Hippies vs. Punks: Where You Been?

It's been over a year since I posted something under the "Hippies vs. Punks" header. It's not for a lack of thought on the topic, which, to refresh you, is the hypothesis that popular music as a unifying, generally progressive social force splintered and shifted in the years from 1975  to 1979, kind of a "last hurrah" for the great "massification of bohemia" (Robert Christgau's term vis-a-vis The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album) brought on by the 1960s rock'n'roll revolution.

It's no coincidence that this period of time is also the same period where postwar social democracy is exchanged for the market orthodoxy of neoliberalism; in many ways we've been living within a monoculture every since. We are now at a point where maintaining this static horizon of neoliberalism has become increasingly problematic to the point of absurdity. Contradictions are piled upon contradictions. City of London bankers find a return to social democracy, something neoliberalism was enshrined to shatter, preferable to following the increasingly insane logic of no-horizon neoliberalism.

In my young-man youth there was an attempt to bridge the Hippies vs. Punks war. That, for lack of a better descriptor, was Grunge, which was really a mainstreaming of underground rock'n'roll that had flourished on the margins of mainstream major label corporate arena rock and pop. So I have been exploring 1987 to 1994. My last Hippies vs. Punks post on The Leaving Trains dealt with this.

Mostly over the last year I have pivoted back and forth between listening to music that influenced me during the time 1987-1994, like Sonic Youth, and using Robert Christgau's Pazz & Jop 1979 Dean's List as a treasure map to guide me in a reconstruction of 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher and the Iranian Revolution.

The great failing of Christgau's 1979 Dean's List is that besides Pere Ubu's Dub Housing it contains no Post-Punk albums. Where's Entertainment! and Metal Box?

It's other major failing, something which struck me when I went to my normal lunch spot the other day and the classic rock streaming on the PA was Foreigner's "Hot Blooded" off their seminal Double Vision (1978) album, is the absence of classic cock rock. Look at the bands that appeared at Bill Graham's Day on the Green concerts in the 1978 and 1979 and you get an idea what teenagers were listening to. It wasn't Pere Ubu and it wasn't Tom Verlaine.

Classic rock as practiced by Aerosmith and Foreigner is and was a celebration of the "bottom of the sack," which actually sounds good in our no-horizon zombieland of today.