"An Optimistic Cultural Renaissance Will Have to Precede Political Reform"

"But now, I wonder if my notion of culture being grounded in music or film has been eclipsed by the culture of the algorithm. For the past 10 years, in books like Move Fast and Break Things and The End of Reality, I have been writing about how a few tech billionaires have built unimagined fortunes by destroying our culture. The technocrats are well-known: Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman. The project of 'disruption' these men championed at the dawn of the digital age has ended with the immiseration of musicians, journalists, and photographers."

Jonathan Taplin at Rolling Stone asks, "Can the Counterculture Rise Again?"

"A Defunct Canon"

"It's not surprising that these authors found their way to so many teenage readers. Many, after all, were bestsellers. Perhaps even more important, a good number were key figures in the postwar U.S. counterculture. Certain titles, like Heller's Catch-22, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, were practically required reading for participants in the antiwar movement and the generational upheaval of which it was a part. Even Hesse's novels, published in the early twentieth century, came to be, according to critic Adam Kirsch, 'literary gateway drugs' and hippie talismans for young people, with Timothy Leary recommending them as good preparation for trying LSD. Even after the counterculture dissipated, these authors remained ubiquitous, as baby boomers passed them on to the next generation of readers. Telling adolescents not to trust grownups is apparently an evergreen rhetorical move, even when it takes the form of a book recommendation by a parent or teacher."

Timothy Aubry at The Point discusses "the gateway books" for late-twenieth-century high-school students.

"Punk Really Needs You to Understand He Hates Hippies in a Jello Biafra Sort of Way, Not a Ronald Reagan Sort of Way"

"'Hating things that right-wingers famously detest is typically tough to maneuver. For instance, a left-leaning person always has to say he hates Bud Light in a craft IPA drinker sort of way and not in the Kid Rock sense, even though neither option is ideal. Democrats also need to reiterate that they don't approve of the NFL because of CTE, not due to Colin Kaepernick. Somehow, Republicans ruined the concept of hate for everyone.'"

From The Hard Times.

"A Frictionless Stream of Sound at Your Fingertips, 24/7. How Could This Go Wrong?"

"Ms. Pelly looks at all this and asks: At what cost? She's been reporting on Spotify for years, mostly for an iconoclastic publication called the Baffler. She's an indie-music fan and no friend of what one ex-Spotify engineer she interviewed calls 'brain-turned-off listening.' Notwithstanding the undeniable convenience of streaming, Ms. Pelly lays out multiple downsides—for the fans, for the music scenes they're part of and especially for the musicians."

Frank Rose at The Wall Street Journal reviews Liz Pelly's Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.

And Michael J. Kramer and Peter Richardson at The Nation call Theodore Roszak "The Social Critic Who Predicted Big Tech's Dark Turn."

Don't Turn Around

"This might be summed up with the following line from Marx's book: 'art should avoid being for art's sake when social equity is at stake.' The quality of artistry matters less than supporting artists who think the right things and say the right things and make the right sorts of art on the approved sorts of topics, and as a consumer of art your status in certain circles is judged by how well you hew to those priorities."

Discussing popular culture, Sonny Bunch at The Bulwark explores the decline of "the hipster" versus the rise of "der kommisar." 

"All About True Amour—a Man's Mostly Unstated Love of His Fellow Man, and Also, Sure, a Man's Love of 'Mannix'"

"The end result is not so much like reliving the movie on the page—although the book does have a few scenes in which the dialogue and descriptive beats are transcribed note-for-note from the screenplay—as much as a catalog of constant diversions that's like being locked inside the New Beverly for a week with Pauline Kael, Harry Knowles and Leonard Maltin. Let that intrigue or daunt you as it may, as you decide whether or not to plunk down $7.48 (the very reasonable Amazon going rate, at press time) for a book that's been deliberately designed to resemble something that would have sat on a rusting metal rack in a drugstore in the '70s. It's definitely not for everybody… not even everybody who loved the film. '"

Chris Willman at Variety reviews Quentin Tarantino's novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

"Because If You Pull the Plug, It Stops"

"The effect on American rock was like a sudden switch back from Technicolor to black-and-white (or even brown-and-white). Given the plain palette of so much 1969-70 rock--jammed-out bluesy boogie in the Canned Heat and Allman Brothers mode, nasal pseudo-country harmony singing a la CSN&Y and their afterbirth--it is tempting to imagine an entirely alternative history for rock. A parallel world where Fifty Foot Hose's Cauldron, United States of America's self-titled album, and synthedelic oddities from Syrinx, Silver Apples, Beaver & Krause, and Tonto's Expanding Head Band, were just the run-up to a giant leap into the electronic future. But in this world, they remain tentative steps towards a path not taken."

