Rebel Without Applause: Why Lou Reed hated hippies
Rock and roll has had a rebellious streak since its very early days, but it was not until the counterculture age of the 1960s that music became seen as a valid form of social protest. Depending on who you ask, the revolution of punk rock arguably has its roots in the anti-war anthems of the hippie generation. Nevertheless, many figures, like Lou Reed, who helped to better define the conventions of punk rock were openly resentful of the ‘peace and love’ ethos of the hippie age.
As a founding member and primary songwriter for The Velvet Underground, Reed forever altered the course of rock history. The Underground played an essential role in inspiring everybody from David Bowie to Nirvana, but they were essential to the punk explosion that would dominate the mid-1970s. Despite first forming in 1964, Reed and company never paid much attention to the hippie movement, establishing themselves as kings of the New York underground instead.
Admittedly, the discordant, often unsettling music of The Velvet Underground would not have fit particularly well with the far-out psychedelia of groups like Jefferson Airplane or The Doors, but Reed was keen to distance himself from that scene regardless. During a 1970 interview, the songwriter lashed out at the San Francisco psych-rock movement, sharing, “We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene. It’s just tedious, a lie, and untalented. They can’t play, and they certainly can’t write.”
Seemingly, though, Reed’s predominant issue with the hippie generation was the performative nature of its supposed rebellion. During the early days, hippies were inherently political, and their anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention, for instance, had real-world consequences on the political landscape of the United States. However, as the movement went on, it became increasingly complacent, reduced more to a fashion sense than a staunch set of ethical principles.
According to Reed, the hippies did more damage than they were worth. Speaking to Rolling Stone back in 1987, he said, “That’s a lot of what rock and roll is about to some people: listening to something your parents don’t like, dressing the way your parents won’t like. Then the adults are doing it, too, and it becomes pointless. It’s all built around the idea of being offensive to some other generation, and nothing more. It doesn’t carry any weight.”
More than that, Reed theorised that the performative politics of the hippies ended up having a detrimental effect on the next generation of kids in America. “Don’t you think it’s interesting that the kids of all these hippies became all these yuppies?” he asked, “Think of what’s going on in the world today. If this was the sixties, the college kids would be in the streets tearing the buildings down. They would never tolerate what’s going on in South Africa, what’s going on with Reagan, the Iran-contra thing. They wouldn’t put up with it for two seconds.”
Reed was never one to engage in nostalgia, and he clarified his statements by affirming, “I’m not saying they were the good old days. It’s the difference in the generations. You get a lot of parents who are prodrug, so now you get these straight-laced kids who are very Republican. All these outrages are going on, and they’re sitting there doing nothing,” he said, adding, “It’s interesting because their kids will probably be the other way.”
Indeed, it was the generation after that elected a Democrat to office in the form of Bill Clinton, but the United States never really achieved the kind of left-wing harmony that the hippies claimed to strive for. Lou Reed, for one, was never particularly convinced of the power of ‘peace and love’ anyway.
