8 - 2 - The Beginnings of the Hippie Aesthetic (852)

8/9/2019 8 - 2 - The Beginnings of the Hippie Aesthetic (852)

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/8-2-the-beginnings-of-the-hippie-aesthetic-852 1/5

In the last video, we talked about therise of LSD and the most important thingfor us to keep in mind about this rise ofLSD is that not only that there was a lotof sort of use of psychedelic drugs goingon.first of all, in a sort of subculture andthen in more in the mainstream cultureinto 1967, 68, 69, but that LSD was used.As a way of creating a kind of a trip,and a lot of musicians either createdmusic that would go along with the drugtrip.Music that was meant to sort of enhancethat.Or got the, having had the experience ofthe drug trip, tried to get music to do asimilar kind of thing.So if you listen to the, an album, couldyou kind of go on a kind of musical trip.Without the LSD.Would that be possible?And so we're going to talk about.

How music gets serious as it begins tohow rock music gets serious is it beginsto sort of address this challenge ofcreating music that could be substantialenough to, to become a kind of a trip inthat way.This is the beginnings of something thatI call in the book and we'll talk aboutin part two of The History of Rock,something called the Hippie Aesthetic.What makes up this Hippie Aesthetic ofmusic?you can begin to trace this musical

ambition all the way back at least to TheDrifters, There Goes My Baby from 1959.A track produced by Leiber and Stoller.There, you begin to see them using theorchestra in ways that are not justsweetening with strings.They're using, sort of motivic thingsthat really draw attention to the kind ofclassical character of strings and thiskind of thing.we can talk about the ambition of PhilSpector and The Wall of Sound in creatingthe biggest possible sound there is, sort

of teenage symphonies that kind of idea.We can talk about Brian Wilson's studioexperimentation after he stops touringwith the Beach Boys and stays in thestudio constantly looking for new kindsof sounds using the studio as his kind ofcompositional sketch pad, finding newsounds, the music gets increasinglyambitious.We can certainly talk about The Beatles



increasing seriousness.In fact when we talked about The Britishinvasion.We kind of track The Beatles movementfrom crafts persons to artists.That kind of thing.We can talk about Dylan and theseriousness of lyrics and how thatemerges in the mid 1960's.So by the time we get to 1966, 1967,musicians are starting to think how canwe make the music serious.We've already had a kind of a.Serious engagement, to a certain extent,with a lot of the kinds of factors thatare going to that, that are going to makethe music serious.So, here are what some of these kinds ofthings are.let's first talk about serious lyrics.One of the things about the hippieaesthetic and a lot of psychedelic musicis that the lyrics should deal withserious themes, not just teen life and

romance.I want to hold your hand, she loves you,yeah, yeah, yeah.But something that really sort of dealswith serious things like spirituality orsociety or the role you know, the, theterribleness of the, the terror of warand all these kinds of, serious kinds oftopics that are.That are not just frivolous kind ofromance kinds of ideas.Of course, Dylan had sort of paved theway for this kind of seriousness of

purpose with his lyrics.Also, for artful crafting of the lyricsthemselves.this is part and parcel with the idea ofthe development of the concept album, analbum that would sort of be bigger thanwould be bigger than the sum of itsparts.The album itself that would sort of dealwith the kind of concept and follow itall the way through.And the album packaging would often timesparticipate in this too.

So you've got an album with seriouslyrics that all kind of deal around this,deal with a sort of central kind oftopic, and then you've got album art thatparticipates in that.It gets much more ambitious in that way.Serious music, that's another way inwhich the music can get serious.you, you appeal to musical styles thatalready have a kind of cache for having



seriousness of purpose.And the two, the two that are used mostare classical music.In jazz, in terms of classical musicthere are probably two kinds of classicalmusic that appeal to.One is kind of 19th century traditionalclassical music, the kind you might findon the program of most classical musicradio stations today.the more orchestral music, stringquartets, that kind of thing, Brahms,Beethoven to a certain extent.Haydn, Mozart elaborate piano things,Chopin maybe even into 20th centuryRachmaninoff.But very tonal classical music and thenon the other hand, avant-garde music.Tape music, synthesizers, all kinds ofsort of crazy, creative stuff that in the60's would've been probably personifiedby somebody like Karlheinz Stockhausen.in jazz it really had to do probably morewith modal improvisation and some of the

