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Erik's avatar

I find it amusing that people back then thought a musical style would influence people's politics. My parents were the only conservatives for miles around and frustratingly square in their musical taste. They had no cool early rock records to leave me, but they sure had Peter Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio. I have a charity store find LP of Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall and I love it. I think I would have gone to a Seeger show, but he could no more turn me commie than gay.

Depressed people dig happy pop dance songs. I don't know what the word would be for people like me who don't tend towards depression, but a lot of us like super dark depressing songs.

From the mid sixties on the boomers decided as one that the most important thing in music was authenticity. The bands who could fake that, had it made. The ones that failed to hide the puppet strings would remain embarrassing.

Mike Nesmith, whose mom invented liquid paper, was the actual inventor of country rock, but is hardly mentioned because of that damn TV show (which was also great).

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Nelson Dyar's avatar

We can turn around Steve's initial question: how did the CIA's knowledge of and complicity in the Contra's drug trafficking in the 80's (protecting traffickers, funding operations ala North's diary, the Hitz Report, etc) into inner cities unwittingly galvanize the rise of gangsta rap, which in turn resulted in a black culture shift that resulted in thousands of incremental and unnecessary deaths?

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