Unfortunately in the points that I’m about to make there are probably hundreds of examples against my point of view; just as many as I could make for it. But the one thing that I’ve noticed over my brief 29 years of life is that if you want to have some sort of meter for the popularity of an administration you don’t have to read anything with Zogby or CBS Newspoll attached to it. Go to your local record store and look at their top 10 rack. Let me explain, if I’m able to.
This started a year or so ago when I was looking for some new music and noted to my wife that Punk was seeming to make a comeback. Then I thought back to the last time that Punk was popular…the early 80’s. My memories are a little foggy back in that time, mostly oweing to the fact that i was only three, but from the music there was a very ‘anti-establishment’ vibe all around.
This simple thought really led me to start the meandering train of thought that led to this diary. Upon searching for a timeline for ‘the Reagan Era’ I found some similarities between the Dubya admin. and Reagans. Most of these you could simply replace Communist with Terrorist and hear the same things being said by and about Dubya. January 1983 Reagan’s approval ratings were at 35%. If you visit Here you can see where I was drawing my parallels from.
But this got me thinking about the presidents in between these two and You could draw similar parallels between the popular music of the time and the popularity of the president. During the Clinton Administration you really had a more laid back music crowd. Bands like Sublime with a very laid back sound were popular. The marijuana theme was popular in other genres such as Rap with Cypress Hill and others. So the popular music genre that i feel really defined the Clinton era was Alternative.
I’m hoping anyone reading this is crying foul on that last statement. Because I thought about it and realised that Grunge was on the forefront of part of that era, but not really. Grunge’s time in the sun was really from about 1988-1993 or 94. Funny enough right in the wheelhouse of Daddy Bush’s administration. The youth was screaming but not to the social extent that Punk had and is today. As much as I’ll probably be crucified for this statement, Grunge was a lot more whiney and was on more of a personal level, not the widespread ‘F the System’ that Punk was.
Now certainly there are grey areas in my statements and please forgive me for this is my first diary outside of my views in my tiny personal blog that mostly consist of blasting video games and whining about my state of current unemployment. So to sum up this rambling here are the short short versions of the point that I’m trying to make.
- Unpopular Presidency – strong social commentary in the music ie Punk.
Mixed Perceptions of the Presidency – Punk lite ie Grunge.
Popular Presidency – Musically Laid back. Alternative. a lot of themse of casual drug use and such.
I don’t know if these views can be considered viable but these have certainly been my perceptions as i’ve dug a little and listened a lot.
I see this is your first diary here. Welcome.
I’ve never really thought of it in this context, but I can see the parallels.
Thanks. My wife has been bugging me to sign up here forever and I finally caved the other day. So you have Cake or Death to thank/blame for this.
Wonderful. I always knew Cake or Death had good taste, and was very smart, now it proved. Good to have you here.
Mr. Cake and Death has a name! And it involves Bunny Slippers. Some day we can trade pictures of our bunny slippers.
I’ve always thought the greatest generation became so great because they had such great music. Was that the last time we had a war that came with an upbeat soundtrack?
I was wondering who Bunny Slippers was this morning, but didn’t have a chance to ask before I had to head out to yoga class…cool.
Welcome, Cthulus Bunny Slippers. Good to have you here with us. I know your referal person is great to read so I know you will be likewise. Great diary. I am from the VN era of music. I loved that time as well. It is hard for me to get into punk or rap. Again, weclome.
whazzat? and since i’m already in here, i’d hardly classify sublime as “laid back.” drug use, yes; but they’re pretty punky.
For a short while in Miami in the 80s I was into the whole punk thing. I was younger than most everyone else, but I was in there. Down near South Beach — which was a dirty punk hangout before MTV painted it all retro Art Deco and the ‘pretty people’ took it over — there were multi-band punk shows almost every night in these terrific old theaters that were holdovers from when that part of Miami Beach had first been built up in the 20s.
Almost all the young people in that scene knew what was going on in the government, knew who the players were, knew what the games were; in fact, we all heard whispers about Iran-Contra well before that story broke in the news media, and it wasn’t like we had the internet. I agree with your analysis that a lot of 80s punk was a reaction to the Reagan administration. (The original 70s punk that spawned the 80s punk scene was not, of course, about Reagan. It was close enough, though, and all the themes were basically the same. It was also glaringly apparent to most punkers long before mainstream society that Reagan had lost his motherfucking mind, so the 80s punk reaction was far more to the administration than to the man, although the man’s name was often evoked in lyrics.)
