by John Beckman
13. “God is a verb”: R. Buckminster Fuller, “God Is a Verb,” Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 4.
14. “act out our fantasies”: Unattributed poem from the Realist, Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 44.
15. “Come alive!”: Pepsi Generation Advertisement, Description: Come Alive, You’re the Pepsi Generation, Agency: Batton, Barton, Durstine & Osborn; National Museum of American History, Archives Center, Coll. 111, Box 1, Folder 13.
16. “Un-Cola,” “Dodge Rebellion,” “Mustangers,” “Today, millions”: Advertisements cited in Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 82–87, 101–2.
17. “Sugar swings”: Sugar advertisement, Time, March 4, 1966, 3.
18. “Happenings Are Happening”: “Happenings Are Happening,” Time, March 4, 1966, 76–77. Consistent with Bill Graham’s commercial wishes for the Trips Festival, this article takes the form of an “entertainment” review.
19. “a stripped-down, flexible, ‘democratic’ arrangement”: Frank, Conquest of Cool, 101.
20. “These hip outlaws”: Gitlin, The Sixties, 386.
21. “We Shall Overcome”: David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004), 150.
22. “insane hippie drag queens”: Http://www.cockettes.com/history1.html. Accessed August 27, 2012.
23. “Yellow Submarine”: Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 106.
24. “rock and roll music”: John Sinclair, “Rock and Roll Is a Weapon of Cultural Revolution,” in Bloom, “Takin’ It to the Streets,” 301. David Cavallo writes of the era, “Relatively little of the music composed by the Grateful Dead, the Band, Zappa, Young, Hendrix or Dylan, in his post-folk music incarnation, contained explicit political ‘messages.’ In his autobiography, Levon Helm of the Band said, with some exaggeration, ‘none of us ever thought to write a song about all the shit that was going on back then: war, revolution, civil war, turmoil’ ” (168).
25. Yippies staged a mock police raid: Hoffman, Woodstock Nation, 128–29.
26. “the old America”: “The days of audience died with the old America,” in “The Yippies Are Going to Chicago,” 106.
27. “For the most part”: Ellen Willis, “The Cultural Revolution Saved from Drowning,” The New Yorker (September 1969), reprinted in Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, ed. Nona Willis Aronowitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 184.
28. “crumpl[ing]” to the stage: Hoffman, Woodstock Nation, 143.
29. “real leaders”: Epstein, Great Conspiracy Trial, 350.
30. “the za-za world”: This and subsequent quotes in this paragraph are from Hoffman, Woodstock Nation, 5–7. In his recent memoir, Who I Am (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), Townshend himself takes a sober look at the episode, seems to regret his violent onstage reactions (both to Hoffman and to filmmaker Michael Wadleigh), and claims to share the Yippie! opinion of the za-za world the festival created: “Woodstock—a crock of shit in the estimation of at least two grouchy folk who had taken the stage: Abbie Hoffman and me—came to represent a revolution for musicians and music lovers.” Unlike Hoffman, however, this member of what he himself calls rock’s “aristocracy” refrains from saying why this seeming revolution may have been a “crock of shit” (180–83).
31. “Sly’s ecstatic exuberance”: Steve Lake’s liner notes quoted in Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 94.
32. “There were whites as well as blacks”: Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (1975; New York: Penguin, 2008), 69.
33. “Sly Stone owned pop music”: Vincent, Funk, 90; emphasis in original.
34. “Who needs the bullet when you’ve got the ballot?”: “Chocolate City,” George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrel. Parliament. Casablanca 831, May 1975. It bears mentioning that George Clinton offered himself in 1992 as the alternative presidential candidate to George (H. W. Bush and Bill) Clinton.
13 DOING IT YOURSELF, GETTING THE JOKE
1. “Peace!”: Jeff Chang and DJ Kool Herc, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005), 76. Bronx history and episode derived from ibid., 68–79.
2. caught this new wave of urban creativity: Story of Clive and Cindy Campbell derived from ibid., 81–86.
