3 Everything Degenerates in the Hands of Man

From the child’s heart’s depths
To reason’s heights.
Paul Eluard, It’s the Sweet Law of Men

It occurs sometimes that children seize control of the means of production themselves. Few do so to greater effect than J.K. & Co. on the album Suddenly One Summer. Fluttering flutes and wonderfully sharp snare breaks and rolls punctuate orchestral arrangements of fuzzy guitars, sitars, and buzzing organs in one of the more delightfully moody moments in the history of psychedelic rock.

Opening song “Fly” contains an organ loop played backwards to a Sgt. Pepper’s drum sound that anticipates Radiohead’s Ok Computer by several decades. “Crystal Ball” is some wonderful psych guitar noodling. The combination of thumping tom drums, ringing organ and sitar on “Magical Fingers of Minerva” is a wonderful example of raga-influenced acid rock.

The album’s real radiance, though, comes from J.K.’s vocals. Anchored in coming-of-age tropes, the lyrics are more often whispered than sung, and are so bereft of pretences as to often risk banality. “Don’t be sad / be glad”, J.K. admonishes on “Fly”, while a sublime soaring organ bears the melody. The triteness though is easily forgiven. Given their context of haunting frailty, the words make perfect sense.

If Suddenly One Summer is disarming, then the self-titled album by fellow cherubs Lily & Maria is a musical Treaty of Versailles. Delivered in almost inaudibly murmured vocals on opening track “Subway Thoughts”, entente is instantaneous. Gentle drums, bass and organs bear the featherweight of supple harmonies as songs falter along a cliff edge.

The intensity is amplified on the freak-folk of “Everybody Knows”, the melody sped along by ethereal vocals and a brushed snare drum. The pace is just as suddenly ratcheted way down on the lone acoustic guitar and horns of “I Was”, the vocals barely audible. As a whole, Lily & Maria is inconstant, moving from barren acoustic folk to light jazz, from whispered harmonies to operatic warbling. August melancholy pervades.

It takes three to make a pattern: as do J.K. and Lily & Maria, on Genesis Wendy & Bonnie effortlessly trade in the fragility of the nearly whispered harmonies of their peers. But the soft focus aesthetics aren’t so syrupy. Rather, subtle harmonies rising to gentle crescendos along the back of jazzy snares confer rainy day windows. Arrangements are sophisticated, there are dashes of Brazilian jazz and hard rock that antedate the sort of wistfulness with a backbeat later borrowed by groups such as Stereolab and Broadcast.

Song titles evoke the mood. “Five O’Clock in the Morning” uses assured reverbed vocals and acoustic guitars to effect the desolation of pre-dawn moments. “The Winter is Cold” would be a rather conventional up-tempo folk-rock number but for its sophisticated harmonies and the shivering urgency effected by the constant repetition of the song title’s four words.

These three albums share both 1968 as their release date, along with the early adolescence of the artists involved. J.K. was a mysterious fifteen year-old Canadian living in Los Angeles, Wendy & Bonnie were fifteen and seventeen year-old sisters, Lily Fiszman and Maria Newman were sixteen year-olds who met around the New York folk scene. The year, along with the young age of the artists, are only apparently coincidental.

In fact, they consolidate the exception of both the albums and the broader cultural politics of their epoch. Washed in the haunting beauty of vocal reverb-induced melancholia, all three hinge upon effects widely employed throughout the late Sixties as signifiers of juvenilia and wonderment associated with cultural and political experimentation.

As allegories these albums work exceedingly well. As sources of revenue they were considerably less effective. Each was a commercial failure and marked both the beginning and the end of the music careers of the respective artists. A recent Wendy & Bonnie reunion aside, little is known of them.

Still, given the fact the groups were all poised at the periphery of that prescribed stage, swapping juvenility for maturity, one can’t help but infer a desperation in their evocation of youth. Childhood sits rather awkwardly here, somewhere between memory and lived reality.

