Hippies vs. Punks: Future's DS2

The fact is that Hippies and Punks have long been absent from the cultural vanguard. Hippies represented the last hurrah of post-WWII prosperity and social democracy. Their contributions to the avant-garde ended in the early 1970s, even prior to the time that the Punks arrived on the scene. When the Punks showed up in a big way in 1976 it was to herald the arrival of the "No Future" paradigm of neoliberalism.

Punk quickly went Post- and splintered; it happened at a time when Hip Hop first appeared. So Hip Hop can make a claim as well to be present at the creation of our current neoliberal paradigm. As the decades have looped by Hip Hop has only grown in stature and relevance, while Punk and Hippie music are merely marginal curiosities.

Future's third studio album, DS2 (Dirty Sprite 2) debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 charts this summer. If there is a pop cultural avant-garde in the United States now I have absolutely no doubt that its manifesto is Future's DS2.

I have been immersed it all week. All I can say is that it says it all about late-stage neoliberalism: a vacant, joyless celebration of money, drugs, pussy and violence. It's End Times. No doubt about it. Fucking 'em two at a time, dodging bullets, pissing codeine and gobbling Percocet -- "They got blood on their money, and I still count it." Boy, does it sound good. It's Nietzsche after rejecting Schopenhauer's pessimism but somehow fast-forwarded to the doped-up care of his sister Frau Förster.

I was aware of Future at first because living in Seahawks country the news of the off-season was Russell Wilson hooking up with Future's ex-fiance Ciara (and mother of one of his children). There was some social-media kerfuffle when a picture of Seattle's QB pushing Future's son in a perambulator with Ciara at his side went viral. Then I read an excellent piece by Jon Caramanica, "In Atlanta’s Ever-Shifting Hip-Hop Scene, Future and Migos Keep Innovating," and I was intrigued. It seemed to me that what we were dealing with here is a moment when the Owl of Minerva takes flight not at dusk but midday. The Zeitgeist is being revealed in real time. According to Caramanica:

Future is digging into his weird. “DS2” (A1/Freebandz/Epic), his third major-label album, is full of psychedelic angst, girded by Future’s uncanny gift for melody. He’s as singular as ever here, and also more accessible; “DS2” topped the Billboard album chart last week.

Future has already made his concessionary album — “Honest,” released last year, which was widely maligned but wrongly so. Few rappers are as well suited for pop’s melodic tenderness as he is — the album showcased that gift.

That was one version of Future retreating into his feelings. But since then, and especially after his split from the R&B singer Ciara, with whom he has a son, he’s tried another way. Now when he turns inward, his lyrics emerge as a catalog of savage boasts and self-destruction, his sadness made manifest in the severe desiccation in his voice and the digital fog that obscures it. This approach has made for some of the most bracing music of his career, as heard on the three largely outstanding mixtapes he has released in the past nine months: “Monster,” “Beast Mode” and “56 Nights.” (Future has released as many impressive full-length projects as any artist in the 2010s.)

“DS2” isn’t quite as consistent, but it’s exceptional at its peaks. The album’s cold tone is established early, on “Thought It Was a Drought.” “Bitch, I’ma choose the dirty over you/ You know I ain’t scared to lose you,” he raps, later sinking deeper into narcotic haze: “Have these meds on me, I’ma do ’em/ I take these pills and I’m having a thrill.” Much of the album is produced by Metro Boomin, who knows how to make low rumbles feel epic, like on “I Serve the Base,” with its terrifying scrape; the surprisingly warm computer melodies of “Blow a Bag”; the milky “Rotation,” which showcases Future’s phenomenal mumble.

Future’s vocal approach is impressionistic, which means that when it’s ineffective it can feel faint. But it’s also absorptive and affectingly tragic. So much of this album is devoted to drug consumption — “Take me a Xan and I levitate,” “Ain’t no fabrication, I’m on medication/ Cough syrup, I’m infatuated” — that it begins to take on an air of trauma. Even though the album closes with the mayhem-inducing song whose abbreviated title is “Commas,” Future mostly sounds as if he’s gasping for air, and that dangerous place is where his creativity thrives.

My best friend of the last several years has been a young woman, a coworker. She is a black woman, part Latina, part African-American, who has two boys, one in middle school and the other in elementary. She went through a divorce while we worked together. And even though she had a lot of the other women in the office gunning for her because she is attractive and was being rapidly promoted following a change in leadership at the local, she kept it together, showed up to the job everyday and consistently worked hard.

We share a history of being raised in the debris of broken families; that, and we are both fervent Levellers. We did Occupy Seattle stuff together, PAC for our union local, Labor Neighbor, etc. It is rare to meet a person who doesn't harbor tacit attachment to notions of a divine chain of being, who believes that privilege --all types: skin, money, cronyism -- needs to be scrapped. She has the spark.

When I left the local where we worked together to take my present job, she was very generous. As a thank you for her generosity, I bought her a copy of Future's DS2. Before giving it to her yesterday, I had peeled off the cellophane, opened the CD jewel case and loaded it into my iTunes. That's what I have been listening to all week.

When I saw her yesterday, she said that she had been on the road for three-weeks straight and was burnt out; she hadn't seen her sons in almost a month.

My relationship with this young woman -- never sexualized, always supportive and real, never phony -- is one of the only things that I can point to in my recent life and say that it is an unqualified success.

Future's DS2 capture of the Zeitgeist is proof to me that we're coming to an end here.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Clash's Combat Rock, Pt. 1, "Straight to Hell"

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."