3. “Forget melody, chorus, songs”: Ibid., 94.
4. “broke daylight”: Ibid., 92.
5. “comic moves”: Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (New York: Faber & Faber, 2011), 257.
6. “over a ritual of motion and fun”: Chang and Herc, Can’t Stop, 120.
7. “Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun”: Ibid., 105.
8. “If you break on the cement”: Joseph Schloss, Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 95.
9. “how innocent and pure”: Ibid., 96. For an excellent history and analysis of dynamics “in the cypher,” see ibid., chapter 5, as well as Jorge “Popmaster Fabel” Pabon, “Physical Graffiti: The History of Hip-Hop Dance,” in That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2012), 57–61.
10. “four elements”: Chang and Herc, Can’t Stop, 90, 110.
11. “’Cause it was a whole gig, y’know?”: Ibid., 130.
12. crafted new tools: To be sure, it was in 1975 and 1976 that two college dropouts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, emerged from their respective garages and founded their revolutionary microcomputer companies.
13. Historically, DIY is the American way: The American magazine Do It Yourself emerged in the 1950s to empower homeowners in the costly world of commercial contractors. Readymade magazine appeared half a century later and updated this domestic ethic for millennial hipsters.
14. “Death to Invaders,” “You could get impaled”: “Pacific Ocean Park,” “The Cove,” Dogtown and Z-Boys, Orsi, A., Peralta, S., Stecyk, C., Penn, S., Kubo, S., Biniak, B., Sony Pictures Classics, Vans “Off the Wall” Productions, ADP Productions, & Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment (2002).
15. “clubhouse,” “pirates”: “Capt. Hook & the Pirates,” Dogtown.
16. “Part of the thrill was knowing”: “Riding Swimming Pools,” Dogtown.
17. “Skaters,” Stecyk wrote that year: Skateboarder article quoted in “The Dogtown Articles,” Dogtown.
18. “Bet you can’t ride it, pig!”: April 1977 Skateboarder article reprinted in C. R. Stecyk III and Glen E. Friedman, DogTown: The Legend of the Z-Boys (New York: Burning Flags Press, 2000), 56.
19. In the fall of 1977: “The Birth of Vertical,” Dogtown.
20. “guys didn’t seem like they were having”: “Jay Adams,” Dogtown.
21. “crazed quaking uncertainty,” “a strong element of cure”: Lester Bangs, “Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who’s the Fool?,” reprinted in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock ’n’ Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ’n’ Roll, ed. Greil Marcus (New York: Vintage, 1987), 32.
22. “in the faces of performers”: Ibid., 36.
23. “a jock strap with red lipstick swastikas”: Meltzer article cited in Steve Waksman, This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 115.
24. “funniest”: Andy Shernoff, interview by Jason Gross, Perfect Sound Forever, May 1996, http://www.furious.com/perfect/dictators.html. Accessed September 1, 2012.
25. “We knocked ’em dead in Dallas”: “The Next Big Thing,” the Dictators, Go Girl Crazy! KE 33348, Epic Records, USA, 1975.
26. “Hippies,” “We tell jokes to make you laugh”: “Master Race Rock,” the Dictators.
27. “Ooooo-wheee-aaah-ooooo”: “(I Live fo
r) Cars and Girls,” the Dictators.
28. “Now I’m a guide for the CIA”: “Havana Affair,” The Ramones, The Ramones, Sire Records, 1976.
29. “that there was a line between”: Tricia Henry, Break All Rules!: Punk Rock and the Making of a Style (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 108.
30. “Rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be fun”: Johnny Rotten quoted in Virginia Boston, Punk Rock (New York: Penguin, 1978), 108.
31. “one of the first punk bands”: Nicholas Rombes, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974–1982 (New York: Continuum, 2009), 61.
