I used to consider myself an expert in techno/house years ago, but I started losing interest in the last year for obvious reasons. The main one being the complete squeeze the mainstream has done to electronic music. I know that good music is still being produced, but the floodgates were opened and the is just coming in from all sides. I'm not only talking about the music... I'm also talking about the people and the attitudes etc..
All that aside... I recently read a few books that have opened a new door for me. It all started with Hunter S Thompson. I read a few of his books and he always writes about the counterculture in the 60's. That got me curious and then from there I went nuts. Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin's biographies, The Electric Cool-Aid Acid test, Haight-Ashbury, Hell's Angels and all that great stuff.
Anyway, all that eventually led to the music. Now I want to know if anyone else has some tracks/stories they enjoy from the time. I wasn't sure if I should put this is music discussion, since it specifies EDM music only.
Ill get the ball rolling and if nobody gives a , that is fine by me.
Dj Nacht
I should also mention that I never enjoyed this music my entire life. It was only after reading about and understanding the 60's did the music finally make sense to me.
EddieZilker
Shouldn't this go in Music Discussion?
Dj Nacht
quote:
Originally posted by Dj Nacht
I wasn't sure if I should put this is music discussion, since it specifies EDM music only.
I'm also interested in talking about the whole 60's in the general.
Some must read books would be Fear and loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels by Hunter S Thompson
EddieZilker
quote:
Originally posted by Dj Nacht
I'm also interested in talking about the whole 60's in the general.
Some must read books would be Fear and loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels by Hunter S Thompson
Ah - well then: it stays in here. I've actually read both of those and recently saw a documentary about him. He's one of my favorite authors, as well. I had the opportunity of reading his perspective on history along side Christopher Lasch's and a few others, over the past few years. Hell's Angels is likely the most historically relevant of the two but I thought Fear and Loathing functioned as an entertaining social commentary. Someone wrote in our copy, "This book is ABSOLUTELY accurate. I've been there." I have no idea if he's talking about the drugs, Vegas, or just witnessing the events that Thompson reported but I thought it was interesting to have it as an artifact, none-the-less.
netroM
I love a lot of 60s Psych Rock :)
Dj Nacht
quote:
Originally posted by EddieZilker
I've been there." I have no idea if he's talking about the drugs, Vegas, or just witnessing the events that Thompson reported but I thought it was interesting to have it as an artifact, none-the-less.
The book can only fully be understood after learning about the counterculture that came to rise in the 60's. Don't get me wrong, the book can also be enjoyed as pure entertainment because that is what it appears to be on the surface. When I was younger I watched the movie plenty of times, had a good laugh and didn't think there was anything else to it. There is one particular part that is, for me, the greatest and most accurate thing written about the sixties. Hell, I can't even read it without getting goosebumps. Ill copy and paste it in to share.
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Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bull, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
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Dj Nacht
quote:
Originally posted by netroM
I love a lot of 60s Psych Rock :)
I don't know these guys, i'll check 'em out.
Dj Nacht
If you enjoy Hunter's twisted drug fueled adventures, then you absolutely have to read his short story called The Great Shark Hunt. He wrote it for Playboy magazine(I actually bought the magazine off Ebay).
It's just as insane as Fear and Loathing.
