Whether we support it or not, the legalization of selling cannabis marks a significant change.
Meanwhile, a whole subculture and its spinoffs have been bubbling under the surface for many years now, and it’s time to shed some light on it. I call this culture neo-psychedelia.
Psychedelic culture comes from art and music in the 1960s intended to replicate, to some extent, effects of psychoactive substances.
Psychedelia occasionally makes its way to the larger public through guitar solos or college comedies. Some bands unfortunately decide to pretend as if it were the 1970s rather than take inspiration from it and do their own thing.
Neo-psychedelia, as far as I’m concerned, is much broader and vague, loosely associated with ideas of the original genre, but still removed from it.
For the longest time you had to know where to find this stuff. Now that it’s increasingly mainstream and the discussion is relevant, I’m taking the opportunity to present some of the cultural artifacts of neo-psychedelia.
It’s worth noting these cultural artifacts are related to mind-altering substances, but not reducible to them. You don’t need enhancement to appreciate this stuff.
Grateful Dead, Blues for Allah
The Grateful Dead is one of the most important bands of the 20th century. The California group has been around since the 1960s and continues in an exciting incarnation today with John Mayer.
As a group, the Dead were capable of successfully pulling off a wide variety of genres such as folk, country, jazz improv, funk, rock, rock ’n roll and shameless sugary pop. They even tried disco.
Lyrical themes went all over the place, too, and often referenced the Bible, epic fantasy and many metaphors for America. Zingers from Grateful Dead songwriter Robert Hunter include nonsense like “copperdome bodhi drip a silver kimono, lLike a crazy quilt star going through a dream night wind.” This is followed by “Na na na, na na na, na na na, na na na, Ooh oh oh.”
Why aren’t they on the radio more?
The Grateful Dead is probably most famous for its concerts, in which typically short songs could be stretched out to a half hour and beyond, mostly with wandering, exploratory guitar solos. I’m always impressed with how they can shoot off into some part of deep space and come back right on beat 20 minutes after you’d forgotten they were originally playing a song about trucking.
One such album is Blues for Allah. It begins with mellow funky riffs, bass crawling up and down, and a percussive block holding everything together. It transitions to a song called Slipknot then we’re brought to electric Disneyworld. Roll Away the Dew sounds exactly like it ought to.
The Dead are relevant now because they pre-dated internet music culture by a couple decades.
The group encouraged fans to record and distribute their musical performances and the band is strongly associated with tape-sharing culture.
Live Dead songs, many of which are on YouTube and archive.org, offer a deeper appreciation of the band as fans can see how the band performed songs not only on albums, but how they evolved over time and even over the course of a tour. It’s not surprising the Dead has lifelong fans — there’s a bulk of publicly available material.
Widespread sharing of live performances adds an element to fandom that’s comparatively new for modern artists, but the ideas have been around before Kanye was born.
Pink Floyd, Meddle
Of all the bands whose music continues to be listened to from the 1970s, Pink Floyd is probably one of the most popular among younger generations. It’s been successfully passed down.
A representative album, before songs were about politics and the band members got really angry at each other, is Meddle. Songs borrow from genres such as rock, folk, blues and vacation music.
The B-side of the record, the masterful Echoes, starts slow, harmonious, cryptic and goes in many directions, from a mellow exploratory jam, to an epic conclusion at the end that pre-dates the end-of-album uplift of Brain Damage and Eclipse on Dark Side of the Moon. The organ is as prominent in Echoes as the guitar.
You could also include other Pink Floyd albums on this list.
DJ Screw and Dub
Hip hop and country music have some things in common. They’re both regional and often create their sounds from specific regional identities (such as the south). They both see themselves as minority populations (country against urban elites, hip hop against urban elites and country music fans). Questions of legitimacy surround artists (are you country enough?) and music can divide fan bases if artists sell out, change their sound and get too popular. Much of the lyrics are based on literal events, and storytelling is important to both. The mainstream trend of having performers “feature” on each others’ tracks uses ideas found in both genres. Personalities are name-dropped.
Another characteristic is recycling. A lot of country revolves around a set of themes and in general doesn’t stray too far from these.
Recycling in hip hop involves using bits of songs as music in itself, and mixers and loopers are themselves instruments.
One artist associated with a particular style of Houston hip hop (and a purple drink) is DJ Screw. His beats are extremely slow and you can’t understand all the low-pitched freestyle rap lyrics, but that’s OK. It’s about feel
Like the Grateful Dead, this sort of hip hop has a jammy, improvisational way about it.
Dub music (which dub step derives from) began in Jamaica as producers remixed reggae tracks that were already completed. Pre-dating hip hop, this stuff cranks the drums and bass and adds a lot of echo and reverb. Dub can also sound lo-fi since some of its classic recordings were made on old analog machines. It’s slow music, but it’s just right.
リサフランクVaporwave / 現代のコンピュー
This type of music started as an internet joke. Much in the way a guy named Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal sideways and called it art, vaporwave takes music recycling to absurd extents and uses whole songs as instruments, rather than isolated sections.
The most famous vaporwave track is called リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー, by an artist called Macintosh Plus (like the computer.) The song is actually just a Diana Ross song slowed down with added reverb, (but you’re not supposed to know that).
This weirdo music rethinks synth-heavy, analog percussion 1980s tracks and adds cheap-sounding effects to achieve disorientation. It’s out of this world. You’re not sure if the singer is a man or a woman or a creature from Planet Tryptamine.
Vaporwave often references 1990s nostalgia, like home videos shot at the mall and the Simpsons. I think it speaks to how we adjust (or how we have difficulty adjusting) to all this rapid change to our material culture.
For young people, the music steals from the era when life was simpler. Vaporwave source material was released in a pre-surveillance age, when the internet seemed far away. This music also has a sense of sadness, as if the golden age has passed. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the internet to people who dig this music, since they probably spent thousands of hours on there, particularly in small-town Saskatchewan where there isn’t a whole lot else to do.
Keys to millennials are in this music, from the nostalgia to the need to calm anxiety, to disregarding conventions of intellectual property and reacting to consumerism in a vague and ambivalent way.
Frankly, this music is appealing to young people in ways older generations might not understand or care about. Vaporwave might not make sense to people for whom a visit to Blockbuster was not a near-transcendent joyous experience.
La Monte Young
Some of the weirdest on this list has rural roots. La Monte Young was interested in the sounds of power transformers growing up in Idaho, and he moved to New York to make those sounds with voice and instruments.
The result is often beatless music playing single notes for a long time. It’s slow and hypnotic.
Musically Young is interested in things like harmonics. Western music has 12 notes, whereas Indian music has notes within what we consider to be notes, so it can sound odd or off to us.
La Monte Young’s music is static but you listen for unfamiliar sounds embedded within a dreamy drony texture. This music fits very well with our landscape.
The museum “trip” is over now. Items at the gift shop are free as long as you have an internet connection.