32. To listen to their scorching diatribes: Hardcore historian Steven Blush writes: “Punk gave lip service to ‘Do It Yourself’ (D.I.Y.) and democratization of the Rock scene, but Hardcore transcended all commercial and corporate concerns.… If you played Hardcore, you couldn’t possibly have been in it for the money, although you might’ve gone for the glory.… Hardcore established a new definition of musical success: in non-economic terms. Sociologists might see this as an example of ‘tribal syndicalism’: unlike money-oriented economies, Hardcore was an objective-oriented, community-based culture—like a commune or an armed fortress.” American Hardcore (New York: Feral House, 2001), 275.
33. “I did my usual swan dive”: Interview with Jello Biafra in Vivian Vale, Pranks! Devious Deeds and Mischievous Mirth (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1987), 61.
34. “exclamation point”: Ryan Moore, Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 37.
35. “shrewd youth”: This quotation and those in the following two paragraphs are from Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, ed. James McIntosh (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 14–17.
36. a nation’s “consciousness”: See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (1961; New York: Grove, 2004), 170–80.
37. cleverly precede our 3-D reality: Apologies, of course, to Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
38. The video-game proponent Jane McGonigal: Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011), 32–33.
39. “dance more”: Ibid., 347.
40. “reward circuitry of the brain”: Ibid., 33.
41. Tom Bissell tells a harrowing tale: Bissell writes, “Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude, and make me feel good and bad in equal measure. The crucial difference is that I believe in what video games want to give me, while the bequest of cocaine is one I loathe and distrust. As for GTA IV, there is surely a reason it is the game I most enjoyed playing on coke, constantly promising myself ‘Just one more mission’ after a few fat lines.” A video-game critic and designer (in addition to being one of his generation’s most deeply thoughtful writers), Bissell is genuine in trusting what certain games “want to give him” (the book performs a trenchant reading of Grand Theft Auto’s narratology), but the compulsive, reactive, and chemically charged gaming habit he describes better resembles the mind-blowing fiero that the gaming industry and Jane McGonigal prize. Which is to say, the compulsion itself is nothing to trust. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (New York: Vintage, 2011), 181.
42. A recent Google search: September 10, 2012.
43. The American Psychiatric Association has the condition slated: A study of 3,034 Singaporean schoolchildren recently published in the journal Pediatrics concluded that socially at-risk children were drawn to gaming, which in turn exacerbated social pathologies: “Greater amounts of gaming, lower social competence, and greater impulsivity seemed to act as risk factors for becoming pathological gamers, whereas depression, anxiety, social phobias, and lower school performance seemed to act as outcomes of pathological gaming.” Douglas A. Gentile, Ph.D., Hyekyung Choo, Ph.D., Albert Liau, Ph.D., Timothy Sim, Ph.D., Dongdong Li, M.A., Daniel Fung, M.D., and Angeline Khoo, Ph.D., “Pathological Video Game Use Among Youths: A Two-Year Longitudinal Study,” Pediatrics 127, no. 2 (2011), e319–e329; published ahead of print January 17, 2011.
44. “go beyond flow and fiero”: McGonigal, Reality Is Broken, 43.
45. “very big games represent the future”: Ibid., 348.
46. “We did not owe any”: David Kocieniewski, “GE’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether,” New York Times, March 24, 2011. See also Megan McCardle, “Did GE Really Pay No Taxes in 2010?” TheAtlantic.com, March 29, 2011.
47. It was the latest coup: “Yes Men Claim Hoax GE Tax Press Release,” MSNBC, March 13, 2011.
48. His advice for activating the citizens’ bodies: Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (1971; New York: Vintage, 1989), 138–39; emphasis added.
49. “the queen and high priestess”: Marcyliena Morgan, The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 134.
50. “crowd-pleasing anthem,” “us[ing] gangsta, a hiphop term”: Ibid., 156–57. Project Blowed account drawn from ibid., 130–59. For an incisive history of early hip-hop’s gender politics and feminist wave, see Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 72–104.
