Is it crazy enough out there for you yet?
Hold on to your hats! The CHAZ now has its own costumed heroes and villains! (Actually, these kids have been rattling around Seattle for a while now, causing normal folks to wince in projected embarrassment, but now they've taken up residence in Capital Hill. Where the action is, I guess. It makes a kind of sense.)
I always thought that the all-star Cosmic Crazy would materialize in the form of rational adults suffering nervous breakdowns and similar as their delusional castles disintegrated out from beneath them, (which has indeed been happening), but I didn't really stop to consider their kids.
Young people today already start off with a mixed bag of loony influences, and they have the energy and verve to go full-on nutters without filters of any kind, (and apparently without their peers offering cautionary or helpful criticism. Except perhaps in the area of costume design...?)
So... we now have super heroes inhabiting the now fabled land of "CHAZ" [Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone -- of Seattle]. And thus, fiction and fantasy are seemingly displacing reality -- or, well, at least in the minds of these young people. That "real" violence and further vandalism is taking place continues to be ignored by the authorities of Seattle -- you know, the people who are "supposed" to be in charge of the city. The fact that
there will be death seems not to bother any of them. No, let's just let the kids have some fun. And as this trend continues to spread, and the country continues to go up in flames -- not a problem, either -- oh, given "white privilege." [??] (Almost forgot.) That the inhabitants of CHAZ seem mostly to be privileged white kids -- not a problem either, since... uh... (let me think)... oh, since they realized that you don't even need to have a coherent narrative. Actually, it might even be better not to have a coherent narrative -- I mean, if utter destruction and chaos is the desired result.
Harking back to the 60's [counterfeit] counter culture might be enlightening at this point given it lays the groundwork for so much of what has transpired since, including the above.
I couldn't figure out why this post stuck in mind until I realized one of the big differences between the 1960's and today was in the popular music. -To be specific, the lack of popular music.
Check out this list of hits from the age of Free Love and King Hippie...
Blowin in the Wind" — Bob Dylan
"Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything there is a Season)" - The Byrds
"Imagine" – John Lennon
"Love the One You're With" — Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
"The Sounds of Silence" — Simon and Garfunkel
"For What It's Worth 1967" — Buffalo Springfield
"Let It Be" – The Beatles
"California Dreamin" — The Mamas and the Papas
"Peace Train" — Cat Stevens
"Teach Your Children" — Crobsy, Stills, Nash and Young
"If I Had a Hammer" — Peter, Paul and Mary
"This Land is Your Land" — Woody Guthrie
"Both Sides Now" — Both Sides Now
"Here Comes the Sun" — The Beatles
"Time Of the Season" — The Zombies
"Break on Through" — The Doors
Today..,
There is NOTHING of note. No catchy jingles. No messages of beauty, love and tolerance. (At least, not that I've heard on any of the liberal-leaning radio stations constantly invading my audio space.)
Quit the reverse! We see artists being 'cancelled', -even the most enthusiastic leftists are being destroyed. (J.K. Rowling, despite our witnessing her over the previous months debasing herself with shameless, cringy virtue signals, has recently drawn the wrath of the Left).
Nobody with a guitar and a mic, it seems, is taking any chances today. Attempts at positive messages are hungrily audited by the woke social media mob, vultures looking for any hanging thread which might be spun into accusations of thought crime, regardless of the artist's intent. The mob knows no reason other than, "Kill! Feed! Brainz!" -Which, btw, is the tactical genius of the so-called, 'Micro Aggression'; blasphemy becomes the sole subjective invention of the mentally ill, any message put through the predator's perceptive kaleidoscope can be cleverly reinterpreted into a lynch-worthy offense. It then simply becomes a matter of building consensus among the Twitter piranha so you can go in for the kill without anybody marking you personally responsible for the crime. Thus it isn't the message which they seek to attack; that's just pretense, rather it's the juiciest, most popular human they seek to bring down.
No wonder nobody dares make any statement which isn't already consensus-approved! Safety in numbers means keeping your head down, not being singled out. Thus, 'creative' expression has been reduced to a pathetic stream of canned tweets, anonymously reproduced purely for the purposes of virtue signalling and hen pecking defamation. Further, in this miasma of social toxicity, standing out by being a talented artist is sure to kindle the envious rage of those with no talent or courage of their own. This is the time to finally get back at those who shine brightly! Those who remind you of your own lack of grace. Bastards!
It's pure Socialism. Everybody must be equal; if you can sing and express better than your neighbor, you must be silenced. How dare you!? In a paradigm where 'property is theft' then surely talent unfairly distributed must also be addressed. You had genetic advantages? Supremacist! You had a healthy upbringing? The time afforded to explore and grow creatively? Why, you must be benefitting from some brand of slavery! It's not fair! You're the monster!