kinds of things that Miles Davis startedwith Kind of Blue at the end of the 50'sand some of the other players, JohnColtrane, and some of the others that hadgotten involved in that.But both of those styles.Classical music of both stripes.And jazz, we thought of any communitieswithin the community at large as being asbeing serious style.So if you brought them into rock, youwere making your music a lot moreserious.

People also start to focus on virtuosity,and we'll talk a little bit later aboutthe, the development of virtuosity inrock, Jimmy Hendrix, Eric Clapton, thedevelopment of the guitar hero.It now meant something that you areactually good at playing your instrument.You weren't just somebody standing upthere in a matching suit kind of.Playing along while somebody sang, butyou actually had skills on the guitar, orthe keyboard, or the drum, or base.this kind of thing and so virtuosity

starts to become important thing.Again, drawn from those two styles areclassical virtuosity or jazz virtuosityso it's either, Itzhak Perlman or JohnColtrain or Charlie Parker, for example,who are Miles Davis?Who are some of your kind of, your idolswith regard to virtuosity?The use of technology is another thing,which helps make the music more serious.



and this could be, this could be devotedfollowing the most recent developments inrecording technology, being able to putmore and more tracks on these recordings,being able to manipulate the sounds invarious kinds of ways in the recordingstudio.As, as we talked about with Brian Wilson,the studio kind of becomes a sketchpadnow, it's a place for your sort of sketchout ideas.and this becomes increasingly the, thenorm at the end of the 60's.It really becomes important in the 70's,and we'll talk about that in part two ofthe course.And we find the first use ofsynthesizers.Mostly the Moog synthesizer, and thisstarts to happen sort of late 68, 69 butthe Moog synthesizer initially not beingthe kind of thing you could take on stagewith you but being the kind ofsynthesizer that would have to stay in

one room.So complicated and so big, difficult tooperate that you had to hire a separateguy to come in just to work thesynthesizer.And then the first sampling synthizerwhich we've already encountered in TheBeatles Strawberry Fields Forever.for example, which is the Mellotron,which had each key had a separaterecording of a, of a maybe an orchestraor a choir or flutes playing thatparticular note.

So when you played all the keys togetheryou got a recording of the orchestraplaying a C an E and a G, and it soundedlike an orchestra playing.The earliest sampler, an analog sampler,these things start to work their way intoeverybody's music because they're newsounds.They're sounds nobody's heard before.And as you get ambitious as a musicianyou start to try to create something new,something that's never happened before,something that's experimental, something

that's trippy maybe.most important thing that comes out ofthis is the solidification of the idea.That the rock musician now becomes anartist.Not simply an entertainer, not simply apretty face that shows up on the EdSullivan show but now somebody who has akind of artistic integrity which theyneed to develop and which they need to



protect in order to have credibility inthe community.and so this idea is that they're alwaysexploring new possibilities, alwayspushing musical boundaries.So take all of those kinds of thingstogether, lyrics, music, virtuosity,technology, this general sort of sense ofresponsibility for their music as, as, asartistic.And we can trace it as I say back to thelate 1950's and forward.And by the time we start to get this.66, 67, 68, 69, it starts to become thedominate model.And that's mostly because these instrum,these musicians are looking for a way tomake their music more serious of purpose.Have more seriousness of purpose becausethey want the music to take on a littlebit more weight as listening music.And that's partly because they're,they're, they're following the idea ofthe trip.

And this is maybe in some ways, how musiccan become psychadelic.So as we start to look at the musicitself, we'll turn first.To the innovations of the Beatles and theBeach Boys as they pushed the envelopeand help us further understand how musiccan be psychedelic.

Documents

8 - 2 - The Beginnings of the Hippie Aesthetic (852)