Please Can We PLEASE Declare A Moratorium On 60s Nostalgia? PLEASE

Feeling easy on the outside
But not so funny on the inside
Feel the sound, pray for rain
For this is the night we ride
This ain't the garden of Eden
There ain't no angels above
And things ain't like what they used to be
And this ain't the summer of love
Lock all your doors from the outside
The key will dangle by the inside
You may begin to understand
That this is the night we ride
This ain't the garden of eden
There ain't no angels above
And things ain't like what they used to be
And this ain't the summer of love
On the night we ride...this ain't the summer of love.
This ain't the garden of eden
There ain't no angels above
And things ain't like what they used to be
And this ain't the summer of love
This ain't the summer, this ain't, this ain't
This ain't the summer of love

Holland Cotter's New York Times piece from a few weeks ago on the Whitney exhibit kind of says it all.

Seriously - this 60s nostalgia is what, for people in their 60s and 70s now? c'moOOoOOONNNNnnnnOOO N N NO N O OOOONNnnnnnn, let it die. this whole "NEW RAVE" (aka, regular dance music) probably fits in, too ... they were all about that peace love and/or understanding crap.

So what new can happen???

u guyses need 2 mello out. get awesome and throw on some quicksilver messanger service.

yes pleaze lets have more 80s nostalgia, no wait 90s nostalgia I luv grunge!!!

remember those 00s, those were awesome maaaaaaan

great idea, grandpa

_\|/_ </////>~~~~ oaaaaah maaan i got the muncheies. better get the polydent ~~~~<\\\\\> _\|/_

I was actually thinking about this issue a bit last night, partially because of the band I saw at the Arthur benefit, Entrance. On the one hand, they were great performers, played damn well together, kicked up a hell of a noise, easily won the crowd over. On the other hand, the whole presentation -- heavy riffages from two guys and a woman with a dress sense straight out of '69 that only wanted to sound like a band from '69 -- was more than a little frustrating. It felt more like a tribute band than an actual tribute band, something I didn't feel with anyone else on the bill.

The comparison I drew in my head was to seeing the (very good) electronic/trance/industrial etc. act VNV Nation a few days beforehand, who are equally beholden to their own antecedents of course. But those antecedents are generally far more recent and there's a sense of embracing and engaging with the future by being more committed to the here and now -- no joke, their song "The Farthest Star" has reenergized me on a particular mental and philosophical level than almost anything else in recent years. I didn't expect that, honestly.

Yet their futurism is still as mentioned also beholden to a past, and there's been plenty in the world of dance and hip-hop that has taken things to further levels yet. Perhaps it's a matter of what one wants to mainline and always ride off of even as time passes -- an obvious lesson to learn. Yet the fact is that the authenticity factor ties down 'the sixties' like a horrible dead weight still, where something like electronic music feels still like that weight lifted off the shoulders.

(And it's all the weirder because full-on electric guitar abuse and mechanistic heavy beats provided via improved recording/production processes just aren't that far removed in time from each other, and are part of a general context of new groundrules being established. But it's the difference, I guess, between wanting your instruments to only sound of a certain place and context and using them to their fullest and finding something new, and that of course applies to both those elements and nearly everything else I can think of. Perhaps it's just all down to presentation in the end.)

listen son,

unless you've mowed a quart of ben and jerrys w/THE wavy gravy while doing bong rips and spinning the dead Europe 72, u can't knock the hustle.

80s nostalgia seems way more prevalent these days than 60s nostalgia.

See, whether or not present-day recording/production processes are indeed an "improvement" on outdated methods...well, that's a matter of opinion, Ned.

Actual remark I overheard tour docent make at the Whitney exhibition: "These posters were also meant to go along with a psychedelic drug experience. So if you think they look cool now, imagine how cool they would look on acid."

