Sunday [9]

Cultural dissonance

There was a song, largely forgettable, released by Oz band Mental as Anything and part of the lyrics stayed with me, haunted me for years: 

We're only sixteen 

But we got black hearts 

Talking to the devil 

When the guitar starts

You'd think, given the type of moral post I put out now that this would begin a diatribe on lost yoof etc.  Not going to because of cultural dissonance on my part - fear of hypocrisy.  Because when the Bull Island Rock Festival was held:

... the punters were the student age I was.  And our bands were the Faces, the Doors, Floyd and all that, with Hendrix, CCR and so on - Santana.  That was the age we went to festivals although I never went to anything that large and was too young for Woodstock.  We avidly followed the progress of Monterey.

As for substances, let's put it this way - they were magically everywhere for youthful faces like ours and the first ones were free.  So there I was - the archetypal wild man alternative radio DJ and anarchist but against that was a kernel of personal, private conservatism since age 12 [well brought up?] and that was partly that I actually [secretly] believed in God and was uneasy with all this deathhead devil stuff.  As a near kid, I went along with it all, drove miles to these long weekend festivals, did the dos there as everyone did but I'd not say "black hearts" - neither me nor those I hung about with. I mean - we tried whatever was going but that was hardly black hearts in our eyes.  My dark brown hair was a bit like Jackson Browne's, a tad shorter before switching camps and going skinhead.  Seems I passed muster as one of them and was usually the instigator of excesses.

What this video above triggered was memories of just how vicious and violent the 'let it all hang out crowd' were and I keep coming back to the film The Beach and the utter lack of compassion of spaced out yoof, apart from the slapper girls to a certain point.  The hygiene level of those girls - well, I think back now and shudder.  Not quite Manson family but equally not your churchgoing gal.

Again - looking at this video above - shudder - some seriously warped people there.  Not my scene at all.

Where on earth were our parents?  The age of majority was still 21 and most of us still lived at home, at least partly.  What did our parents think we were going to - a classical music concert? When I think of my parents' circle, I don't think they were Harper Valley PTA types, nor the Stetson hat father and uptight mother - they were more "respectable" and "nice".

I had a look at a video on Monterey and clicked out once they had Michelle Phillips extolling its virtues - she was a drug pusher and enabler/denier of what was done to her stepdaughter, Laura Mackenzie Phillips.  I look at that mother and shake my head - as bad as that one today I saw in the MSM smiling happily as her tranny child of six or so proudly chose his/her/its pronoun. Pretty enough woman but brain like scrambled Woke eggs.  Criminal child abuser.

The whole thing about the war returnees a generation ahead of us, then us, then Gen X - one steady downhill path for the west.  And I for one was right in the middle of it all.