But if these albums might stand in for their epoch, a further instance is extraordinary for condensing the same figural power into a single piece of music. The song in question appears halfway through the first album from the magnificent and still active Japanese experimentalist band Magical Power Mako (recorded in 1970 but only released by Polydor in 1973).

Produced when sole member Makoto Kurita was fourteen years old (with the aid of childhood friend Keiji Haino), “Open the Morning Window, the Sunshine Comes in, the Hope of Today is a Small Bird Singing” opens with a chorus of children gently chanting the song’s prolonged title repeatedly, first in Japanese and then in English, over a minor chord piano melody. This goes on for three minutes before it’s suddenly interrupted by a choral chant which then quickly returns to the children’s singing, but this time with all manner of vocal effects and with orchestral strings in the background. The children are eventually displaced by an ostentatious rock guitar solo. And yes, it’s as outlandish as it sounds.

The rest of the album is equally eclectic. Driven by traditional Japanese drumming and chanting, “Cha Cha” mostly involves yelling the song’s title, interrupted by a seemingly random array of instruments. “In a Stalstite Cavern Astronaus” is a recording of percussion instruments and screaming inside an actual cavern, while “Flying” is a beautiful instance of sentimental acoustic psychedelic folk that gives over to a heavily effected electric guitar. Eccentricity prevails. As a matter of fact, it’s been said that over one hundred instruments appear on the album.

Moments where the affective state of childhood nostalgia is as tautly condensed as it is by Magical Power Mako might be rare. But they’re merely exceptional instances of a more diffuse cultural and political zeitgeist definitive of the late 1960s. Just as the delicate timbres of a chorus of children gently repeating a whimsical phrase or hushed teenage harmonies are a piece with the effects of the falsetto reverb-effected vocals typical of pop of the epoch, so they also embody, in particularly overstated form, the diffuse juvenilia definitive of the counterculture.

Often taking form as outlandish clichés of minds awakened or of inner-children mined for revelations, childhood, rebirth, and innocence were the currency in which the culture traded once a rhetoric of youth came to express mass discontent with post-war society.

Father I Want to Kill you, Mother I Want to...

It’s one of the great ironies of the 1960s “youth” culture, Fredric Jameson suggests, that no less virulent an anti-communist conservative than John F. Kennedy was most responsible for bequeathing it with its vocabulary.²³ Kennedy’s electoral venture, set to a refrain of national renewal – slogans included “A New Frontier” and “A Time for Greatness” – laid the ground for that generation’s self-consciousness. And in hindsight, inferring the connotations is none too complicated.

A blend of LSD-related aesthetic tropes combined with rock and blues motifs declared a quest for “a new frontier”. The premise is a familiar one: a new consciousness, a new form of community; freedom from the constraints of post-war institutions: the family, marriage, mass education. But for pop music to be privileged as an expression of this newly politicised language of youth, a further not unrelated development was necessary.

The collapse of high into mass culture entailed widespread adoption of bourgeois conventions and avant-garde techniques in rock and pop. No less important though, pop music, along a line running from the folk revival and psych-rock to punk and beyond, was coming to valorise authenticity as a marker of artistic quality. You had to mean it or it didn’t mean.

On these issues, music had a lot to say. But this wasn’t all talk. Changes were discernible in form as well as content. An embrace of experimental impulses absorbed from composers such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, along with widespread willingness to experiment with studio technology meant that, in the span of only a few years, the pop music vernacular expanded spectacularly.

As the sophistication of pop music grew so too did the nuance of expressions of innocence, spontaneity, and wild, anarchic possibility – all aided of course, by hallucinogenic glee. To quote one widely read San Francisco critic at the time, “a cleansing wave” was washing over “the rigid studiousness of rock”.²⁴

Wouldn’t it be Nice if We Were Older?

