An Argument with a Hipster Troll: Why Psychedelic Music Does Not Begin and End with the Beatles

April 2020 was the 50th anniversary of the album Yeti (1970) by Amon Düül II, so I celebrated and commemorated by posting my thoughts about this album and sharing a humorous meme where Charlie Brown is about to listen to Yeti. The other character has a thought bubble (“Always Charlie plays strange records, why can’t we just listen to the Beatles?”)

A person commented on my post with a question (“Haven’t you ever heard of the Beatles’ acid phase?”) that he must have intended as sarcastic since the Beatles’ influence on popular music has been constantly cataloged, praised, and worshiped by both critics and the public. On the Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, half of the top 10 are Beatles with Sgt. Pepper’s predictably being awarded the crown as the greatest album of all time.

“Of course, I know the Beatles’ psychedelic phase,” I answered and in my reply talked about “Tomorrow Never Knows” as innovative and pioneering in its production. For my ears, “Tomorrow Never Knows” is the Beatles’ best psychedelic track.

This answer was not enough to satisfy this Beatles cult, rabid super fan. He argued with me that “Tomorrow Never Knows” was “catchy” and that the Beatles’ best psychedelia was to be found on Sgt. Pepper’s and that “Revolution 9” was the trippiest track of all time. I argued that Sgt. Pepper’s was cartoonish and overproduced (read Saliha Enzenauer’s scathing, superb takedown in her article in the Hall of Shame section here on Vinyl Writers.) I argued that Sgt. Pepper’s consists mainly of dance hall music and pop with a psychedelic sprinkling. I also argued that “Revolution 9” is merely an attempt at a provocative sound collage and that it is not necessarily “psychedelic”.

What he was defining as “psychedelic” and I was defining as “psychedelic” were clearly divided. He was preoccupied with production values, while I prefer psychedelic music that evokes an altered state of consciousness. I argued that psychedelic music cannot be too polished or it simply does not satisfy the complexity of a psychedelic experience. I never asked him if he had ever done hallucinogenic drugs, but I was not ashamed to admit that I have explored the inner spaces of my mind throughout the years with LSD and psilocybin mushrooms.

Once I shared this information with him, he resorted to clumsy personal attacks against me to reinforce his intellectual superiority. These attacks included “Your drug use makes you think Amon Düül II are better than the Beatles, but they’re just a jam band and can be considered pop rock” and “Your ego is getting in the way of acknowledging the Beatles as the giants of psychedelia.”

His assertions about the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s, and “Revolution 9” are extremely laughable and remind me of conversations and discussions I’ve had with hipsters who condemn any music outside of math rock or noise rock or prog rock because it makes them so intellectually superior.

The narrative that psychedelic music began in 1967 with Monterey Pop, Sgt. Pepper’s, and the San Francisco scene and ended in 1969 with Abbey Road and Woodstock is an Anglocentric and extremely narrow perspective on psychedelia. In my opinion, the breakup of the Beatles and the death of the hippie dream at Altamont with the Rolling Stones in 1969 was simply the start of psychedelic music. The peak of psychedelic music unfolded in Germany in the early 1970s.

From the years 1970 – 1974, a new generation of young German musicians played psychedelic music (derogatorily nicknamed “Krautrock” by the American and British media) that was light years beyond the American and British bands of that era. Many of these German musicians preferred the term “kosmische musik” and “cosmic music” is a more accurately descriptive moniker (than Krautrock) for the albums released during this time.

Yeti is dark and Gothic, fiery guitar and gypsy violin madness, primitive and primordial tribal percussion, wild witchcraft. Florian Fricke and Holger Trulzsch of Popol Vuh experimented with electronics (Moog synthesizer) and African and Turkish percussion on In Den Garten Pharaos (1971) to create a deeply mystical, spiritual transcendence. Tago Mago (Can, 1971) moved into a completely different lyrical and vocal territory than the American and British bands because of Damo Suzuki’s chanting, improvisatory, incantatory singing that meshed with the relentless rhythms of bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit. Can encompassed electronics, funk, and world music. While the American and British bands typically did not get any more exotic than an inclusion of an occasional sitar, Agitation Free assimilated a diverse array of influences from their travels to Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, and Lebanon that bloomed like cactus flowers in their desert masterpiece Malesch (1972). Tangerine Dream embarked upon a voyage to the ancient pyramids, temples, ziggurats, rain forests, and subterranean caverns in the cinematic, epic, widescreen Atem (1973). Dzyan emitted an engulfing experience (Electric Silence, 1974) intermingling international and interplanetary soundscapes.

Disco and punk in the late 1970s and heavy metal, hip-hop, and new wave in the 1980s made psychedelic music recede into the shadows. However, psychedelic music re-emerged in different incarnations in the 1990s and in the 2000s/2010s.

The bottom line? The next time a hipster troll tells you that psychedelic music began and ended with the Beatles and tries to shove Sgt. Pepper’s down your throat, give him a high dosage prescription of German kosmische musik!

by Mark Lager

(Read all Vinyl Wankers installments here)