AFH: When you use the word "hippie" are you referring to the ideology in songs like Joni Mitchell's, "They paved paradise and put in a parking lot," or Chrissie Hynde's, "I went back to my city"? Hynde is not a hippie, but those songs seem to relate to your work. Don’t you consider "hippie" a pejorative description for political art? It seems that label is often used to make relevant statements sound anachronistic or too extreme?Vineland, p. 28:
KG: I disagree. I think because I was born in the 70's and missed the 60's I idealize the word hippie. I admire hippies because I associate them with freedom, open-mindedness, experimentation, revolution, peace and an uncorrupted attitude towards money.
AFH: You must be referring to the original hippies. Don't you find there to be something distressingly naïve about current-day hippies since that aesthetic and those ideals have been so mocked and commercialized by subsequent eras?
KG: Well, I really like the Easy Rider "we can live off the land" idea of a hippie, but it's a little disheartening when the song "Revolution" refers to Nike. I'm pretty fascinated with the way the meaning of the 60's has evolved. I don't think the term hippie would be used now. There isn't really a specific hippie style anymore and attitudes have shifted and broadened due to hindsight. They've fractured into multiple groups like environmentalists, the health conscious, organic farmers, political activists, anarchists...etc.. even yuppies.
Caray, you sixties people, it's amazing. Ah love ya! Go anywhere, it don't matter -- hey, Mongolia! Go way out into smalltown Outer Mongolia, ese, there's gonna be some local person about your age come runnin up, two fingers in a V, hollerin, 'What's yer sign, man?' or singing 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' note for note.
Funny and sad how the art establishment -- as represented here by the Artnet interviewer -- has come to adopt the view of the '60s counterculture promulgated, in Pynchon's novel, by a Reagan Administration DEA agent. This interviewer reminds pynchonoid of a Fox News commentator trying to bully a left-leaning interlocutor.
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