My boys, i'm afraid to say early 90s nostalgia is also starting to emerge. haw haw. every 10 years we think "no way that shit 10 years ago will ever coem back into fashion"

Fashion Tip: watch old episodes of A Different World for outfit ideas, especially if the episode deals with black history or exploring racial tension

British psychedelic poster art > American psychedelic poster art

you crazy

don't get me wrong I like Haphash and all

See, whether or not present-day recording/production processes are indeed an "improvement" on outdated methods...well, that's a matter of opinion, Ned.

Fair enough. Then let reword it to say that I like the fact very much that the possibilities are much, much more numerous and broader before than they were, and presumably will continue to be so.

http://m1.freeshare.us/154fs727476.jpghttp://m1.freeshare.us/154fs727476.jpghttp://m1.freeshare.us/154fs727476.jpg

I don't remember the 60s, ergo, I must have been there

British psychedelic poster art > American psychedelic poster art

-- Tim Ellison, Friday, June 29, 2007 1:22 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Linkp

otm but true of brit design in general.

experimentation >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>nostalgia

haha, gareth + 600 posts to thread

i'll shut up now

"experimentation" is really a modernist value, tho

rockism = nostalgia for "experimentation"

(...as if experimenting with old forms is not experimenting, gotta love that)

you know, in science, you never hear about the experiments that were inconclusive or outright failed, do you

sorry I'm just being confusing aren't I... anyway Tim otm about the entire concept of experimentation being central to music and that that idea itself is outdated and conservative; it doesn't really apply to the current state of musical culture. Experimentation requires that there be limits to be experimented with - there are no such limits anymore, the sonic pallette is now totally infinite, there are no genre rules, no industry of purists restricting what can be made, etc.

That being said, what is happening a lot is self-conscious experimenting with pre-established forms. Tim and I went into this on some other thread I started and had some useful things to say in this regard.

ARGGH should be

Tim otm about the entire concept of experimentation being central to music is itself outdated and conservative

also I like how in the 60s experimentation often meant cribbing/referencing previous generations - blues, music hall, jazz and folk ad infinitum

in the 00s "experimentation" = biting G04, PiL, dub, Detroit techno, etc.

there are no such limits anymore, the sonic pallette is now totally infinite, there are no genre rules, no industry of purists restricting what can be made, etc.

i wish all this were true, but it ISN'T. there are still taboos and barriers to be broken; we must continue to strive for higher things. maybe 'experimentation' was a bad word; ideally, the best music isn't experimented upon but brilliantly conceived, composed and executed. 'experimentation' implies some accident, some chance of failure.

what are these taboos and barriers?

Part of what I meant was that sonically we can now produce every conceivable wavelength detectable by the human ear. In this respect there is no longer any kind of "new" sound.

btw I'm all for striving for higher things, I just think criticizing stuff for having obvious references to the past is sorta counter-productive.

sonically we can now produce every conceivable wavelength detectable by the human ear

but to choose and isolate the ideal sound is a very lengthy progress, and i'm not sure it can be done conveniently at the moment. more importantly, very few people are actually doing so.

and if you don't think there are genre rules, you clearly haven't heard the chart stuff i've been forced to undergo of late. ugh.

an obvious reference to the past is no bad thing if the reference fits the musical ambition perfectly. people have previously stumbled across musical genius, of that i have no doubt.

sure there's genre rules for chart pop - the charts need compartmentalization for all kinds of reasons. But AESTHETICALLY, anything can be produced now, there's no censors - if you want to make something horribly offensive or abrasive-sounding, no problem you can do it and someone will probably listen to it. Conversely, you can make the wimpiest, twee-ist sounding mellow pop in the world, someone will listen to that too...

but nobody is doing away with genre limitations altogether and creating truly liberated, unpredictable, wholly exciting music. i mean, there's awesome stuff out there, sure, but there ain't much that's completely mindblowing.

nobody is doing away with genre limitations altogether and creating truly liberated, unpredictable, wholly exciting music.

i don't really see that there's much interest in doing this, though, and i think that's because modernism ended up in a state of exhaustion about this possibility

oh come on there's all kinds of genre-mashup folks out there. Beck and Bjork have made entire careers out of it (hey so did Bowie), Outkast certainly tries hard... I'm not repping these guys as "mind-blowing" or "liberated" (cuz I don't really know what those mean) but certainly they've taken a "must mash-together every single genre I can think of" approach.

