Introduction
INTRODUCTION What do all these protests mean? Well my friend, Time Magazine Explains they’re vaguely reminiscent of the sixties. They’re anachronistic fossils, atavistic apostles, They can’t hustle, they’re still twisting with the sixties. I hear people singing songs, About what’s right and what is wrong, Their song is painfully reminiscent of the sixties. How the hell can they play music, When their guitars are acoustic? I can’t use it, I had to lose it in the sixties. As the curly-headed, turban-topped king of rolling thunder, I build my castle on the hill, to evangelize in wonder At the peasants of the eighties, in the valleys, going under. And as I watched them go, amazed they do not know, They could learn so much from Barry Manilow. But they’re so vaguely reminiscent of the sixties.1 Folk singer Charlie King’s song “Vaguely Reminiscent of the Sixties” is part satire, part serious.2 His introduction, spoken at a concert and recorded for release on his 1982 album Vaguely Reminiscent, speaks to the disappointment that many on the left felt about how their actions in the 1970s and 1980s had been represented and re-imagined in American politics and culture in the period since the 1960s. For those involved in activist movements, countercultural endeavors, or some other iteration of alternative political or cultural expression, such representations of activism (or “metaphors” as Charlie King called them) were not only slightly insulting, they misread alternative politics and culture in the post-sixties era, identifying the New Left, the counterculture, and the anti-Vietnam War movement as singular entities confined to a specific context – the 1960s – and a unique time of change and challenge in American life.
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