I’m not the only person who sees the correlation of hipsters and hippies. Hell, in my early 20s, we couldn’t go three days without my former Room Lord (then just roommate) sporting clashing tie dye and shouting obscenities about the man.
What can I say? We were a disgruntled group of rebellious youths.
As we’re going into our mid-30s, most of us have at least partially sold out. My dad thinks it’s hilarious to point out I work for the man.
I’d say more of us identify with Matthew Lillard at the end of SLC Punk than at the beginning.
Not that I put too much weight in the Strauss and Howe model. According to them, my oldest niece and nephew are members of my generation. I’m willing to allow leeway, but I don’t think they haven the same worldview I do.
This gives rise to mini-generations, in which case I might be a Xennial, or Generation Catalano.
Although I like the case made for the “You have died of dysentery” Generation.
This is all getting off on a tangent. I’m not writing today to argue about the virtues of marketing generations. It is one of my favorite research rabbit holes, but I can save that for another time.
I’m here today to ask a very important question about our recycled 60s culture:
Where’s all the psychedelic music?
Back in the 60s, my parents (or at least their older siblings) had this:
The closest thing we have is trance music.
I’m not complaining. I like techno most of the time. It reminds me of that one awesome year towards the end of my high school career between national tragedies.
I feel our current cultural revolution is missing something. We’ve got the protests, villains, and heroes. We even have the free sex and rampant drug use.
That isn’t even counting the prescription drugs we’ve been on since childhood.
I’m not judging us for our vices… today.
I’m just saying, if we live a hippy lifestyle, we need to have hippy music.
We brought back folk music and protest songs. Why can’t we have music about using drugs to make us super humans?
I mean, if we’re all going to be hopped up on nootropics anyway, we might as well use our limitless brain powers to write trippy songs about it.