Simon Reynolds presents a 2018 article from Red Bull Music Academy called, "Synthedelia: Psychotronic Music of the American Sixties."

"The People Who Pushed Things Forward"

"That interwoven community included Brian Epstein (who brought the world the Beatles), Kit Lambert (who co-managed the Who), Simon Napier-Bell (the Yardbirds, and a young Marc Bolan), Robert Stigwood (Cream, the Bee Gees), Billy Gaff (Rod Stewart), Ken Pitt (David Bowie), Barry Krost (Cat Stevens), as well as Tony Stratton-Smith (who formed the visionary label Charisma for bands like Genesis). In fact, it was a gay man, Larry Parnes, who svengali-d Britain's very first rockers, from Tommy Steele to Billy Fury to Marty Wilde."

Jim Farber at The Guardian talks with Darryl W. Bullock about Bullock's new book, The Velvet Mafia: the Gay Men who Ran the Swinging Sixties.

"The Contemporary Left, Then, Must Be Relentlessly Modern"

"The questions with which Fisher began his last lectures–about what we are capable of wanting and envisioning–are questions of consciousness. Their roots can be traced to the concept for which Fisher is most famous: 'capitalist realism', the title of his first, bestselling pamphlet, published in 2009. The original definition–'the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it'–is not, Fisher would later say, 'quite accurate'. Capitalist realism is less a conviction than 'a set of behaviours and affects that arise from [it]'. It entails a 'deep embedding in a world–or set of worlds–in which capitalism is massively naturalised'. 'The best way to think about capitalist realism,' Fisher told an audience in 2016, 'is as a form of what I'd call consciousness-deflation.'"

Lola Seaton at New Statesman reviews Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures.

"LA's Radical Culture Was Powerful and Prevalent"

"It moves seamlessly between civil rights and Black Power, anti-war protests, gay liberation, women's liberation, alternative media, the Brown Berets and the Chicano Moratorium, student strikes, the free clinic movement, Asian American radicalism, and the citywide struggle against police brutality. All these movements shared a desire for freedom—freedom of movement and mobility; freedom to access public space; freedom to live and work anywhere; freedom to determine their own education, health, and sexuality; freedom to write, perform, and make art; and freedom from economic precarity and war—at home and abroad. And at times, Davis and Wiener show, LA's insurgent movements were winning, challenging the state’s legitimacy and thus driving it to rely on force to maintain control."

At Boston Review, Robin D.G. Kelley reviews Mike Davis and Jon Wiener's Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.

"A Shocking and Seminal Event"

"That division was made all too clear as hundreds of anti-war protesters marched through New York City four days after Kent State. A large group of construction workers taunted them as anti-American and then attacked with crowbars in what became known as 'The Hardhat Riot'. Dozens were injured but President Richard Nixon understood the political advantage of siding with blue collar workers against students he called 'bums'."

Fifty years later, Chris McGreal at The Guardian writes that "the Kent State massacre marked the start of America's polarization."

"Maybe It Was the Boring Left Which Made the Psychedelic Left Possible"

"How the musical countercultures fit in with concrete political actions is a contested issue that a number of the contributors wrestle with. A pointed distinction is made by underground press to NME stalwart Charles Shaar Murray between the 'psychedelic left' and the 'boring left'. The section on the Rock Against Racism movement and its allies in the inkies makes convincing links between pluralistic critical impulses, racially diverse acts sharing page and stage space and political struggle. Sinker makes a convincing argument that the remarkably un-psychedelic real-world realities of workplace relations in the publishing industry seem to have driven the decline of a pluralistic music press. Strikes and solidarity, those hallmarks of the 'boring left', were the key battlegrounds in the era's managerialist creep, and their defeat  eventually extinguished the radical potential of the inkies."

MT Page at Tribune reviews A Hidden Landscape Once a Week: The Unruly Curiosity of the UK Music Press in the 1960s-80s, in the Words of Those Who Were There.

Where the Pyramid Met the Eye

"In 1965, his group the Spades released a single containing two Erickson songs that became crucial to the Elevators–You're Gonna Miss Me and We Sell Soul. But the leap into innerspace came when he paired up with Tommy Hall to form the Elevators in Austin, Texas, later that year. Hall was the psychedelic visionary–the one who shaped the band’s debut into being The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, the principal lyricist, and the player of the electric jug, the sound that gave the band their unearthly wobbliness–while Erickson was the singer and main composer; and what extraordinary music he composed. On that debut album, Roller Coaster is disorienting and sinister, a combination of rock'n'roll and raga-like intensity; Reverberation (Doubt) a claustrophobic nightmare; Fire Engine is garage rock taken to its logical extreme. As Rob Chapman wrote in his book Psychedelia and Other Colours: 'The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators and its follow-up, Easter Everywhere, contain some of the most primal yelps of discomfort and joy heard anywhere in rock'n'roll.'"

