'Mister Postman, look and see, if there's a letter in your bag for me. I've been waiting such a long time, since I heard from that girl of mine.'
There are different versions of this song. But the one that I grew up with was played by the Beatles. It featured on the 1963 album 'With the Beatles', which I think was the first L.P. that I ever possessed. Its purchase was an occasion of tremendous excitement, and the record was soon ground into crackly oblivion by the cheap sapphire stylus on my cheap dansette record player. Until it was no longer playable, however, I loved every moment.
Appearances notwithstanding - the Beatles of that period performed all their songs wearing the same cheery asinine smiles beneath their cheeky mop-tops - it is a song of great passion. Older readers will probably have been there; I certainly have. What a mixture of emotions churn in the heart and the stomach as the daily wait for the postman is endured. Love, longing, despair; hope, fear, anxiety. It is with an uncomfortable mix of anticipation and dread that the footsteps of the bringer of tidings are met. And at the time when John Lennon intoned the words, the torture could continue for days on end.
It is an experience which is, I suspect, foreign to younger generations. Today, everything is instant. Even email is far too slow and cumbersome for many folk in the year 2018. A text is all that's needed. 'Do you love me?' 'No. Go jump in the lake.' End of story. And in the life of instant, a whole lot is being missed out on.
Not always, but frequently, feeling requires time in order to gain depth. Thus the modern culture of 'easy and instant' is fated to promote solely trivia, the superficial. A life of photos of 'me having lunch' on Facebook and WhatsApp will inevitably lack emotional depth: the conditions are not there for the kind-of training which depth normally requires.
A life of information overload, of instant-ness, suits 'those who would control us' just fine. It creates the group, the herd, the sheeple, as the phenomenon is sometimes unkindly called, where there is no time to think for yourself, to reflect, to allow the possibility of being properly individual. It creates a universe of superficiality, in which the deeper aspects of life have no chance to muscle in.
Precious little is found in the mainstream on the mind-compromising effects of the culture-of-instant. That's hardly unexpected, since it is a system whose survival depends on a level of collective blindness. The so-called alternative media, though, also says little or nothing. I find this 'notable', since the culture of instant and incessant information is part and parcel of what creates modern culture and its malaise. Every bit as much as what the alternative loves to rail non-stop against: deep politics and the rest.
The passion of Mister Postman is a threat to the system, to the status quo. It is real feeling, real people feeling real stuff. It provides the opportunity for authenticity, for proper individuality. It is a danger, and has to be quietly dealt with, to be removed, in order to create a compliant populace.
Part Two: The 1960s March On
Watching some of those old music clips from the early and mid 1960s can be a bizarre experience, one that bleeds incongruence. To the modern eye, the body language is minimal, understated, or non-existent. But real feelings, real passions, are communicated through many-a song of the period, in a way that more recent music is normally incapable of doing. Take a peek at the Zombies performing 'She's Not There' in 1965. Compared with the gyrating which is the norm nowadays, the band is statuesque. But the lack of physical movements is compensated by the emotional gyrations emanating from the magnificent voice of Colin Blunstone. It's a great song, methinks, with longing, unfulfilled passions, overflowing. Typical modern mainstream 'emoting' is formulaic, manufactured, nothing in comparison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2hXBf1DakE
As the 1960s neared their end, emotion in music became darker, more complex. A remarkable transformation in musical expression and consciousness took place over a few short years: it was a period when change seemed to speed up, as it appears to do from time to time in human cultural history. Here is Julie Driscoll, a mere four years after the Zombies. Julie manifested as a unique phenomenon in the history of human consciousness. She was embodiment of divine Shakti for the time, sent to challenge the customary cool of Lord Shiva. He failed totally, crumpling into a heap at her feet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLxMlqpxcRQ
There is a stereotypical reading of alternative youth culture of the 1960s, rolled out ad nauseam in any number of popular mainstream documentaries and the like. It goes a bit like this:
It all started off a bit naughty, but essentially quite nice: Carnaby Street, trendy, those cheery Liverpudlian mop-tops. Then came hippies, San Francisco, Haight Ashbury, dope, acid, more acid. Free love, flower power, love and peace, man. Within a year, though, it all turned nasty. Haight full of junkies, Altamont, Vietnam, student riots in Paris, rock stars dropping dead all over the place, Charles Manson. It all went wrong, it all dropped dead like the rock stars. By New Year's Day 1970 it was history.
