For our honeymoon, my wife and I took a very long road trip up the West Coast, hitting notable spots on the way. We spent four days in San Francisco, a city neither of us had ever been to. (Keep in mind, she was four months pregnant, and emotions were more...on the surface than usual.) After a day of some walking and lots of eating (we didn't scrimp on this trip), I felt the need to take the trolley to Haight-Ashbury. Being a huge fan of music, history, and anything resembling counter-culture, I was excited. Sharonne was...willing. We left the trolley and walked around, me wondering what the streets would've felt like in 1967, Sharonne pointing out that the place looked like nothing had changed since 1969, a paltry two years from when the Haight was the epicenter of "The Summer of Love". As I opened my eyes to the scene, I was aware of what Sharonne was seeing and feeling as well as my keen disappointment in the place. This disappointment would likely have been accompanied by some disgust had I ventured here in 1969. The hippie counter-culture died a slow, violent death in the ensuing years, to some degree appropriated by those who wanted to commercialize it for personal gain. Vietnam continued to happen. Johnson resigned. Nixon was elected by the "silent majority". While Woodstock stood frozen in time on that farm in New York, Altamont happened. MLK and RFK happened. Kent State happened. I was born (okay, that wasn't important or bad...) Watergate happening seemed to be a fitting coda. What strikes me as particularly sad about the nation's collective response to Watergate was that Nixon won. A man in his position could disgrace his office, yet there was no violent rebuke from the people. We elected a gadfly, who couldn't make us happy and then an older president who represented symbolically and physically (read about Reagan's days as governor of California) the ongoing fight to stamp out any resistance to the myth of America.
Why am I so infatuated with the 60s? I was born into Nixon's New America. I grew up riding the happy mythos/discourse of Reagan. My parents are a few years too old to be the core Baby Boomers. My mother and stepfather's musical journeys stopped with the Folk Revival. Like the Cantwell piece, I see through the plastic vision of protest taken on by The Kingston Trio. I have a Pete Seeger CD, and while I enjoy the music, there is a child-like innocence that strikes me as too idealistic. In a sense, I can appreciate Bob Dylan for moving where his psyche directed him. His protest songs, "Masters of War" in particular, are seminal. But, he was not Pete Seeger, in temperament or context. One couldn't have blamed Seeger if he had changed his trajectory to fit in. McCarthyism left him without work, yet he rode it out in relative cheer holding fast to his principles. Bob Dylan's principles blew in the wind because, like my parents and many of their peers, change became a principle itself. The times were a changing every day and what was tried and true didn't necessarily work. More importantly, a hegemonic structure became even more complicated due to the promise of inclusion butting up against widening disparities, social and economic.
As exciting as the 60s are reported to have been, I've met many more people who wouldn't want to live through it again. America stood at the cliff, looking into the abyss of revolution, then took a step back. This is not unprecedented in my lifetime. I listened to Tom Snyder in the dark of my room as he hysterically described the riots going on outside his window in 1992 Los Angeles. Musically, I listened bewildered as hip-hop culture and rap became part of the vocabulary. Much like GHWB sending in the troops to L.A., I found out that certain cultural objects were necessarily commodified in order for the revolutionary aspects to be boxed in. I found out in the 90s that protest music was largely a product of the middle class. It is allowed to be so because privilege trumps outrage.
I sometimes wonder if the angry outcry to "Like a Rolling Stone" has something to do with connecting to that within African-American folk music which is angry. Like the creation of the Negro spiritual as an agent of limitation, the American adult psyche is more comfortable with the easily defined characteristics of Ray Charles than the constantly changing Michael Jackson. In a sense, this may be the biggest loss in Selena's death. Could she have been the next Bob Dylan, enacting change as a core principle over a long period of time while expanding the possibilities of what it means to be Latina?
Why am I so infatuated with the 60s? I was born into Nixon's New America. I grew up riding the happy mythos/discourse of Reagan. My parents are a few years too old to be the core Baby Boomers. My mother and stepfather's musical journeys stopped with the Folk Revival. Like the Cantwell piece, I see through the plastic vision of protest taken on by The Kingston Trio. I have a Pete Seeger CD, and while I enjoy the music, there is a child-like innocence that strikes me as too idealistic. In a sense, I can appreciate Bob Dylan for moving where his psyche directed him. His protest songs, "Masters of War" in particular, are seminal. But, he was not Pete Seeger, in temperament or context. One couldn't have blamed Seeger if he had changed his trajectory to fit in. McCarthyism left him without work, yet he rode it out in relative cheer holding fast to his principles. Bob Dylan's principles blew in the wind because, like my parents and many of their peers, change became a principle itself. The times were a changing every day and what was tried and true didn't necessarily work. More importantly, a hegemonic structure became even more complicated due to the promise of inclusion butting up against widening disparities, social and economic.
As exciting as the 60s are reported to have been, I've met many more people who wouldn't want to live through it again. America stood at the cliff, looking into the abyss of revolution, then took a step back. This is not unprecedented in my lifetime. I listened to Tom Snyder in the dark of my room as he hysterically described the riots going on outside his window in 1992 Los Angeles. Musically, I listened bewildered as hip-hop culture and rap became part of the vocabulary. Much like GHWB sending in the troops to L.A., I found out that certain cultural objects were necessarily commodified in order for the revolutionary aspects to be boxed in. I found out in the 90s that protest music was largely a product of the middle class. It is allowed to be so because privilege trumps outrage.
I sometimes wonder if the angry outcry to "Like a Rolling Stone" has something to do with connecting to that within African-American folk music which is angry. Like the creation of the Negro spiritual as an agent of limitation, the American adult psyche is more comfortable with the easily defined characteristics of Ray Charles than the constantly changing Michael Jackson. In a sense, this may be the biggest loss in Selena's death. Could she have been the next Bob Dylan, enacting change as a core principle over a long period of time while expanding the possibilities of what it means to be Latina?
Awesome post! -Krystal
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