If there’s a fashionable audio element to what we will loosely name the Resistance, it exists within the type of podcasts and the vertical-video clips they generate: 1,000,000 short-form movies of individuals speaking into USB microphones have changed not solely rousing political speeches but in addition music as the primary car for rabble-rousing. What this transformation means is that we’re producing a flood of efficient, enervating, and disposable media about political dissent. It’s a theatre for pundits and satirists however not for poets and artists. What I’ve not been capable of determine, reflecting on the legacy of Nation Joe, is whether or not this can be a good or a nasty factor.
I first noticed the clip of McDonald at “Woodstock” once I was within the eighth or ninth grade. It left a deeper impression on me than the rest within the movie, save for the flashes of crowd nudity. Round this similar time, a child at my college let me hearken to a actually profane album that his father, Patrick Sky—one other folksinger, whose profession adopted a trajectory not in contrast to McDonald’s—had recorded within the early seventies. “Within the draft board right here we sit / Lined o’er with Nixon’s shit,” Sky sang. All of the cursing and naughtiness felt fairly thrilling, which was in all probability why I used to be so struck by Nation Joe spelling out “F-U-C-Okay” with the Woodstock crowd. I additionally thought these songs had been very humorous. And though this would possibly sound precocious for a seventh grader—particularly one who wasn’t as good as he thought he was—I recall appreciating that the music was so specific not solely in its language however in its message.
Pondering again, I’m wondering if my attraction to the directness of the “I-Really feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” might need been an indication that, for work, I might finally select political commentary over novel-writing, which was what I did in my twenties. There was one thing distinctly unsatisfying to me in a music like “The place Have All of the Flowers Gone?,” which felt far too plaintive, nearly passive in its protest. What I wasn’t fascinated by then—and, frankly, don’t actually fear a lot about now—is how these phrases would age. A fiction-writing good friend of mine again in my youth instructed me that he needed his books to really feel timeless and everlasting. My work, I’ve lengthy accepted, is finally ephemeral and meant solely to vary opinions, not transfer folks’s hearts. It’s merely true that direct and topical political dissent is finally disposable. We don’t bear in mind “It’s one, two, three / What are we fightin’ for?” as a lot as we bear in mind “What number of roads should a person stroll down / Earlier than you name him a person.”
Nonetheless, Nation Joe did present a beat and a melody, one thing massive crowds of individuals may dance to—watching him and the Fish at Woodstock was in all probability much more enjoyable than tweeting angrily in your telephone in your bed room. There is no such thing as a query that the hippies did a greater job at turning dissent into one thing interesting and harmful. On the similar time, I believe that what I understand because the non secular vanity of the growing older hippies comes from the aesthetic attract that the sixties and seventies nonetheless maintain over this nation.
Why can’t the left generate that type of aesthetic political identification anymore? Why isn’t there a large motion of neo-hippies beginning phone-free communes someplace up among the many pot farms of Humboldt County, and even in arid West Texas? My suspicion is that the atomized manner we now expertise a lot of what we soak up, by way of social media, discourages it. We get blunt discuss and, often, stirring pictures of huge rallies. Nothing else feels as environment friendly as firing off a tweet, perhaps making an attempt to prepare an immediate protest. The correct, against this, has produced new tribes that put on the identical hats and give you names for themselves, reminiscent of the Groypers, although they, too, principally specific themselves by speaking into microphones and webcams. What I’ve beforehand known as the ideology of the web—a broad anti-authoritarianism, and a hostility to establishments—is probably higher suited to reactionary tradition.
It’s a wierd scenario. I are likely to suppose that political discuss ought to be direct slightly than swathed in fairly verses and the sound of a dulcimer. However I admit to feeling a bit jealous of the previous hippies. They didn’t all age gracefully, however so many stayed dedicated to some trigger, which is greater than I concern I can say for myself. When the battle lastly ended, the books had been written, and the nation roughly agreed that they had been proper about Vietnam and civil rights, there was nonetheless the music and an concept, nonetheless more and more pale, of residing free. ♦