No swell cleansed harder than the brilliant surf pop of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Brian Wilson’s arrangements built dense musical landscapes; manipulations of timbres, expansive oscillating harmonies, ethereal arrangements of gentle instrumentation combined with rousing choruses set the orchestral conventions of the epoch. Neither background listening nor dance music, in its demand for full sensorial immersion Pet Sounds withdrew any space for critical reflection in a way pop had never before. The album demanded one feel, not think. Thus had play, wonder, awe, infancy taken musical form. At least superficially.

Despite stunning formal innovation, the Beach Boys remained interred in the starry-eyed and maudlin sentiments that had always reigned over pop. One might read in Brian Wilson’s tales of heartbreak an undercurrent of social and political estrangement belied by the gorgeously sad falsettos of Pet Sounds, but the musical echo of 1960s youth culture would only really rebound two years later, in 1967.

Between producer George Martin’s renowned studio wizardry, the incorporation of collage techniques, non-Western instrumentation, songs about yellow submarines and walruses, and Edwardian iconography, the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band married the content of the counterculture to its form. Their carnivalesque absurdity and willing playfulness embodied the epoch’s blend of politics and aesthetics, the desire for a more authentic experience of everyday life, and an idealised future. Music had, in the eyes of its producers and consumers become, in the words of MC5 manager John Sinclair, “a weapon of cultural revolution”.²⁵

Crowd noises and the clatter of an orchestra tuning up solicit the listener into Sgt. Pepper’s. The festive atmosphere is quickly amplified by the mounting enthusiasm that propels the title track and album closer “A Day in the Life”, while the ethereal breeze of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and the simplicity of “When I’m 64” invite reverie. Behind all this nonetheless lies an oft-noted hovering yet palpable sense of loss and regret, a recognition of the alienation of post-war suburban life and its consequent rejection running throughout the album and especially discernible on “She’s Leaving Home” and “A Day in the Life”.

Nostalgic reverie for youth, hazily poised between elation and fear, both mourned the anomie of a decrepit post-war society and celebrated emergent cultural and political renewal. The mood is patent in the complex and moody harmonies that pervaded in the post-Smile epoch of which the Zombies, the Mammas and the Papas, or Procol Harum are only the most extraordinary instances. Oscillation between optimism and melancholy is also palpable in the combination of gentle instrumentation and rousing choruses resounding with allusions to ice cream, sweets, toy shops, fairies, circuses, and nursery rhymes definitive of psychedelia.

It’s more apparent still in the thematic prevalence of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland dreamworld. By Rob Chapman’s account, it first appears in composer Pauline Oliveros’ 1966 composition “Beautiful Soop”.²⁶ The theme is more famously revisited on San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane’s 1968 hit song “White Rabbit”, it also appears on the Bunch’s forgotten 1967 single “Looking Glass” and anchors Mark Fry’s under-appreciated psych-folk masterpiece album Dreaming with Alice.

Indeed, a whole sub-genre of “toytown pop” emergent in 1967 became ubiquitous in the charts in the years that followed. Literally dozens of songs, usually jangly, slightly off key, taking children, toys, confections, trains, castles, or animals littered the charts. One website dedicated to the phenomenon counts over 20 toytown singles released between 1968 and 1974.²⁷ These range from comic sad-sack grownups (Cuppa T’s “Miss Pinkerton”, the Decision’s “Constable Jones”, Julian Starr’s “Mr. Jewel Went Away”, Consortium’s “Colour Sergeant Lillywhite”) to absurd fairytales (Mirror’s “Gingerbread Man”, Richard Barnes’ “The Princess and the Soldier”, Tomorrow’s “Three Jolly Little Dwarfs”) to the banal (Geranium Pond’s “Dogs in Baskets”, World of Oz’s “The Muffin Man”). At any rate, more than any other genre, psych inhabited the pastoral spaces to which we consign childhood: edenic gardens, remote Never Lands, secret entrances, and private dreamworlds.

