Yesterday on TV, some old hippie lady, dressed in indian-style garb, belted out some ancient 60s style folk tune about something or another, probably something about how pink people shouldn’t hurt brown people. But was she serious?

Take love songs. Every other popular tune is about losing a girl, getting a girl, getting rid of a girl, loving a girl. Most of the remainder are the same, but about guys. But why? For a person involved in a longish relationship, these songs’ lyrics just go in one ear, travel down the ear canal, impact the tympanic membrane, vibrate parts of the cochlea, and proceed to send spectral signals to the brain. But it stops there: unless the music part is very well done, the lyrics are not paid attention to.

Now consider a broken-hearted teenager with some money in his pocket. Or one who first wishes to get that girl (or guy), then get heart-broken. Seriously, those spectral signals get priority-courier’d right into that foremost part of the brain, saying “listen to me, I know how you feel”. Around a breakup, every bloody stupid girl/boy song somehow takes on some meaning and makes the sufferer want to listen.

And buy those records so he or she can listen to them some more, at a later moping moment.

In other words, I hypothesize that there are all these songs about lovy dovy stuff because (a) they attract lonely people through some weird subliminal “buy-me-now” attraction, and (b) they don’t outright offend those not so lonely. So the records sell.

What this has to do with the hippie anti-war songs should be clear. Not that I was personally there, my fertile imagination tells me that there must have been more than a few “artists” who, talented just beyond the modicum, used the 60s/70s lefty American movements as a captive market. In some cases, not far beyond the modicum: in my opinion, several groups like Peter Paul & Mary actually sound pretty awful, not just now but then.

I would love to hear someday of some record executive who, during those days, made an explicit effort to pump out those “spontaneous”, “heartfelt”, “important” songs using manufactured bands. Heck, I would love to hear some of these “folk heroes” come out one day, admit that they never gave a leaping lump of fecal figment about the Vietnam War or other cool causes, they just wanted to sell records. All they had to do was to dress up in silly clothes, mix in a few words about the cause-du-jour into some lame songs, and … PROFIT!

Hm, not too different from so-called christian rock.