Sing too loud, and you'll find yourself marked for extermination.
So.., no good music.
Half of that music came out of Laurel Canyon, where virtually everyone was connected to intelligence, the military, etc. Check out Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by David McGowan. [McGowan suffered a suspicious death not too long after it was published.] Anyhow, Chazistan is the last place I'd take any decent musical instrument.
I hear what you're saying, Woodsman, about the direction much of music (and art) has taken. Actually, this post has gotten a bit involved, and I speak to that more later on. Meantime, as Nucifera has pointed out, much of what we're seeing now culture wise -- using the lens of social engineering, that is -- comes out of the insidious, at first glance seemingly invisible sinister workings set in motion in the era of our so called counter culture — or, actually, some time before that.
I was glad to see Nucifera's response given I do know Dave McGowan has been criticized by some here, especially for his later material and/or statements he made (with which I'm not very familiar). However, when it comes to his Laurel Canyon material, for me he's provided a very useful blueprint to use as a starting point for further research, which is something I did quite a bit of a few years back.
What requires rather fine-combed research is the digging in there and really taking a close look at specific lyrics, something McGowan touches on, although a lot more revelations I'm sure are in the offing for those interested in pursuing such a line of inquiry. McGowan does put some time into the evolving sound itself, as well as the oftentimes dubious circumstances in which these bands arose — not only the bands, but the few clubs that were seminal to creating this music scene in L.A. — along with the various studios whose session musicians were employed to smooth over the initial lack of musicianship (in a lot of cases), which required considerable time and practice so as to have these bands convincingly become -- both in clubs and in concerts -- what fans were hearing on their favorite [session musician enhanced] records.
Woodsman, while your list of songs at first glance would seem to confirm the widely held perception of the counter culture as being anti-war, and about love and peace, and new understanding, etc., I think it's important to realize the degree to which the seductiveness of the music (not to mention the drugs and "free love") functioned rather like a cultural trojan horse.
Actually, the reason I included in my (hopefully humorous) little skit about CHAZ the detail about Crosby carrying a gun is because he, and countless others in this “peaceful” little scene, actually were carrying. And they were conservatives too — Crosby hailing from a blue blood American family with generals, and other notable early American figures (including a founding father, as I recall) dotting his family tree. Of course, this would seem to contradict the common perception of these counter culture icons as "free spirited lefties." Actually, it's useful to keep in mind these two opposing realities when doing this kind of investigating, with the latter often surreptitiously informing on the former -- if you know what to look for, that is.
In line with that, there's the military intelligence aspect to this scene, which McGowan quite brilliantly takes out of hiding -- most notably through the unacknowledged fact (until decades later, after McGowan himself wrote about it online) that Jim Morrison’s father, George Stephen Morrison, was — well, let me paste in here what McGowan wrote about the man and his significance:
“It is the first week of August, 1964, and U.S. warships under the command of U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison have allegedly come under attack while patrolling Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf. This event, subsequently dubbed the ‘Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ will result in the immediate passing by the U.S. Congress of the obviously pre-drafted Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which will, in turn, quickly lead to America’s deep immersion into the bloody Vietnam quagmire. Before it is over, well over fifty thousand American bodies – along with literally millions of Southeast Asian bodies – will litter the battlefields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.”
(Yes, the New York Times finally got around to reporting on this just four decades after the fact. Guess they didn't consider it the sort of news that was “fit to print.”)
So, Jim Morrison’s familial proximity to the very event that got the whole ball rolling in Vietnam is really a perfect snapshot of the deadly-dual nature of the American [counterfeit] counter culture. Of course, at first glance, you might say: well, we can’t help who our parents are. Yes, but, as McGowan points out, did Morrison publicly reject this legacy? I mean, given he was one of the major icons spearheading the anti-war movement? Answer: no, certainly not. Actually, Morrison is one of the more interesting, even mysterious characters McGowan discusses in his exposé on Laurel Canyon, given Morrison's rather confounding personal transformation -- as well as his strange reverting back to… uh… his host personality[?] at the end of his brief career. If mind control does play a role in all of this, Morrison is a good subject to inspect more closely with that in mind.
Also good to keep in mind with this sort of examination is that art and artists by their very nature are unwieldy; they are personally set on self expression, whatever the circumstances of their art making happen to be. So, there’s an interesting interplay then between a “role” these musicians, in this case, are knowingly playing (a role they may be intermittently reminded of by their handlers and/or programmers), and the degree to which as artists and maturing individuals they are being informed and subsumed by that role, or by that counterfeit scene that they were initially chosen to activate. In this sense, the "counterfeit" and the "real" become inextricably bound, as these artists merge with the scene they are given to “manufacture.”