Michael Hann at The Guardian writes an appreciation of Roky Erickson.

What the World Was Waiting For

"Madchester made a rousing backdrop for those of us growing up in the north-west. That its heroes were not perfectly coiffed popstars or smouldering American rockers, but looked like every lad you had ever known, only enhanced the sense of proximity. I recall watching a report on the local news–vox pops with northern teenagers, an interview with the founder of Joe Bloggs jeans, a light-hearted exploration of the baggy scene–and feeling a new allegiance to my scruffy, overlooked part of Britain."

Laura Barton at The Guardian remembers the Stone Roses, thirty years after the release of their debut album.

"THIS IS Psychedelia"

"Say yes to--Ed Cobb, Sky Saxon, Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, Eddie Phillips, Arthur Lee, Moulty, Mouse, Dave Aguilar, and all the others who never could.
"In their hunchbacked Twilight Zone, they made the best, most formidable sound ever. Rock powered emotion in all kinds of music. Arthur Lee? you say. Wimp music! Sky Saxon? A spoilt rat-faced child!
"Then fuck you I say. Fuck your lack of compassion, your world concern, and for forgetting the individual, the small want-to-be-big individual who tore out great handfuls of his soul for a promise of a no-meaning 15 minutes of fame."

"This is his story," Julian Cope's 1983 NME manifesto.

Krakatoa, East of Java

"Craven Walker didn't envision the lamps as paragons of grooviness. 'They weren't marketed like that—they were almost staid,' Granger says. Indeed, an ad in a 1968 edition of the American Bar Association Journal touted the 'executive' model—mounted on a walnut base alongside a ballpoint pen.
"As light fixtures go, the lamps are peculiar in that they don't cast much light. They appeal to people at ease in darkness."

Abigail Tucker in a 2013 Smithsonian article explains the history of the lava lamp.

"'It's Anti-War, and It'll Have a Big Effect on the War'"

"It was obvious that someone at Columbia felt Head had box office potential, because roughly a month out from the premiere, large, mysterious ads began appearing in the pages of the Voice. A thick-lipped young man sporting a dark comb-over and glasses gazes at the reader; in the first two ads to run, the only copy acts as a textual dopplegänger to the half-tone image. Other movies advertised on those same pages give a sense of the era's cultural tumult: Andy Warhol's Flesh, Jane Fonda exposing much of her own skin in Barbarella, Godard's visceral Weekend, Steve McQueen's careening Mustang in Bullitt arriving for an engagement at Radio City Music Hall."

R. C. Baker at The Village Voice looks back at the Monkees' movie, upon its fiftieth anniversary.

The Years Punk Broke

"I had plenty of American punk albums made by groups who were before my time--so, X and Misfts, for example--but the game-changer for me was Bad Religion's No Control, which I bought the year after it was released. From then on, I was a contemporaneous fan of the band and, from that, other Epitaph groups such as NOFX and The Offspring. This was the first time that I listened to U.S. punk rock that was box-fresh. From there groups such as Green Day followed. That I've written a book about all this stuff more than 25 years later shows just how profound an effect it had on me. It was the music I'd been waiting for all my life to hear."

Brett Callwood at the LA Weekly interviews Ian Winwood, author of Smash!: Green Day, The Offspring, Bad Religion, NOFX, and the '90s Punk Explosion.

"Most of the 'Alternative' Stuff Going On Was Actually Alternative"

"In an office full of debauchery, the art department was particularly notorious, glamorous in a fucked-up way and always louche. There'd be cocaine bindles casually tossed into the trash sitting on top of proof pages, and people having Irish coffee as they pasted up the paper at 9 a.m. Every time the door to the art department opened, it was like a cross between the party scene from Breakfast at Tiffany's, a Cheech & Chong film and the playa at Burning Man."

Pleasant Gehman recalls the early years of the LA Weekly (as part of the paper's fortieth anniversary).

"The Two Most Influential Cult Bands in Rock History"

"The late '60s was a fertile time for rock, period. You could say it's hardly a shock that two pioneering underground rock groups debuted the same month. But there is something strange and special about two bands who inspired decades of underground admiration and imitation debuting within less than a week of each other. They might rule vastly disparate realms of rock, but both have established themselves as the kings of cult for decades to come."

Joe Lynch at Billboard links the Velvet Underground to the Grateful Dead.