Consciousness

If I had one wish, it would be to travel through time - into the past. I have always been severely disconnected from the perpetual present in which I live, and it has only been recently that the reasons have become clear. I stopped listening to the radio ages ago, and I stopped buying music long before that. It had nothing to do with the digital revolution (although I do download the odd song on occasion) and everything to do with the simple fact that music is just no good. It hasn’t been for years. The popularity of Britney Spears and N’Sync and the entire Disney-fied blandness of popular music in general killed everything.

The death blow of music struck hard when corporate America and the fashionistas of New York labeled, packaged, and sold a rugged sound that emerged from Seattle in the early 1990s. If Mother Lovebone, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam were the curiously experimental children, then Grunge was the mall-crazy, consumption-obsessed teenager. Everything was relatively fine until that sound - as well as that wet, dingy, dirty Northwestern look that accompanied it - became a genre unto itself and a fashion statement in New York, Paris, and Milan.

That’s when I lost my musical innocence. That’s when I realised that, no matter how creative or original we try to be, our individual essences would never be our own. If they were popular enough to catch on amongst a few fans and followers, then surely the marketing machines of Madison Avenue and Hollywood (see: Singles) would pounce quickly to grab every loose dollar from the generation that became known as X - an ironic labelling in that it came about due to that particular generation's eclectic make up, coupled with American society’s inability to concisely describe it that tied them all together in a nice, neat, marketable lump sum.

That’s why I want to get out of the now and go to the then before all that happened. I long for a time when the establishment was so slow to react to cultural movements, that Hollywood actually got away with abandoning the Hayes Code - when music, although not available for download, was still free to share with the world. A time when Pepsi was still pop - a generation and a half before it would become Pop. A time when arenas were for footballs and cheerleaders, and not beach balls and Zippos. A time when voices rose above the muck and grime of politics and economics - when all you needed to take a nice trip was five dollars and a discreet acquaintance.

I would go back to 1967, hang out in Haight-Ashbury getting high and getting stoned. I’d ride the musical wave that crashed into San Francisco Bay, and I’d follow the ebb as it receded into Los Angeles Harbor in 1971. I would ignore the war and politics, the Hollywood defeat of middle America, and the corporate takeover of youth culture that was inevitable with the wake up from the drug and free-love induced haze of Baby Boomer America. I would just sit on a grassy hill, tripping on acid as I watch the music and listen to the colors, eyes closed and dreaming of a time that would never exist. I would lie there and soak up that rare moment in time when voices matter and music is its own revolution.

And then I would come back. No sense in hanging around for Watergate, the alleged oil crisis, and the Reagan administration. I have already been through all of that in one form or another, and there is no point in reliving a past that keeps repeating itself anyway. I would carry with me those four years spent absorbing the culture that broke the bonds of its fathers and set off an atom bomb of rebellion that too quickly extinguished itself. I would certainly appreciate experiencing Jimi, the company of Janis, and the consciousness of the Doors, and I would never forget it or squander the flame they sparked for their generation.

I would die first…just as they did.