miller Band's Fly Like Eagle (1976) as an example of the transcendence of the corporate soft rock California sound.

The Hippie as Sunshine Patriot was vulnerable to the Punk's Winter Soldier. In 1977 and 1978 the slaughter begins. I think we've got that straight.

A book that provided a manifesto for the Occupy movement, that preceded it by one year, that identified the overwhelming redistribution of wealth to the top 1% of Americans and that defined this redistribution as political in nature is Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics (2010). I read it when I was laid off in March of 2011. Hacker and Pierson point to the problem of rapidly increasing income inequality as having its origin in the Carter administration:

If one wanted a book title to capture the great turning point in modern American political history, it would be more accurate, if less catchy, to call it Carterland. 1977 and 1978 marked the rapid demise of the liberal era and the emergence of something radically different. Tax reform: defeated. A new consumer protection agency: defeated. Election Day voter registration: scuttled before reaching the floor of the House. Health-care reform: defeated. A proposal to tie the minimum wage to the average manufacturing wage to prevent its future erosion: defeated. An overhaul of outdated labor relations laws: successfully filibustered in the Senate, despite the presence of sixty-one Democrats and a Republican minority containing some genuine supporters of organized labor, not to mention, far more moderates than in the GOP today.

In college my buddy Oliver made me a mix tape that had "Champs" on it (Track 19 of Pink Flag). He showed me the LP album cover one time and told me that I should absolutely pick it up. I never did. Why? I don't know. I usually followed Oliver's advice. It was an unmitigated failure on my part not to. I had a large social network then. I could have introduced Pink Flag to many others. Much later I had "Mannequin" and "12 X U" on the No Thanks!: The 70s Punk Rebellion retrospective put out by Rhino. But I didn't possess Pink Flag until recently.

There is a question here that needs to be answered. How can an album recorded at the outset of our current Age of Fragmentation (36 years ago!) sound so timely today? Listen to "Ex Lion Tamer" and tell me if there is a more perfect song right now in the Western world.