51. “beergutboyrock”: “Riot Girl Manifesto,” Bikini Kill Zine 2, 1991.
52. “rock ’n’ roll fun”: Sleater-Kinney, “You’re No Rock N’ Roll Fun,” All Hands on the Bad One, Kill Rock Stars, 2000.
53. new wave of fire-breathing zines: Sarah and Jen Wolfe Collection of Riot Grrrl and Underground Music Zines, MsC 878, Special Collections and Archives, University of Iowa Libraries; http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/msc/ToMsC900/MsC878/wolfesarahandjenzines.html. Sample zine titles accessed September 1, 2012.
54. “When was the last time”: Katha Pollitt, “Talk the Talk, Walk the SlutWalk,” The Nation, July 18/25, 2011, 9.
55. “Volunteers” staged disruptive pranks: Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “A Merry Band of Rights Pranksters,” New York Times, December 4, 2012.
56. “really diverse group of agents”: Charlie Todd, Causing a Scene (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 695 of 3253 in Google eBook.
57. “clueless,” “misinformed”: Ibid., 1198 of 3253.
58. “The golden rule of pranks”: Interview with Charlie Todd by Shelley DuBois, “How to Get 4,000 People to Take Off Their Pants,” CNNMoney, April 20, 2012, http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/20/improv-everywhere-charlie-todd/. Accessed September 9, 2012. Todd’s golden rule is no joke: pranks pulled with vicious intent or with no forethought to the consequences—like the pot brownies two University of Colorado students served their classmates and professor on “bring food day,” resulting in several trips to the hospital and multiple felony charges to the pranksters—are in fact a threat to civil society: they cause mayhem, anger, and physical harm. They make citizens retreat in fear and resentment. But pranks in the tradition of American fun nimbly follow this golden rule; their collective fun sustains itself on the widespread pleasure of getting the joke. Sometimes a killjoy is the butt of the joke, sometimes society itself is the butt, but the punch line is illuminating, not hurtful. “Police: 2 University of Colorado Students Arrested for Feeding Pot Brownies to Classmates, Professor.” U.S. News on NBC.News.com, December 10, 2012, http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/09/15797353-police-2-university-of-colorado-students-arrested-for-feeding-pot-brownies-to-classmates-professor?lite.
59. Improv Everywhere is radically civil: In his interview with Shelley DuBois, Charlie Todd makes it plain: “I think a big appeal of our projects is that there is no agenda behind them—it’s comedy for comedy’s sake.” They may not be driving an agenda (even when disrupting Best Buy’s commerce), but their fun breaks the fourth wall of civil society: between the ostensible performers and observers of everyday social interaction. Which is to say, even with “comedy for comedy’s sake,” they call out citizens to react an
d participate in what wouldn’t otherwise be a public forum.
60. some of the nation’s most authoritarian citizens: In 2008, former U.S. senator and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum associated the Democratic Party with Woodstock, sexual freedom, and what he believed to be their misappropriation of the Founding Fathers’ ideas of liberty. Channeling the spirit of William Bradford describing Merry Mount, Santorum said, “Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom. All of the things are about sexual freedom, and they hate to be called on them. They try to somehow or other tie this to the founding fathers’ vision of liberty, which is bizarre. It’s ridiculous.” Charles M. Blow, “Santorum and the Sexual Revolution,” New York Times, March 2, 2012.
61. an academic cottage industry: Among the recent scholarly books on the subject (not to mention countless scholarly articles) are Rachel Bowditch, On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Katherine K. Chen, Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Theatre in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man, ed. L. Gilmore. and M. Van Proyen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
62. three hundred thousand ravers: Isaac Brekken, “The New Stars in Vegas: D.J.’s and Dance Music,” New York Times, June 11, 2012.
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Page numbers beginning with 331 refer to endnotes.
abolitionist movement, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1
acid rock, 10.1, 10.2
acid tests, 10.1, 10.2
ACLU
Actor’s Workshop
Adams, Abigail, 2.1, 2.2