Unnaccountably perhaps (!) when I first saw this Shoreditch grafitto I misread it as "Bomb that hippie scum", which I took to be an expression of sympathy for much-maligned hippies. Instead, it's a tired anti-yuppy thing .... blah. Anyway, I liked the idea of it being an ironic attack on (ie praise for) hippies.
Because of punk's dumb-ass (but tongue-in-cheek?) never trust a hippie sloganeering, it seems to me that it's still basically uncool to venerate hippiedom (I was always impressed that Mark Perry ignored this petty sectarianism even during punk's heyday).
My namesake from The Young Ones obviously also had something to do with it in the UK, but it still seems ridiculous that the prejudice has stuck. I mean, give me Neil Young's more-or-less sincere heart of gold over Joe Strummer's fake white riot any day.
Meanwhile, there's no pejorative in "punk"! Far from it. So, for eg, on his (excellent) The Garage Sale radio show in Virginia, Brother Jimmy The Truth has got the "How punk is that?" slot - meaning "How fucking good is that?", which I think is pretty typical. Even 35 years of corporate co-option hasn't managed to destroy punk's (undeserved?) aura of cool-ness. It's indestructable!
It just ain't fair. Bring back the hippies, I say. And leave the yuppies alone. And you know what? I mean it man ....
No comments:
Post a Comment