anyway Tim OTM

always different, always the same

"must mash-together every single genre I can think of"

and THIS IS WHY THEY HAVEN'T SUCCEEDED in blowing my top (well, the odd Beck song aside). try "must mash together no genres at all" and you're getting somewhere. just make music, fuck 'convention'!

well i will agree that a lot of the postmodernist use of style is too arbitrarily wrapped up in limited ideas of what the people want to do. but given the modernist/postmodernist trajectory, i'd have to be shown an example of this to see how it could even work as something genuinely new and not stylistically referential to this or that.

again, i am speaking in near-unattainable ideals. to succeed, my plan would have to be put into action by someone with access to the complete range of sounds and instruments, having complete proficiency in all of them, who had never heard a note of anyone else's music in their life, and who could yet conceive of perfect, complex, sophisticated compositions. of course there's going to be a certain prior influence. the key is to at least attempt to transcend these influences, to make something you've never heard the like of before.

add point(s) of view

not "new" objects, but "new" ways of "seeing"

THIS IS WHY THEY HAVEN'T SUCCEEDED in blowing my top

dude mebbe they don't want to blow your top

only coz they haven't met me yet

majorly postmodernist records from the last couple of years like ys, the dividing island, in stormy nights, hissing fauna, are you the destroyer?, and the midnight room are things that, i think, blow tops.

perhaps I will feel even more threatened by his presence after reading it!

The Summer of Drugs
By TED NUGENT
July 3, 2007; Page A17

This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the so-called Summer of Love. Honest and intelligent people will remember it for what it really was: the Summer of Drugs.

Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.

Jimi Hendrix: Wasted talent.
The Summer of Drugs climaxed with the Monterey Pop Festival which included some truly virtuoso musical talents such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, both of whom would be dead a couple of years later due to drug abuse. Other musical geniuses such as Jim Morrison and Mama Cass would also be dead due to drugs within a few short years. The bodies of chemical-infested, braindead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood.

As a diehard musician, I terribly miss these very talented people who squandered God's gifts in favor of poison and the joke of hipness. I often wonder what musical peaks they could have climbed had they not gagged to death on their own vomit. Their choice of dope over quality of life, musical talent and meaningful relationships with loved ones can only be categorized as despicably selfish.

I literally had to step over stoned, drooling fans, band mates, concert promoters and staff to pursue my musical American Dream throughout the 1960s and 1970s. I flushed more dope and cocaine down backstage toilets than I care to remember. In utter frustration I was even forced to punch my way through violent dopers on occasion. So much for peace and love. The DEA should make me an honorary officer.

I was forced to fire band members and business associates due to mindless, dangerous, illegal drug use. Clean and sober for 59 years, I am still rocking my brains out and approaching my 6,000th concert. Clean and sober is the real party.

Young people make mistakes. I've made my share, but none that involved placing my life or the lives of others at risk because of dope. I saw first-hand too many destroyed lives and wrecked families to ever want to drool and vomit on myself and call that a good time. I put my heart and soul into creating the best music I possibly could and I went hunting instead. My dream continues with ferocity, thank you.

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

A quick study of social statistics before and after the 1960s is quite telling. The rising rates of divorce, high school drop outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes, is dramatic. The "if it feels good, do it" lifestyle born of the 1960s has proved to be destructive and deadly.

So now, 40 years later, there are actually people who want to celebrate the anniversary of the Summer of Drugs. Hippies are once again descending on ultra-liberal San Francisco -- a city that once wanted to give shopping carts to the homeless -- to celebrate and try to remember their dopey days of youth when so many of their musical heroes and friends long ago assumed room temperature by "partying" themselves to death. Nice.

While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact. Honest people will remember 1967 for what is truly was.

There is a saying that if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. I was there and remember the decade in vivid, ugly detail. I remember its toxic underbelly excess because I was caught in the vortex of the music revolution that was sweeping the country, and because my radar was fine-tuned thanks to a clean and sober lifestyle.

