RIGA - Once upon a time there lived a group of people who did groweth their hair long, and adorn it with flowers, and who did maketh love instead of war, and who did generally doeth many drugs. And they were the hippies. And they did live it large, at least for a few years, until they did cutteth their hair short, and putteth suits on instead, and findeth corporate employment.
Yes, the hippies were a fascinating bunch, even though they had all the intellectual sophistication of a guppy. It's hard to believe that they once freely roamed the streets, whipping out their sexual organs on a whim, jangling their tambourines around, and endlessly blathering on about world peace. But you've got to love them compared to the Nike-wearing, cell phone wielding scum that is the apogee of youth culture nowadays.
"Hippy Lullabies" is the seventh release in the excellent Lullaby series by Radio SWH's Klass Vavere, and as with the others, it's a bizarre musical mishmash on a theme. But "Hippy Lullabies" unfortunately lacks that special charm that somehow made the other albums so special.
The album opens with Simon and Garfunkel's immensely irritating "The Sound of Silence." My mother is a keen S&G fan, but me, I can't endure them. Their lyrics actually physically hurt my ears. Any song that starts off with the line "Hello darkness my old friend" just cannot be serious. Can it? Perhaps S&G hoped a lightbulb manufacturer would pick up on their tune and use it for an advert. Or perhaps not. Irony clearly wasn't a way of life back in the '60s, and no doubt S&G's lyrics were poetry to the hippies' ears.
I'm not quite sure what Santana's "Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen" is doing on a hippy compilation, along with Cream's "I Feel Free," the Beach Boy's "Good Vibrations" and several other tracks. But then hippy music was never exactly a clearly defined genre.
"Hippy Lullabies" is by far the weakest in the Lullaby series. Yes, there are some nice, twangy, quirky period pieces that will have you tapping your feet and picking your nose. And yes, no one can resist the sheer joy that is the Fifth Dimension's "Let the Sunshine In."
But all in all it's a pretty uninspired choice when you think of the wealth of glorious music that was around in the late '60s.
It's interesting to consider that some 30 odd years after the hippies ruled the world, hip-hop is now the dominant force in music. Hippies. Hip-hop. Spot the difference?
The hippies smoked themselves senseless on drugs, shagged anything that moved, and passionately protested against anything that moved, provided they could be bothered.
Hip-hop, meanwhile, is about as vacuous as it gets, the ultimate materialist dead end, philosophically speaking. Whenever I watch the average hip-hop video, I shudder with a sense of how doomed the world is. Brothers and sisters, what the world needs now is, ahem, hippy-hoppy.
"Hippy Lullabies"
(Microphone Records)
Available from Upe, Randoms and all good music stores
