Hippies vs. Punks has been on hiatus. Since February Ukraine has absorbed most of my attention. I realize now that these Hippies vs. Punks posts, though of modest depth and limited insight, require a level of attention, effort and research that I have been unable to deliver of late.
The standard operating procedure for a Hippies vs. Punks post is to take a band, an album, a song, sometimes even a genre and immerse myself in selected recording(s) for a week or two, and then sit down and deliver. And what I want to deliver is some sort of understanding of what happened when the Hippies gave way to the Punks.
Why is this important? Because it is the period of time, when the Hippie dream gave way to the Punk nightmare, that marks the beginning of the age of neoliberalism in the West.
A story that appeared this week in the New York Times reminds us what many (Noam Chomsky, for instance) have been saying for decades -- that inequality, the re-ascension of capital, begins in the 1970s after a brief spurt of egalitarianism in the 1960s. Neil Irwin writes in "Growth Has Been Good for Decades. So Why Hasn’t Poverty Declined?" that great gains in the fight on poverty were made between 1959 to 1973 -- what one could call the heyday of rock'n'roll -- but have completely stalled or fallen backwards in the last 30 years:
From 1959 to 1973, the nation’s economy per person grew 82 percent, and that was enough to drive the proportion of the poor population from 22 percent to 11 percent.
But over the last generation in the United States, that simply hasn’t happened. Growth has been pretty good, up 147 percent per capita. But rather than decline further, the poverty rate has bounced around in the 12 to 15 percent range — higher than it was even in the early 1970s. The mystery of why — and how to change that — is one of the most fundamental challenges in the nation’s fight against poverty.
The disconnect between growth and poverty reduction is a key finding of a sweeping new study of wages from the Economic Policy Institute. The liberal-leaning group’s policy prescriptions are open to debate, but this piece of data the researchers find is hard to dispute: From 1959 to 1973, a more robust United States economy and fewer people living below the poverty line went hand-in-hand. That relationship broke apart in the mid-1970s. If the old relationship between growth and poverty had held up, the E.P.I. researchers find, the poverty rate in the United States would have fallen to zero by 1986 and stayed there ever since.
“It used to be that as G.D.P. per capita grew, poverty declined in lock step,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at E.P.I. and an author of the study. “There was a very tight relationship between overall growth and fewer and fewer Americans living in poverty. Starting in the ′70s, that link broke.”The idea behind Hippies vs. Punks has always been that if we could understand what was going on when the kids gave up on the Hippie dream -- go back to the land, reject technocratic corporate society, live in communion with nature, practice tolerance, etc. -- in favor of the nihilism and know-nothingness of the Punks we could understand where we went wrong the last time around. So that now, as the wheel turns and signs appear pointing towards the coming demise of neoliberalism, we will be prepared to avoid the mistakes the Hippies made.
Not all Punks were "No Future" nihilists like the Sex Pistols or Rock 'n' Roll High School know nothings. The foremost example of a politically engaged, socially conscious first-wave Punk band is The Clash.
It is hard to appreciate today how big The Clash were in the early 1980s. In fact, my freshman year at the university they were the band at the top. And what made them different is that they were, at least as the gestural level, clearly opposed to the cultural establishment that they were reigning over.
When The Clash signed to CBS Records and released their eponymous debut in April 1977, it marked the critical moment when the corporate mainstream recognized the new avant-garde.
As has been noted in numerous past Hippies vs. Punks posts, 1977 is the year that the Hippie finally gives up the ghost and disappears, becoming nothing more than a heavy metal headbanger. The Hippie, shorn not of his locks but of his Aquarian aspirations, had been trending in that direction for many years, certainly since 1971. By 1977 the shift is irrevocable.
Five-years later The Clash release their double platinum Combat Rock (1982); it is the year I graduate from high school and enter the university. My first few months on campus songs from Combat Rock were heard everywhere -- from the student union Bear's Lair, to transistor radios, and out of the mouths of collegiate gridiron heroes. I owned a cassette tape of the album, which I played repeatedly.
The Clash performed "Straight to Hell," a song about the gross injustice of living in a world ruled by war and greed, on Saturday Night Live, October 2, 1982. Watch the YouTube of the performance. It is wonderful. The band is flawless. From the animated guitar playing of Mick Jones and Paul Simonon to the precision of a mohawked Joe Strummer on lead vocals.
I remember that evening. It had been a beautiful, sunny day in the Bay Area. I had been out with a girl, and I got home late and turned on the TV to Saturday Night Live. Everyone watched Saturday Night Live in those days. It was obligatory. I remember thinking that Joe Strummer's conclusion to "Straight to Hell" -- when he holds two fingers (simulating a gun) up to his temple and rasps sharply into the microphone -- was a bit over the top. But watching it today, I have no such qualms.
Nineteen-eighty-two is the zenith for The Clash. Reaganism and Thatcherism rule the West. It is the end -- for the Hippies, for the Punks, for any dream of progressive transformation of society.
But on that one beautiful Indian summer dark night in October I was feeling good: a young man, a boy, living alone for the first time, in a clean apartment, on top of the world as it hurtled through space on its trip around the Sun.
Next week: Combat Rock, Pt. 2, "Should I Stay or Should I Go."
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