Perhaps it’s because of these unwieldy, intertwined elements, that a lot of people have a hard time accepting the idea that such a cultural scene could be the “love child” (let’s call it) of something as cold and calculated seeming as “social engineering.” But if you zoom out a bit, you can better see that this manner of engineering is knowingly working with such unwieldy elements (like sex, drugs and rock ’n roll, for example), which itself goes to the scene’s seeming — and, in many respects, actual — authenticity.
There’s also the fact that in order to create a [counterfeit] music scene you need “real” talent. Although, maybe what we’re seeing now (as you pointed out, Woodsman) is the more recent discovery by music execs, etc., that you really don’t need much talent to create a hit, or trend, or scene. You really just need access to distribution mostly, since that sort of world-wide, commercially rubber stamped product very readily "stands in" for talent and beauty and worth.
It’s an involved subject, but I wanted to at least touch on some of it in response to your post, Woodsman. For me, McGowan’s work (which I first encountered here, in fact, years ago now) helped me to formalize a very important revelation: the fact that so much of culture that one would assume to be “grass roots,” and as such would seem to emerge from the ground up, is actually largely engineered from on high. Add to that the inevitable existence of vying factions, and you have increasingly murky waters. But, as we’re all seeing now — as the world is seemingly spontaneously toppling about us — it is the degree to which these behind the scenes forces are attempting to
play us that we need to be alert to. And understanding the role that culture plays is seminal to that.
I thought I’d finish this post with one of the songs on your list, Woodsman: Stephen Stills' “For What It’s Worth,” which he wrote when with the band Buffalo Springfield. But first, here's what McGowan had to say about it:
“['For What It's Worth'] the band’s second single, recorded and mixed on December 5, 1966, and written just a couple weeks before, was released locally in December 1966 and nationally in early January 1967. It would be the group’s only hit single and it is remembered today as the quintessential protest song of the 1960s.”
[…]
“As a protest song, it must be said, it doesn’t quite measure up. First of all, despite what is commonly believed nowadays, the song is not a commentary on Vietnam War protests. Far from it. The event under consideration was the so-called Riot on the Sunset Strip, which involved about 1,000 kids who were demonstrating against the imposition of a curfew and the announcement that a popular club – Pandora’s Box, at 8118 Sunset Boulevard – was slated to be closed.”
[…]
“Even if the song had been about anti-war protests, it still would be an odd choice for a protest song. Lyrics such as ‘Singing songs and carrying signs, mostly say hooray for our side’, seem to largely dismiss the concerns of protestors. And the line ‘nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong’ seems to suggest that protestors are no better than that which they are protesting against.”
“Another curious irony about the song is that it was authored by Stephen Stills, aka The Sarge, an authoritarian, law-and-order kind of guy if ever there was one. Stills himself later heaped derision on the very notion of a protest song: ‘We didn’t want to do another song like For What It’s Worth. We didn’t want to be a protest group. That’s really a cop-out and I hate that. To sit there and say, ‘I don’t like this and I don’t like that’ is just stupid’.”
[end: McGowan excerpts]
So, this song -- more currently used in documentaries about the 60’s counter culture -- was itself later “countered” by its maker. And yet, its “impending” seeming sound is the stuff legends are made of -- or at least popular hits -- even if its lyrics largely fall short of the mark (as far as "real" protest goes) (not that its fans seemed to notice -- or care)… although, actually, now that I’m listening to the song again, the lyric
“there’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear” sounds rather like a kind of confession about this manufactured counter culture that Stills and the band had been initiated into. Even
“stop, children, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down” also suggests something going on that requires further investigation (an insidious psyop, perhaps?). Notice, too, towards the end there’s a change in tone, where the song becomes much darker:
“Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you’re always afraid. Step out of line, the man come and take you away.” Interesting how these lyrics suggest Stephen Stills’ own paranoia concerning the subterfuge to which he’s been conscripted.
Anyway, those are the sort of things I started noticing when I started poking around a bit. Sometimes these "confessions" would seem to be unconscious. Or, sometimes the artist may be trying to confess something rather urgently in the only way permitted: through his art, and in a way that won’t have him “taken away” — lyrics such as
“there’s a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware” — a man who might well be Stephen Stills’ handler.
So, in looking at lyrics this way what starts to take shape is another dimension of the 60's counterfeit counter culture: art’s shadowy, semi-unconscious world where fear and confession commingle and conspire.
As for CHAZ… it’s hard to say whether the super hero development was anticipated or not. But again, here is the unwieldiness of all such propositions — propositions trafficking in “make believe,” let’s call it. And, really (say the planners amongst themselves), as far as make believe goes, the more the merrier, at this point -- if destabilizing destruction and chaos is the immediate goal.
(By the way, check out Neil Young in this footage — quite a look he’s got going!)
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