In Praise of Certain Youthful Naivete

87. SANDI THOM, "I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)"
Produced by Ian Brown; written by Gilbert & Thom
Hungry Dog/Legacy 03 2006 Did not make pop charts

Damn, do some people hate this song. I mean, really, really hate it. Try Googling the title and you'll see what I mean. The feeling seems to be strongest in the UK, which only makes sense since the single broke much wider there. But if you listened to some of these people, you would think that this woman is sanctioning genocide.

Listen, I get it. As you can probably tell, I'm an ex-punk, and I really do hate hippies. When you get right down to it, though, the thing that impresses me most about this lyric is the way it tries to yoke those two truly antithetical youth movements together, precisely because they have almost nothing in common. The bigger the dare, the more you impress me, and I love watching the specifics of this patently ridiculous pas de deux play out across these verses.

What most of the rabid antiThomians I've run across seem to miss about the song is that it's not just mindless ancestor worship. It isn't just another one of those everyone-in-my-parents'-generation-was-cooler-than-we-are songs. More like Smashmouth's "Walking on the Sun," this song is fully cognizant of the fact that many of those young rebels became old farts. Does it change anything when the heads of state play guitar? Well, no, as a matter of fact it doesn't, not for the most part (although Vaclav Havel's got to count for something, doesn't he?). It's not just that she missed the revolution(s). She has to deal with its decadent aftermath, and with the full knowledge as her own generation moves forward that subcultural rebellions sometimes change little more than style.

Plus I like the homemade percussion. On about the third hearing, I started thinking that that was the sound of barely suppressed rage being vented through the extremities so that Thom didn't blow out her vocal chords screaming in frustration. So apparently this time the hippies won. Who's up for a rematch?