Hippies vs. Punks: A Promise of What's to Come

The last Hippies vs. Punks post was back at the end of August, nearly eight months ago. It is not as if I have stopped listening to or thinking about music. It's that a series of crises erupted at work. By the time things settled down in February I had figured out what I wanted to say, but a couple of things changed since last Summer that so far have prevented me from dipping back into the exploration of why, how, when the Hippies die off in the mid- to late-70s, to be replaced by the Punks.

First, my physical conditioning cratered. Week after week of 60-hour work-weeks prevented me from exercising. I was in survival mode for months. After a while when you don't exercise, you get weak. And when you get weak, your ability to produce diminishes; your discipline disappears; basically, you become another species.

Second, the demands placed upon me by my job, though no longer necessitating six-day work-weeks, are significantly more substantial than pre-crisis. Subsequently, I've had to slowly improve my physical conditioning before I can start sitting for hours in front of the computer on the weekend or get up early on a Friday morning (4:00 AM), which is how I used to do Hippies vs. Punks.

At the beginning of February, as the sunlight started to creep back from its winter recess, I happened to hear The Leaving Trains' Fuck (1987). I was in my kitchen preparing dinner when James Moreland's "Temporal Slut" shuffled on my iPod docking station. I couldn't place it. I thought it might be one of the later Fleshtones albums I purchased when I posted on Hexbreaker last April.

A couple more songs played and I still couldn't place it. Finally, I went and looked at the iPod. I saw that it was The Leaving Trains' Fuck which I had downloaded several months ago after I saw that the band's oeuvre was finally available for purchase and digital download. I think the last time I looked, 2014 or 2015, the only recordings available online were YouTube cuts.

At one time I owned Fuck. I had purchased it either in late 1987 or early 1988, but I never managed to get a handle on its hard, slick LA thrash sound. Much like my unsuccessful attempts at mastering Back Flag's My War and Hüsker Dü's Land Speed Record, I tossed in the sponge after several attempts, never really to listen to it again.

And while I apparently didn't remember much of the record's sound, I do remember the cover art:

A cloudy firmament conjuring up heaven's pearly gates juxtaposed with the basic building block of profanity. A kind of perfection, a marriage of the sacred and the profane whose semiotic economy one would be hard pressed to equal.

And when I think about Fuck, I think about Stacey. Stacey was my girlfriend right before I married my ex-wife. This was a time -- 1988 -- that SST Records seemed to significantly increase the number of bands signed to the label and the records which those bands produced. The horizon seemed wide open, free, robust and filled with rock'n'roll.

I must have listened to Fuck more than 25 times in February. I figured it out. I got it, which is something of an achievement given that it was three decades in coming. I am even prepared to do a song-by-song breakdown of the record.

But what it really got me thinking about was the period from 1987 to 1994, and how in this time frame I was alive, my horizon was truly open, and how everything since then has been of a diminished nature.

Rock'n'roll begins its death march in 1994. There are some bright spots along the way, including some manifest perfection in the form of Post-Rock and Alt-Country. But its descent to cultural marginality is clear; Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer for music should make that obvious. As NYT rock critique Jon Pareles says in today's paper ("Kendrick Lamar Shakes Up the Pulitzer Game: Let’s Discuss"):

To me, it looks like some of the squawks are complaints about exclusivity being breached. And if you ask me, it should have happened sooner. I hereby nominate, for a retrospective Pulitzer, Public Enemy’s 1988 album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back”: an experimental sonic bombshell, a verbal torrent, a mind expander. For that matter, the Pulitzers were late on Kendrick Lamar, too: “To Pimp a Butterfly,” from 2015, has even more musical breadth than “DAMN.” (which has plenty).

All of March I re-explored 1987 and 1988 in popular music. It's an amazing period. I saw Public Enemy perform at Nassau Coliseum in 1988.

What we shall do in the weeks ahead is back-burner 1975-1979 in favor of 1987-1994. Big-ticket culturally-unifying rock'n'roll dies with Kurt Cobain. There was an off-ramping period with Oasis and Radiohead, but 25 years later Hip Hop is the cultural king. No doubt about it.

The Hippie and the Punk are both cliches. Yes, they still resonate in the right audience. But for how much longer?