Death due to drugs and the social carnage heaped upon America by hippies is nothing to celebrate. That is a fool's game, but it is quite apparent some burned-out hippies never learn.

Mr. Nugent is a rock star releasing his 35th album, "Love Grenade," this summer.

I flushed more dope and cocaine down backstage toilets than I care to remember

Bastard

I've got a great Sun Ra album at home that has Ted Nugent playing on it. About 1968 I think. He sounds like he's trying to drown out the rest of the Arkestra single-handedly and nearly succeeds.

Wow, what album's that?

Can't remember the name offhand but I bought it out of the original Fopp stall in the Savoy Market (when it was still called A-One Sounds) but it came from under the counter if you know what I mean...

Oh, Monseur le Fopp, you have really spoiled Marcello...

Yeah, hold on here, Ted Nugent and Sun Ra together? The mind reels.

http://makemyday.free.fr/69/69poster32.jpg

I imagine they played on the same bills a lot, late 60s

Funkadelic certainly did

sun ra played around detroit forever. though there is this from one of those discography pages:

[Track listing from Webber, personnel from Geerken, corrected by rlc; commenting on the T74.12.11 concert, Curtis Fukuda says the guitarist was "a medium height Afro-American of lean build", putting the quietus on intriguing rumors about Ted Nugent, who told Melody Maker that he once made a session with The Ra. John Gilmore says that Dale Williams used his wa-wa pedal a lot but thinks 1974 is too early for him; he recalls a guitarist named Sly around this time. Thanks to Mark Webber for a tape]

Has Ted ever smelled the air at one of his shows? He's made a lot of dough off the wasters he criticizes. And I'd kill him if he flushed my shit down a toilet.

Rock hasn't dominated the charts since the late 50s. However, pop has, and the pop of the 60s, 70s and 80s was a lot more similar to rock's values than the pop of today.

British psychedelic poster art > American psychedelic poster art

-- Tim Ellison, Friday, June 29, 2007 1:22 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Linkp

otm but true of brit design in general.

This last bit is an opinion held mainly by British people, I have found (and in any event is far from fact).

Also, Canadian psychedelic posters were really awesome too!

All opinions are by definition far from fact.

That's only your opinion.

And that's a fact.

Jack.

It wasn't posited as an opinion, I was a sucker to use it in my response.

anti-drug stances aside, I really can't see Ra allowing someone like Nugent anywhere near his music

Why not?

Yeah-- if there's one guy in rock n roll who's got PRECISION & DISCIPLINE, it's THE NUGE.

he's pretty precise with his aim when he hits the stuffed buffalo with the arrow...top that fripp!

No wonder Ted Nugent regret being part of the hippie movement. Today he is a lot more interested in blowing up Muslims and blacks and making the wealthy ones even wealthier.

Judging by the article, that Ted Nugent seems a decent man. I pretty much share his opinion on the sixties: those hippies were amongst the most embarrassing people ever to walk this earth.

Why not?

ego

Best news out of that Nugent article: new album this year! Gorge is the only ILMer who'll agree with me (except maybe for Scott), but Craveman was the Nuge's best album since about 1980. So seriously, if he's got fresh product on the way, I am excited. Now I wish I hadn't skipped his NYC show.

Didn't Mama Cass choke on a ham sandwich?

I saw a Nuge show about 5, 6 years ago in Milwaukee that was excruciatingly dull. Maybe a snort of coke would've helped that one.

All I wanna know is when his cartoon is coming out.

I salute you, Mr. Nugent. I mean, I don't really agree with his political views, but man -- that Rolling Stone commemoration just makes me hate hippies even more, even though I realize it's supposed to do the opposite.

Gorge is the only ILMer who'll agree with me (except maybe for Scott), but Craveman was the Nuge's best album since about 1980

Scream Dream was 1980 exactly, right? So yeah, I'd go with Spirit Of The Wild, I think. But I have nothing against Craveman.

how did the nuge hijack this thread?