My recollection of the scene is that there was a nihilistic, sort-of desperate materialism to it. No one was very interested in spiritual metaphors (like from the 60s counterculture movement), preferring instead to quote pessimistic and secular philosophers — you couldn’t spit on a punk without hitting a Nietzsche paperback — and everyone pretty much believed the whole system was going to have to come apart in order to fix all the social/political problems. Very few people thought we’d have to actually rip the system apart ourselves (although that idea wasn’t generally frowned upon), because most people figured the Reagan administration was the beginning of the end. By which I mean, a lot of young punks had the idea that the Reagan administration was the clearest symbol that we had, as ‘western culture’ and certainly as Americans, Gone Too Far. We’d slipped over some point of no return, it was too late to pull back and fix any of it with anything more than band-aids over bullet-holes, and now the only thing to do was to throw wild; to party one’s ass off while we waited for the inevitable nukes and then the outside possibility of a Mad Max landscape emerging from the ruins of it all.
Anyway, I can totally see your interpretation of grunge as more whiny and personal than punk, but my take on it is that they are just different facets of the same gem (except 90s grunge had far more mainstream popularity than 80s punk). 80s punk talked about and raged against the effects of certain sociopolitical dynamics on a large group scale, and 90s grunge talked about the effects of the same dynamics on the individual, with its rage turned more inward — which makes a certain kind of sense if you view music as a semi-narrative with some cohesion, because from one perspective you can almost see 90s grunge as the thing that 80s punk “grew into” (or “regressed into” depending on your pov).
I guess my ramble boils down to my opinion that music movements are less about presidencies specifically and more about the entire zeitgeist of a sociopolitical context, if you catch my drift. Presidencies are just symbols of much more extensive and subtle power dynamics — but I totally agree that you can get a good read on the pulse of our culture by examining whichever music scenes are popular or unpopular at any given point in time. I see it also as an interplay: music scenes reflect what’s going on sociopolitically, and at the same time, they contribute to shaping the next sociopolitical shift.
You nailed how I was trying to word Grunge perfectly. I always felt that Grunge was the next kind of ‘evolutionary step’ from Punk, but much more internalized. I love all of it though. Mucho thanks for your insight 🙂
HA! Success! Told you that you couldn’t lurk without signing up. 😉
Nice name lol
COD, you have a great soulmate. I applaud your choice in your selection. ;o)
Awww thanks. I like him too. 😉 He’s kinda handy to have around. Always something new…like the slippers. 😉
Just a note about punk . . . my first exposure to punk was back in the 70s. I stopped off in London on my way home from the oil patch in the Middle East (long story) and vividly remember a T-shirt I saw in a store there. It showed Friz Freleng’s famous Pink Panther cartoon character, but green, smoking a cigarette and a safety pin stuck through his ear.
The caption, of course, was “The Punk Panther.”
That week (just before Christmas of 1977) I also popped my nose into an HMV record store in search of this great song I’d been hearing on the radio there, which turned out to be “Jammin'” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. As it turns out, this wasn’t my first introduction to reggae, but it wasn’t until some time later that I figured out that Eric Clapton’s hit “I Shot The Sheriff” was actually written by Bob Marley.
OK, I’m rambling, but I remember that their best selling record of the week was “Never Mind The Ballocks” by the Sex Pistols — who were banned from play, if not in the entire UK, at least over the BBC. Kids were hearing it from pirate stations out in the North Sea and stations like Radio Luxembourg that were piping their signal across the Channel. (Jammin’, as it turns out, was #2 that week.)
I later read a story about a music festival that happened about the same time that featured a large number of punk bands, and one band that the crowd almost booed off the stage — which seems to be an unlikely feat at a punk festival. That band, interestingly enough, was the newly-formed Dire Straits, and for some reason their songs about pretense in the art world, stolen love down by the waterline, and a five-minute piece about a jazz band called the Sultans of Swing didn’t go over very well.
OK, I’m rambling, but let me get around to the point I wanted to make: Punk didn’t catch on here in the States until a few years afterward. But when it rose up in England, guess what was going on? Yep, a recession with Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher at the helm of the government.
History doesn’t really repeat itself, but it rhymes.