Posted By BillHeise on June 21, 2010

This week, I wanted to give you an example of what I consider the ‘natural’ perspective on life in music. So I thought I’d been you a bunch of songs about how rock n roll led us to rediscover our ape-like qualities. The first is the Kinks’ Apeman:

This is the result of the Baby Boomer generation’s feeling that they were undoing the work of the art and artifice of previous generations. They were going to strip down (away? back?) the artifices and get back to the ‘natural’ inheritance as animals. And they had reasons:

I think I’m so educated and I’m so civilized
‘cos I’m a strict vegetarian. And with the over population
And inflation and starvation crazy politicans.
I don’t feel safe in this world
No more don’t want to die in a nuclear war.
I want to sail away to a distant shore
And make like an apeman.

For this reason, they grew their hair long and got naked. In doing so, they were breaking the artificial boundaries of their artificial civilization. And that is a good thing.

But they were also giving up on wholesome aspects of human life (see my dissertation on France Gall here) while feeding their every desire. Our forerunners in art accepted the fact that they lived in a world of freedom, even though ‘all their friends were junkies’:

Others would not grow past thirty, and many of them did not, having filled themselves up with a too-full measure of heroin and cocaine.

But not all died, including Pete Townsend, who devoutly wished that he would die before he got old. And when they did not die, many did not change their minds about their initial overly idealistic proposition that they could live like apemen amidst their ‘a trifle too satanic’ friends.

Instead, those who were not carried away by money fled and became the last idealists. They believed that the 1960s represented “the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished.” They believed that the human race was about to go “back to a very savage, lawless, terrifying period.” And they retreated from the experience which was not in accord with what they had learned in school back into academia (where competition is held to a minimum by barriers to entry by unions) and the arts (where anyone can say anything in a narrative framework without fear that a non-artist will be able to make an alternative case for a different reality). So no one was telling people that they were wrong. That doesn’t mean they weren’t wrong. It just means that no one was telling them.

Those who had retreated behind the walls of academia and who had remained “pure” would carry forward the work that the timid among us were too timid and frightened to carry out ourselves. They would launch themselves out of this world to another planet, as the people of Findhorn do:

Findhorn people see it a little differently. They’re feeling that there’ll be these “pockets of light” springing up in different parts of the world, and that these will be in a way invisible planets on this planet, and that as we, or the world, grow colder, we can take invisible space journeys to these different planets, refuel for what it is we need to do on the planet itself, and come back.

I suspect my readers will misunderstand me, here (it won’t be the first or the last time), so I want to be as clear as possible. The problem I have is not with the music, which is really good. I’ve always had, as I’ve said before, a sense that lyrics don’t mean much. And insofar as the lyrics attempt to wrest control from a traditional society and open up the previously closed spaces of human life, I approve of them. But insofar as they attempt to close around themselves as the final answer to the problems of human life, I object, and object strenuously.

Anyway, enjoy the music of the day. Here’s one last song called “Monkey Man” sung by another hopeless junkie:

Categories: What I'm Listening to This Week
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