byrdsongs, lvi

As the 70s progressed, the former Byrds were involved in quite a bit of lackluster stuff. A lot of it – not all of it, but definitely a lot of it – is just tired sounding corporate hippy music. Call it CHM, a slightly more inclusive category than CCR (corporate country rock). What are the basic characteristics of CHM?  …CHM is frequently very sleepy sounding because it’s performed by musicians taking Quaaludes to come down from cocaine binges…  CHM is bloated sounding on several fronts. The songs and records tend to be longer because drugs make every fart that comes out of your ass seem absolutely fascinating...  

Many if not all of the practioners of CHM are and always have been corporate hippies, though for reasons having to do with shrewd marketing they make music expressing sentiments opposed to the corporate machine, even as said machine enriches them, enabling the purchase of multiple mansions in the various socialist enclaves south of Ventura Boulevard… CHM often sounds lost and lacking of any real focus. This is another factor contributing to the length of the songs. The songs are longer because they’re lost in the woods, so to speak, and can't find their way home, so they just noodle around and around and around in a druggy haze, searching for something convincing to latch onto, and failing to find it, so that what ends up finally bringing the songs mercifully to a conclusion is nothing other than pure exhaustion... CHM often has conceptual pretensions, issuing forth in things like concept albums, lengthy songs with several distinct (bowel) movements, and music with melodic structures that are too complicated for their own good. Once again, drugs have a lot to do with this because they make every utterance seem meaningful and, in connection with this, they expand one's ego and inspire a degree of megalomania that leads rock stars to imagine themselves to be doing important things. ...We would do well to remember the ‘C’ in CHM.  That is to say, CHM is completely and utterly and totally corporate. The records sound processed – mechanically (re)produced – even when they’re trying to sound rough and ‘in the moment.’ A good way to think of this is that the records are overproduced, not in the Marxian sense of there being more supply than the market demand can bear, though this certainly happened often enough (hence the cutout bins that men and women of a certain age mined for bargains), but rather that they sound cluttered, overly manufactured and murky, sometimes even a bit fussy and claustrophobic.  The irony here is that this is often carried out in an effort to make the record sound more ‘real.’  But you know right away that you’re not listening to something real but instead something that’s trying to be real.  Baudrillarad calls this the hyper-real.  I call it shitty music. 

By the time you get to the late 70s, the pretend/real has gotten so unreal/hyper-real that the records sound like they’re recorded in a cramped closet made of aluminum foil. But it all starts in the 70s with records like Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night and Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything, both of which include ‘mistakes’ as a way of making listeners think they’re hearing something authentic and intimate. But make no mistake: the mistakes are not mistakes… There are other aspects of the ‘C’ in CHM that are worth pointing out. For instance, CHM records are usually entirely commodified.  Technically speaking, anything traded in the open market is a commodity. But CHM records have a kind of gloss to them, not just in the way they sound but in the way they appear physically. They’re meant to look like records that you absolutely have to have or you’ll be out of it. This actually dates back to the 60s. Sgt Pepper’s has the look of an album that you have to have, as does (paradoxically)the White Album, as does Beggar’s Banquet. 

But in the beginning, the artistically conceived glossy sleeve had at least a certain amount of aesthetic integrity as an end in itself, beyond the market.  Only in the 70s does the sleeve become entirely a marketing device, and CHM paves the way for this development, along with progressive rock, which is more closely related to CHM than you might think, being a product of many of the same social forces… To the extent that CHM expresses a political vision, it’s vaguely against the man. But it’s against the man in a way that the man himself can use to contain the generalized anger and resentment against him.  CHM is, in other words, ‘co-opted,’ a term I used with a fair bit of regularity in my former life as a Trot, and by which I mean here that the corporate hippy has a stake in the system. As a result, CHM doesn’t really offer an alternative to the existing order of things. It merely makes a show of wanting the order to be more inclusive and less oppressive. What does that actually mean? Your guess is as good as mine.  But I do know this:  Love is an important idea in the CHM conceptual lexicon.  And here I’m not talking about romantic love but rather something like familial love qua social solidarity, i.e. 'we’re all brothers and sisters (with the exception of the angry blacks that would steal our TV sets and burn our suburban homes to the ground if it weren’t for the fast-response paramilitary security services we have at our disposal). Can’t we all just love each other and do away with our greed? Love is all we need...