Buck 65

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“The title of the album is Situation and there is a pretty deep meaning behind that. The whole album was inspired by the all the events of 50 years ago, exactly fifty years ago. So I am talking about the year 1957, which is probably the most important year in Western pop cultural history. I think it has had such a big impact and legacy that it still acts on us today in a way that is subconscious, we don’t even realize that we’re still basically acting and doing things creatively based on what we learned and what we know from events of that year. Within a nutshell that amounts to being the year that rock ‘n’ roll broke wide open. Of course it existed a little before that, but that was the first year that the charts basically got completely taken over by Elvis, Buddy Holly and on and on and on. I mean at the point rock ‘n’ roll mania took its grip full, like it fully caught on like on a wide scale and the years even before that, Elvis may have had a few hits, but the the charts were dominated by like Dean Martin, Perry Cuomo, all that kind of stuff. Rock ‘n’ roll fully took over in 1957. 1957 was that year that “Howl” and “On The Road” were published. So that was the emergence of the beat generation and their stories of that life style, ya know, promiscuous sex and drug taking and for a lot of people that loose activity and behavior was frightening. It was also the year of infamous obscenity trials. It was kinda the year of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll; it was ground breaking and earth shattering to the point where it caused such a stir that the government was getting involved and there were hearings in the Supreme Court and people were trying to shut it down—people were terrified. We had not really seen youth rebellion before that, for all purposes it didn’t really exist. But all the sudden kids were going nuts and people were shitting there pants and can you image this all happening right in the middle of the clean cut, white picket fence 1950s.

“Also very important and interesting were things happening in Europe, in particular the formation of an artist and political movement called Situationist International. Their legacy is part of the brains behind riots and terrorist, but before that this was agroup that kinda rose from ashes Dadaism. One of the students of Situationist International was a young Malcom McClaren, who took what he learned and later formed the Sex Pistols, i.e. doing something artistic—in this case making music—that made a really strong political statement, created some kind of change and got people talking. These were all really wildly exciting ideas. It was just a year the ideas literally went crazy and formed the way we think and formed our expectations with pop culture. I don’t think we actively think “Boy, we haven’t really seen anything this exciting since 1957,” but the impact is just so large it affects the way we think…I would argue.”