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Remembering Live Aid
Jun. 12th, 2007 06:59 pmI'm touchy about Californian stereotypes, but one thing on which the rest of the country has us, dead to rights, is the subject of hippies. We have way more than our fair share of them.
A lot of our hippies are imported, so we don't necessarily have the market cornered on growing them, and you're perfectly welcome to have them back, if you like. They followed Jerry here, and when he died, they didn't know what else to do, so they just pitched camp where they were, hanging out in parking lots after Dave Matthews Band shows at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, selling hemp cheese sandwiches out the backs of their VW Microbuses for a buck apiece, trying to scrape together enough gas cash to follow the Phish tour up the coast.
Our homegrown hippies are different. They all got old, got jobs, and bought property in Marin, but they never lost their hippie sanctimony. They just got more and more ironic.
While my friends and I were in high school, one such hippie dad never missed an opportunity to point out our generational shortcomings. Bald on top and ponytailed in the back, he told us that, compared to his generation, we were apathetic, and without style. Which was true, but he said these things wearing 501s and a tie-dyed Gap t-shirt. Co-opting the achievements of your own generation while belittling the one you're responsible for is lame, no matter how many surfboards you wax, no matter how much NPR you listen to. It was like he was daring us to brain him with his rainstick.
He heard about Live Aid with condescending sadness. "It's great that you're trying, I guess. You guys had to have your Woodstock. It's just too bad it's so corporate, man. Hemp cheese sandwich for a dollar?"
Remember that? Remember how irrelevant and out-of-touch thirty-somethings were in the eighties?* Remember how ancient hippies were? And remember how fucking all of them had been at Woodstock?
Well, here's the fun part: When Live Aid happened, Woodstock was only sixteen years old. Live Aid was twenty-two years ago, guys.
Isn't that awesome?
(*Homosexuals never grow irrelevant or out of touch. The gayness causes us to retain our youthful idealism by arresting other development [see: Live Journal], so we stay hip long, long after it is natural or attractive for us to do so. My being able to quote huge swaths of Invader Zim at the time did not endear me to teens on my bus. It horrified them. It made them reconsider everything they believed. This is our curse.)
A lot of our hippies are imported, so we don't necessarily have the market cornered on growing them, and you're perfectly welcome to have them back, if you like. They followed Jerry here, and when he died, they didn't know what else to do, so they just pitched camp where they were, hanging out in parking lots after Dave Matthews Band shows at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, selling hemp cheese sandwiches out the backs of their VW Microbuses for a buck apiece, trying to scrape together enough gas cash to follow the Phish tour up the coast.
Our homegrown hippies are different. They all got old, got jobs, and bought property in Marin, but they never lost their hippie sanctimony. They just got more and more ironic.
While my friends and I were in high school, one such hippie dad never missed an opportunity to point out our generational shortcomings. Bald on top and ponytailed in the back, he told us that, compared to his generation, we were apathetic, and without style. Which was true, but he said these things wearing 501s and a tie-dyed Gap t-shirt. Co-opting the achievements of your own generation while belittling the one you're responsible for is lame, no matter how many surfboards you wax, no matter how much NPR you listen to. It was like he was daring us to brain him with his rainstick.
He heard about Live Aid with condescending sadness. "It's great that you're trying, I guess. You guys had to have your Woodstock. It's just too bad it's so corporate, man. Hemp cheese sandwich for a dollar?"
Remember that? Remember how irrelevant and out-of-touch thirty-somethings were in the eighties?* Remember how ancient hippies were? And remember how fucking all of them had been at Woodstock?
Well, here's the fun part: When Live Aid happened, Woodstock was only sixteen years old. Live Aid was twenty-two years ago, guys.
Isn't that awesome?
(*Homosexuals never grow irrelevant or out of touch. The gayness causes us to retain our youthful idealism by arresting other development [see: Live Journal], so we stay hip long, long after it is natural or attractive for us to do so. My being able to quote huge swaths of Invader Zim at the time did not endear me to teens on my bus. It horrified them. It made them reconsider everything they believed. This is our curse.)
