Mastodawn

Zen fascists will control you: https://www.ianbetteridge.com/zen-fascist-wi/

In 1979, a punk band from San Francisco recorded a song about the Governor of California. It was a joke, mostly. Jerry Brown was a Democrat, a Buddhist, a man who dated Linda Ronstadt and discussed limits and simplicity at a moment when America was in no mood for either.

Zen fascists will control you...

Ian Betteridge

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thomas yager-madden Mar 10

@ianbetteridge I don’t know, this could be that I didn’t get acquainted with her work until she was older and more overtly jaded, but I’ve always felt like I hear a deep irony and disappointment in Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” that the CSNY version seems designed to try to suppress, doing violence to the ambivalence of the original. The “we” she calls golden includes everyone, and if we’ve got to get “back to the garden” I don’t think she is claiming that the Woodstock festival itself was necessarily a successful move in that direction in her view

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Ian Betteridge Mar 10

@tym It's a *really* good point and I’d love to write something exploring it. There's a lot of “the hippy dream is over" that emerges around that period - I'm thinking of the line from "Blue” ("acid booze and ass/needles guns and grass... lots of laughs”) and I think some of that starts with Woodstock (the event and the song)

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thomas yager-madden

@ianbetteridge I think you are right that she went through a period of disillusionment that turns up in her songs. I also see her as having always just had that restless schizoid creative individual streak, where she can never wholeheartedly embrace a scene or a movement or even a musical style, keeps herself always a step apart, because as a matter of personality she’s more interested in questions than answers