I do not buy this interpretation of events. It certainly bears little resemblance to what I lived through as an impressionable teenager of the time. The story is a good one for television, simple and easy to understand. Many people like seeing something 'good' going down. To me, though, the reality was both more prosaic and more psychologically archetypal.
The transition from flower power to blood on the tracks was not a case of failure, of something naïve being replaced by something more 'realistic'. It possessed a continuum; it was the same process in a state of transition. Specifically, it was a darkening, a nigredo as the alchemists would have it, or incorporation of shadow elements to use Jungian language. This process is tricky and painful, but necessary if anything is going to survive. The counterculture in Britain as I knew it in the early 1970s was far smaller than the hippie stuff of five years previous. Yet it embodied a depth, substance, a solemn knowing, all of which were pretty absent from the alternative collective of 1967.
Part Three: Feed Your Head
Come the early 1970s, a certain thread in the world of rock was undergoing remarkable transformations. Jazz-rock, experimental rock, prog rock, post-psychedelic rock: we like to give things names, it makes us feel more secure. Whatever. Music of great complexity, sophistication, and psychic/emotional expression was emerging, pushing the boundaries further every week. Can, Yes, the Mahavishnu Orchestra were my main inspirations, but there were others doing similar stuff. I know enough about music to see that what was going on was remarkable from a musical point of view. I don't think people could create such pieces nowadays if they tried: it is outside modern mentalities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmM2qXDS9wc
While not exactly mainstream, some of the bands boasted an enormous following. The Mahavishnus and Yes played sell-out concerts in massive venues in the USA in particular. A considerable proportion of western youth was engaged and identified with the music and what it manifested. Then, one day, it stopped. Just like that. John McLaughlin disbanded the Mahavishnus and disappeared to India. Yes and their ilk became objects of ridicule. From 1975 -76 the map of pop, rock and roll was dramatically redrawn.
One common complaint about Yes, in particular, was that their music was self-indulgent and pretentious. Though less familiar with their later work, I know their music pre-1976 fairly well. It is a criticism which applies to a small minority of their output, in my view. The vast majority is far from pretentious. This is a criticism provided by people who don't get it, or choose not to get it. Whose emotional and spiritual range of sensibilities comes from flatland. Much of the band's repertoire invokes a variety of rich emotion, in my heart and soul at least. There is real passion there, but of a different order to what most 'pop' dishes up.
In place of Yes and the Mahavishnus, the youth of the day were suddenly served up punk and disco. Punk is far more readily accessible to the mainstream media; it works in the world that they are comfortable with, that they understand. Social unrest, anger, outwardly expressed frustration, class war: this is the fractious world which keeps the whole rotten system going. It is notable how the BBC and their like come up with sympathetic, understanding 'documentaries' on punks and skin heads, but the same is not forthcoming for prog rock, hard psychedelic rock, etc. The effects of these are potentially far more subversive. A youth culture based upon the Hindu-flecked jazz-rock of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, dealing as it does more with the one thing that scares the 'Control System' shitless, inner transformations, would be far more threatening than those which have appeared instead. It had to go. Simple as that.
That's punk. As for disco, well,...……. it's disco, innit...….
I have always smelt the whiff of social engineering about the transformation in 'music for youth' which I have outlined in skeleton above. To my knowledge, nothing has been written about it, and large chunks of modern alternative culture are not specially sympathetic to the consciousness-focussed phenomena that came and went so spectacularly. While I don't think that everything in social and cultural trends is engineered - there is room for the spontaneous, the unexpected, which will burst through regardless of any attempt at suppression - nevertheless things don't just happen by chance. Culture seems to be an ongoing game of cat-and-mouse between forces of spontaneous creativity and those of directed control. It is my thesis that, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the former were unusually prominent; a good deal of popular cultural change ever since has intended to bury that threat to its supremacy good and proper. It has been a comprehensive programme of dumbing down.
