The only music worth its salt is psychedelic..

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Alistair at GreenGalloway
ya I've read a couple things, also familiar w/the history cos I was a peacepunk obsessive freak as a kid

Hawkwind is definitely a/the spiritual forefather but the real ties are bands like Zounds, The Mob, Blood Robots, etc w/free rock scene - Fuck Off Records is a relevant label

+ obv Crass were literal hippies

later on there's crust/traveller crossover I think? to an extent anyway. Amebix/Disorder also famously lived together in squats in Bristol.

unfortunately it's mostly not reflected in the music besides maybe The Mob

an interesting + mostly forgotten piece of history anyway
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
My memory is blurry, but weren't PM Dawn, De La soul and most definitely Arrested Development some sort of Hip hop Hippies? Or at least that was theirsales pitch.

De La Soul were pretty acid-house, weren't they? Which was a sort of flower-power MkII in itself.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
"Hip Hop hippies" - none of this had any kind of popular traction beyond the marketing of these bands. I think the strangeness of Lil B (mentioned upthread I think) has a better claim to being psychedelic - it's genuinely weird, and breaks with the musical conventions of rap much more radically - decentres the author, lets stream of consciousness dominate, genuinely meant challenge to raps's machismo, and ceaseless production being some of the ways. Should really start listening to him again.

Paidrag - feel free to up some Mob tracks if any fit? Would like to hear. But yeah, I get the impression that this stuff was rooted in the live scene on the traveller circuit. The Crass I've heard seems to have that edge of creativity that you could characterise as psychedelic if you were being v generous.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
My memory is blurry, but weren't PM Dawn, De La soul and most definitely Arrested Development some sort of Hip hop Hippies? Or at least that was theirsales pitch.

Well there's a whole side of hip-hop that's all about the Afrocentric mysticism - I'm thinking of that Killah Priest guy that craner loves so much - which is very psychedelic but I think also quite far removed from (stereotypical white) hippiedom.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
idk about specific tracks, their whole style is mid-tempo anarchopunk with a dark/psychedelic edge. Let the Tribe Increase is a great record anyway.

you also see them referenced in re "death rock", tho probably Rudimentary Peni - also psychedelic albeit in a different way - is more relevant there

Zounds is closer to a kind of shaggy free-rock vibe, + they definitely had playing chops v few other people in that scene did

Crass I wouldn't call psychedelic but v hippieish, as indeed their roots were - look up Wally Hope for the backstory. sonically not v hippie either, lots of dissonance.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
to quote G.I.S.M. punk is hippies after all. but usually not v psychedelic tho.

wrong drugs. alcohol is the least psychedelic substance on earth.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
Haha, you know what, I somehow managed to read 'De La Soul' as 'Deee-Lite'. As you were.

Deee-Lite fit the hippy bill very well, though. A bit hippy-ish also were The B52's. And Urge Overkill. In fact, looking back, there were quite some hippy-revivalisms going on in the early 90s pop-music.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
One of my friends sent me an article about cocaine earlier, only of interest as it said that cocaine use has rocketed over the years while ecstacy and LSD has declined
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
One of the problems with psychedelic music of old is the use of once mind blowing sounds which subsequently became codified as psychedelic and so now sound extremely bland and twee. This is a classic 'time barrier' situation (hello Luka) innit? Again I'm thinking of the obvious psychedelic music of the 60s 70s. Tie dye, Krishna.

Perhaps the same has happened with the futurist psychedelica of the 90s too - 'greys', neon grids, etc.?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The abstract psychedelica of Crystl's 'Warp drive' however, remains potent... Psychedelica as sensory rather than (pseudo, some would say) spiritual.

Villalobos makes very psychedelic music.

I guess in popular music there's generally no psychedelic feeling. It's digital, processed, clean, flat, squashed into a glassy plane. I still think music can be great with all these qualities but there's definitely a lack of depth to it. It isn't a higher reality it's a hyperreality. 'The Real'... On acid! (Or Coke, more likely).

Maybe it's a sign of the times - fair to say the 80s wasn't a particularly psychedelic decade? Or is this a cliche, the coked up neoliberal 80s, big suits, big phones... And then the MDMA injection in the 90s and there's a resurgence of all that stuff.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
One of the problems with psychedelic music of old is the use of once mind blowing sounds which subsequently became codified as psychedelic and so now sound extremely bland and twee. This is a classic 'time barrier' situation (hello Luka) innit? Again I'm thinking of the obvious psychedelic music of the 60s 70s. Tie dye, Krishna.

Perhaps the same has happened with the futurist psychedelica of the 90s too - 'greys', neon grids, etc.?

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
These symbols of otherworldliness and mysticism age badly. Thinking of Yeats, who I've been amateurishly studying a bit lately - his early stuff, all faeries and dew drops, totally dated and embarrassing even within his own lifetime.

No doubt connected to the form that the imagination CAN take in any given epoch
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Also, he use to write and then actually post letters to himself.

If he was around now, he'd probably think that Teresa May faked a chemical weapons attack in Syria.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Early Yeats, though, is part of that whole English late pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic "fleshly school" movement, like the French Symbolists and Decadents, scratching around the sparks of Modernism.
 
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