When I was a Boy, Everything was Right

So childhood played a key role in the desire for a more authentic pastoral experience permeating the 1960s. In hindsight, the child’s pervasiveness among the epoch’s aspirations is quite striking. Still more striking however is the meagre scrutiny given to the association of innocence with childhood in the first place. So inherent is the child’s embodiment of moral purity it might be impossible to think of modern European humanity without it.

We should not claim that an idea of childhood had not circulated before the dawn of modernity. But despite a long-pervasive iconography of the infant Christ, it was only in the sixteenth century, historian Philippe Ariès has shown, that a “touching” image of the infant came to be detached from religious belief and viewed as an object of value in its own right.²⁸

In his groundbreaking argument, Ariès claimed that prior to modernity, children were perceived merely as “miniature adults” and recognised with comparatively little significance. If the abruptness by which he posits the emergence of the idea of childhood is open to debate, the child’s anchoring of modern ideals of progress, freedom and reason is irrefutable.

Staking a claim to innocence, it turns out, was a pretty strong case for an ascendant European merchant class to cast off the shackles of received wisdom imposed by medieval hierarchy. It’s an assertion that works by posing as unburdened by superstition, unfettered by the blinders of social mores, and repudiating original sin. The issues at stake here are all, it might be apparent, the institutions of a feudal aristocracy. But the progressive enterprise which opposed them had need of both philosophers and of children.

In this regard, no thinker played a more crucial role than the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, as Joanne Faulkner demonstrates in a penetrating assessment.²⁹ Locke argued that all ideas are the product of experience.³⁰ This makes him the founder of empiricist philosophy. But in the process of conveying this claim he posited the child as a tabula rasa (blank slate).

This probably makes him the founder of the bourgeois conception of childhood too. If we are born tabula rasa, if we all start from scratch, the contention goes, then none of our knowledge could have been derived from God nor preconceived ideas.

This is, in other words, an argument for freedom from convention and natural hierarchy, and it posits the child as an original and pure version of the mind’s relation to the world; a distilled essence of knowledge. If we’re born free from prejudice, it stands we ought to be free from aristocratic institutions as well.

A series of effects issue from such a view and they’re still operative today. For one thing, the philosopher only consolidates an image of adult autonomy here by attributing to the child an inversion of adult attributes of reason and self-mastery. This in turn justifies authority over the child or anyone else not considered reasonable, in the process.

Romanticism might have emerged as a rejection of what it took to be the coldness of modern commitments to reason, Locke’s included, along with the alienating effects of modern society, but the Romantics nevertheless extended the opposition of child and adult modernity inaugurates.

In this regard, in Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise on child-rearing and education, the child is portrayed in a prelapsarian state – a “state of nature” sufficient to develop virtues of freedom, autonomy, and spontaneity. Yet “everything degenerates in the hands of man”, Rousseau writes in the book’s opening sentence.³¹ It’s a view in which the child travels light, only acquiring emotional baggage on a gradual path towards corruption by what Rousseau describes as the vices of “prejudices, authority, necessity, example”.

Such a view offers up innocence as something that will inevitably be lost. This is to be lamented. But it’s also seen as inevitable on the path of progress. The Romantic philosopher doesn’t merely preserve adulthood as the accomplishment of progress, then, he restricts the child to salvaging what is experienced as lost in historical development. This is to say that, imagined in a primitive state, the child preserves a pre-cultural freedom and spontaneity but only as degraded memory.

Time Let Me Play and Be

To grasp this dichotomy between reason and original nature is also to find oneself upon the axes of modern music. Indeed, the internal logic avows the same imperatives.

In taking the score as the repository of musical meaning, Enlightenment musical discourse permitted the complex coordination of musicians.³² But it also demanded passive reception from those sat in the salon or theatre. This implies not only an opposition between musician and audience, but also insists music be the object of polite contemplation.

Of course, Romanticism offers a reversal of this dichotomy between musical reason and musical feeling. Music, the claim goes, is corporeal, it is registered directly by the body and not only by rational consciousness. But Romanticism has its own hazards, falling too easily for tropes of visceral and primitive authenticity.

This is one way of returning back to the issue of the child. If the lullaby re-transmits the child’s cry in harmonic and tidy form, then the cry itself seems to harbour a more primal energy, prior to its taming by social convention and order. Such a view holds an ideal of primitive authenticity and it is particularly important to various strands of rock music, a realm where screams are monuments to coarse emotion. Raw, visceral, primal, gut-wrenching: these are amongst the most affirmative compliments for popular music and they are indicative of a recurring intersection of romantic conceptions of childhood and of music.

Behind all of this lies a sort of secularised lapsarian view where the sources of corruption are neither Eve nor apple but society itself. It might have its ancestry in Locke and Rousseau, but it can be found throughout a radical tradition running from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin and it’s a notion that continued to flourish amongst the generation of philosophers who came of age in the late 1960s.³³

For the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben for instance, the child functions as a negative anthropology, a condition of possibility of history and of humanity, and so an anchor of pure living potential.³⁴

The philosopher of postmodernism Jean-François Lyotard views processes of socialisation as amounting to the de-toxification of raw childhood so that it can be contained by society.³⁵ Insofar as social order cannot overcome the contingency posed by birth, children represent for Lyotard the irreducible possibility of society’s destruction.

For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “children are Spinozists”.³⁶ This is a reference to the great philosophical critic of the notion of an autonomous mind and it implies the child’s existence takes place at a generative level, unhinged from a passive and rational adult subject. Or, one might say, it insists we discover our inner wild (Spinozist) child. Like Agamben and Lyotard then, Deleuze and Guattari treat childhood as offering a path to a more expansive mode of being, prior to its reduction by logics of order and hierarchy.

The nuanced philosophical differences among these thinkers won’t concern us here. Rather, the point is that in privileging the child as harbouring a primordial, creative force that might still transform the adult world, the great contemporary critics of current society are not at odds with Romanticism.

Childhood, in other words, amounts to what theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton suggests is a retrospective construction, an empty space filled by adult desire.³⁷ But this means the actual child struggles to live up to the fantasy.

Placing the child outside legitimate discourse might invest them with the profound desire for escape from the narrow constraints of reason and order. But doing so deprives them of any agency or means of negotiating with the adult world into which they are necessarily drawn.

So argues Jean Baudrillard, among the few philosophical critics of the idea of childhood.³⁸ The point is in fact relatively straightforward: in order to rescue adult society, the child is exiled from it. This is a dilemma as much for modern and postmodern philosophy as it was for the psychedelic revolution.

It’s a Family Affair

But if the pastoral milieu to which it is expelled is permitted to persist, every childhood nevertheless comes to an end. An awkward exit must be negotiated.

This occurs in a scene common in films and television programmes in the 1980s. A group of middle-aged people are framed standing around a middle-class kitchen or restaurant table, glasses of wine in hand, reminiscing about “the Sixties”. The conversation inevitably has three moments: (i) reflection on youth and ageing – “oh how young we were”; (ii) joyful listing of acts – sexual, political, narcotic – perpetrated; (iii) collective confirmation of past naiveté. Everybody has to grow up sometime. Failure to trade optimism for a dose of cynicism becomes symptomatic of pathological adolescence

Cast as oedipal or generational conflict, the upheavals of the 1960s were re-articulated as family drama and rehabilitated as affirming rather than rejecting the status quo. Youthful rebellion, in this view, was necessary in order to overcome lingering conservative tendencies and rigidities, but these childish indiscretions could then be reintegrated into mature society.

It’s a clever dismissal of a radical challenge. The libertinism of the private pleasures of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll could be affirmed – usually in the most garish ways – to the exclusion of the egalitarian spirit of the 1960s. Anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and workers’ struggles which gave the epoch its impulse are eclipsed altogether, while concessions to other progressive forces allow them to be captured by the logic of contemporary capitalism. This is altogether frequently acknowledged.

But if the sub-genre of post-1968 accommodation cinema reflected a broader celebration of 1960s rebellion while abandoning its very ideals, Forrest Gump (1994) is the pop culture nail in their coffin. The film centres on the parallel lives of a virtuous yet dim Forrest (played by likely future American president Tom Hanks) and his childhood friend and love Jenny (Robin Wright) as they negotiate the defining events of post-war America: desegregation, the Vietnam War, the summer of love, and so on. Intellectually curious and sexually promiscuous, Jenny’s peace-love pretensions are milked at every turn by abusive fanatics, caricatured Black militants and sloganeering radicals. Forrest, ever the holy fool, is untarnished by the crises that enfold around him. Hippy experimentalism, it eventually turns out, was just a gateway to heroin addiction and AIDS. Innocence is recast as the property of a White supremacist, imperialist America, while moral corruption rests with its critics and dissidents. The poles are altogether reversed.

Beginning to See the Light

For all the risks and reductions that any periodising move entails, we stand on relatively firm ground if we situate the point of closure of “the Sixties” in the period between 1972–1974. Not only did a then emerging crisis entailing doubling oil prices produce widespread recession, but along with the American withdrawal from Vietnam and the failure of the Bretton Woods system, the moment marked a collapse of profitability on a global scale from which, despite periodic “recoveries”, the global economic system would not overcome.

Pop music grasped the ebbing optimism and revolutionary élan rather swiftly. In this regard, the late period career arc of the Beatles is instructive. While one could already glimpse the symbolic closure of the Sixties in the collapse of any thematic unity on the follow up to Sgt. Pepper’s, The White Album (1968), critic Ellen Willis takes Abbey Road (1969) as amongst the clearest indications of a new post-68 sobriety; “the calm after an emotional storm”, as she puts it.³⁹ Along with Let it Be (1970), the group’s final album, Abbey Road mostly abandoned the chaos and silliness that had threatened to overwhelm Sgt. Pepper’s, instead expressing only mellow elation (“Here Comes the Sun”) or an almost Buddhist patience (“Let It Be”, “The Long and Winding Road”).

Critic Greil Marcus would draw an analogous shift between Sly & the Family Stone’s Stand! (1969) and follow-up There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971).⁴⁰ On Stand! the band guiltlessly frolics (“I Want to Take You Higher”), revels in unbridled togetherness (“Everyday People”), and is powerfully defiant (“Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey”). By There’s a Riot Goin’ On two years later, an oppressive doom hangs over the group. Despite its apparent intimacy, “Family Affair” is deeply cynical; “Runnin’ Away” is all sorrow and despair.

These are merely iterations on a theme. One can cite others: the desolation of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973); the roll call of noteworthy deaths: Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison; the popular turn away from experiments with sonority and rhythmic texture.

The often mad and chaotic demand for sensual immersion denoted by the psychedelic period would mostly be displaced by the studied virtuosity of prog or the down-home pastoral conservatism of 1970s soft rock. Or, where textural experimentation endured, as with for example the Velvet Underground, it did so with a distant and studied cool. In any case, the point is that the demand to grow up was figurative as much as literal.

Sometimes it was both. Bob Dylan’s slow migration from folk revival protest music to the confessional frame culminating in Blood on the Tracks (1975) or Desire (1976) reflected, to borrow a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson, a broader “bargain for survival on purely personal terms”.⁴¹ The mood of disillusionment is still more evident on Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971); lost loves intersect with pining for far away cities in an unstable combination of nostalgia and resignation.

An anxiety over the marking of time is amplified further by Neil Young’s delicate and fragile voice to particular effect on Harvest (1972). While Mitchell conflates the death of Sixties optimism with failed romance, Young does so with reflections on growing old and angst over the passing of time.⁴² As rock’s association with the cultural politics of the period were sundered and the scope of political vision began to contract, music sought refuge in the personal vision of the artists. The child was once again safely ensconced to a sentimental nostalgic fantasy.