It could be that Nugent failed the Buddy Rich audition by breaking the "No Fucken Beards" rule.

Nugent hates hippies because of their political views. Musically, he was part of the same movement himself.

yeah srsly Nuge hates hippies for all the wrong reasons, the stuff he dislikes about them are the parts that one wanted to like if it weren't for the dippiness and bad hair

haha oops followed a link from another thread and didn't notice thread is old! old! old!

So old it will be in Rolling Stone soon.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1023/930726526_58e0c0a425_o.jpg

full page ad in today's New York Times:

ABC RUG SALE FESTIVAL
celebrating
THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE
up tp 75% off ABC's regular low prices
ABC Carpet & Home

;_;
;
;

http://futility.typepad.com/futility/images/00sf.jpg

i'm actually thinking of setting up a concert to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the concert that commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the summer of love:

http://www.summeroflove.org/main.html

You should get Tribute to Nothing to play.

i think the nuge hijack is perfect in that dudeman is emblematic of how the the right [dems incl.] continue to blame the johnson administration for all of society's ills. nuge perverts nostalgia for total bum trips. has he no feeling for romantic idylls? [oh yeah sure he does. it's just that he has them for the jacksonian era.]

nugent did his best work in the 60s, his playing on those amboy dukes record is tight & inventive, before the caveman shtick took over.

back in michigan during the late 70s one of the nuge's musical peers told me he tripped w/teddy...sour grapes? take it w/a grain hahaha.

from november 18 2008 new york times

WHOLE FOODS CELEBRATES THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF JONESTOWN

all grape-flavored vitamin water and energy drinks half price

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/07/28/us/29letter_190.jpg

“Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three and a half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me,” Ms. Rodham wrote to Mr. Peavoy in April 1967. “So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”

Befitting college students of any era, the letters are also self-absorbed and revelatory, missives from an unformed and vulnerable striver who had, in her own words, “not yet reconciled myself to the fate of not being the star.”

“Sunday was lethargic from the beginning as I wallowed in a morass of general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially,” Ms. Rodham reported in a letter postmarked Oct. 3, 1967.

In other letters, she would convey a mounting exasperation with her rigid conservative father and disdain for both “debutante” dormmates and an acid-dropping friend. She would issue a blanket condemnation of the “boys” she had met (“who know a lot about ‘self’ and nothing about ‘man’ ”) and also tell of an encounter she had with “a Dartmouth boy” the previous weekend.

“It always seems as though I write you when I’ve been thinking too much again,” Ms. Rodham wrote in one of her first notes to Mr. Peavoy, postmarked Nov. 15, 1965. She later joked that she planned to keep his letters and “make a million” when he became famous. “Don’t begrudge me my mercenary interest,” she wrote.

She reports in one letter from October of her sophomore year that she spent a “miserable weekend” arguing with a friend who believed that “acid is the way and what did I have against expanding my conscience.”

Ms. Rodham skates earnestly on the surface of life, raising more questions than answers. “Last week I decided that even if life is absurd why couldn’t I spend it absurdly happy?” she wrote in November of her junior year. She then challenges herself to “define ‘happiness’ Hillary Rodham, acknowledged agnostic intellectual liberal, emotional conservative.”

From there, she deems the process of self-definition to be “too depressing” and asserts that “the easiest way out is to stop any thought approaching introspection and to advise others whenever possible.”

The letters to Mr. Peavoy taper off considerably after the first half of Ms. Rodham’s junior year; there are just two from 1968 and one from 1969.

“I’m sitting here at a stolen table in a pair of dirty denim bell-bottoms, a never-ironed work shirt and a beautiful purple felt hat with a purple polka-dotted scarf streaming off it,” she writes in her final correspondence, March 25, 1969. A senior bound for law school, she betrays exhaustion with the times, a country at war and a culture in tumult. “I’m really tired of people slamming doors and screaming obscenities at poor old life,” she says, and describes the sound of chirping birds amid the “soulless academia” that she will inhabit for just a few more weeks as an undergraduate.

No More Hippie Regurgitation