Hippies vs Punks: The Idea

I'm thinking of making Friday evenings "Hippie Fridays" since last Friday night I cursorily and by happenstance mentioned the student rebellion of the 1960's and a couple theories by prominent authors -- Theodore H. White and Theodore Roszak -- regarding its causes.

But rather than "Hippie Fridays" maybe it should be called "Hippies vs. Punks Fridays" because what I am really fascinated by is how quickly and completely we underwent a huge cultural shift in the West in the middle 1970's when the punks came on the scene and in the space of a few years wiped out the hippies as a vanguard movement.

Last winter I watched DVDs of the English rock show The Old Grey Whistle Test. It started broadcasting in the late 1960's and ran all the way up until the late 1980's. And very clearly starting with acts like Jackson Browne, Fairport Convention and Stealers Wheel you can see the hippies. It was all about the music, kind of freaky; just hanging out there, you know. Then come the punks. The Jam, PiL, The Damned. And it's glaringly different. The music is hard. It's angry. It sounds much worse. And were talking in a very short space of time, a couple of years. It's like the homo sapiens are supposed to have wiped the Neanderthals. And this is the music of my maturation. This is the music I embraced while rejecting the "pussy music" of my parents, who were hippies.

And this is important beyond a shift in musical tastes among Western youth. Why? Because it's well acknowledged that the paradigm we're suffering through -- we could call it a lot of things, but let's stick with "neoliberalism" for the time being -- was launched, approximately, at the time that punks wiped out the hippies. So if we can understand why the hippies fell so quickly to the punks maybe we can figure out why neoliberalism completely bamboozled us and we ended up in our current predicament where the 1% have captured just about everything.

There are a lot of songs that I could cap off the Friday night with here. Patti Smith's cover of "Hey Joe," a song popularized by hippie god Jimi Hendrix, is a good one for at least two reasons. First, Patti Smith is a progenitor of punk music. Her seminal debut album, Horses, is produced in the "hinge" year 1975 when we make our move into the new paradigm. Second, Patti Smith was, is and always will be a hippie. This highlights the possibility that rather than being wiped out by the punks, the hippies became the punks. In any event, Patti Smith is a transformational figure, which is on full display in this recording: