the old bureau #1 • nostalgia

Letting Go of Letting Go of the Creeping Meatball // Josh Mead Using the bands branded crassly across the fronts of fast fashion behemoths’ budget T-shirts mass produced in South East Asia as a barometer of what is currently culturally significant, you could be forgiven for assuming that the revolutionary sensibilities of late sixties counterculture are re-emerging. Like an unwashed phoenix from the patriarchal, overdriven flames, images of topless, long haired, Kerouac citing, shamanic demi-Gods with well publicised drug problems co- opting symbols of peace and love in the pursuit of record sales are seemingly somewhat ‘in’ right now. Their faces can be like totally paired with some vintage Levi’s and white Converse for that so West Coast vintage look (hashtag paid ad).

Whilst not all wide-eyed Arcadia worshipping 20 somethings care about the countercultural connotations of wearing say, a Jefferson Airplane T-shirt to the office, it’s exciting to see those flowery radical rhetorics and insurgent images lining streets being occupied by Extinction Rebellion protesters and marching on parliament. The Airplane, a band who (despite eventually becoming the face of the late seventies’ burgeoning Capitalist Rock scene, Jefferson Starship) put out one of the Woodstock Nation’s most important statements with ‘We Can Be Together’, the opening track of 1969’s Volunteers. Lifting its refrain from a pamphlet written by Catalan Dada-influenced painter, Ben Morea, a founding member of New York’s anarchist affinity group, The Motherfuckers, the song’s core sentiment (‘Tear down the walls, motherfucker’) is as vital on a global scale today as it was in the context of the conflict in Vietnam.

Great music maybe shouldn’t have to be the bed-mate of great philosophical or political ideas to be great, granted, but never has a period and a genre of music been so pinned to a cultural movement as the rock and roll of the extended sixties and the Hippy movement. ‘When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake’, Plato said in The Republic and, for me, there’s nothing that shakes the walls of the city, of my skull, or of my rib cage as hard as a great piece of music. The Woodstock Nation’s mode of music lost that power after Altamont which, for most, proved to be the death of flower power. Anyway, to paraphrase Morea’s Black Mask posters of the late sixties, flower power was never going to stop fascist power. That’s not important. It was never important. However gluttonously the record companies allowed revolution to become a fashion statement and however aware of that you become as a listener to Country Joe and the Fish or Hendrix or Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell or The Airplane in 2020, it doesn’t stop the walls of your brain from shaking. Yes, bands at Woodstock played along with radical rhetoric onstage to sap the last bits of life out of dehydrated runaway teenagers high on acid and then fought over their fees backstage, but it didn’t matter one bit to those teenagers and it matters very little to any listener until you overthink the thickness of the glass in popular history’s rose tinted Ray-Bans and the walls of the city come crashing down on you.

The nostalgia for a certain time or certain scene that you’ve never even lived through is beautiful whilst Jean Shepherd’s call to, ‘RISE UP AND ABANDON THE CREEPING 46