Tonight I am filled with -- to borrow the Hippie phrase -- "negative energy." There is a problem at work. One of the members of our clerical bargaining unit repeatedly calls in sick, day after day, week in and week out, month after month, year after year. The office manager does nothing. The rest of us pick up the slack and feel resentful. Morale deteriorates. But today a line was crossed and a decision was made to say something to the office manager. I am angry about this because I will be the one who has to do it, and it's something with which I shouldn't have to be dealing.
Last week the summer was waning but still with us. This week, autumn, 36-hours away, is waxing.
On my walk downtown to the train station this morning I realized that the thing that unites Hippie with Punk is the desire to be heard. Their music cries, each in its own way, "Listen to me! I am special! I need to be heard!"
What prompted me to think this was the decision to forego my saturation of Moby Grape -- which was my intended topic, following last week's ode to Quicksilver Messenger Service's first two albums, for tonight's post -- in favor of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Push the Sky Away. Released in February, I became enraptured with the album at the end of spring, typing brief posts here for several days in a row at the beginning of June.
Both the Hippies and the Punks intended to shock. If there is one improvement in the music of today it is the refinement of a sensibility which says, "Listen to me. Or don't listen to me. I don't care." When beard rock is transcendent it is because of this. (I've been listening to a lot of Bon Iver these days.) And no finer example of this dispassionate "take it or leave it" ethos -- though Nick Cave and Mick Harvey are certainly no beard rockers, their roots tracing back to the seminal Post-Punk band The Birthday Party -- can be found than the second single off Push the Sky Away, "Jubilee Street":
We must aspire to this detached state. The Hippie failed, and so too did the Punk. We're sitting in the swill of their failure. We have to be prepared for the end. It's coming. Nick Cave is a fine model. Note his trim frame in the video above. As we age we must remain slender:
Next week, Skip Spence's Moby Grape and the Hippie version of detachment (drug damaged) captured in his solo classic from 1969, Oar.
