The Starving Aesthete: 'Surrealistic Pillow'

Among certain segments of the hipster community, there has arisen a consensus that the world actually ended sometime in the '60s, and that the three subsequent generations have just been milling about the wreckage waiting for the other shoe to drop. In 1967, the undulating protoplasm of capitalism shifted from tragedy to parody, and a generation of promising young stockbrokers and gas station attendants left their posts and decided to sit in their closets staring at flowers for the next 50 or 60 years. Enough of them remained, of course, to keep society plodding along — but most of the intelligent boomers surrendered to the ennui that accompanies a real cultural solar eclipse, and buggered themselves off of the main stage. And when the circle rounds itself and our descendants experience that same moment of clarity our grandparents did, I give it even odds that blame for all of this is placed squarely on the slumping shoulders of "Surrealistic Pillow" (1967).

Jefferson Airplane’s sophomore album is so tied to the time and place of its creation that it makes it hard to discern the actual emotional content of the piece beneath the many layers of cultural contextualization heaped upon it. And perhaps this is as it should be; the album could not have been made anywhere other than San Francisco, nor at any other time than the Summer of Love. However, the external imagery of “angelheaded” high school dropouts dropping tabs to the tune of “White Rabbit” fails to capture exactly what that really means. 

In his cosmological magnum opus "A Vision," poet W.B. Yeats lays out a binary vision of world history in which the competing tendencies of concord and discord — of unification and dissolution — oscillate between peaks and troughs of supremacy. The more that individuals of a society are practicing one kind of thought, the less they are practicing the other, as symbolized by the phases of the moon. The '60s were the height of the last discordant wave — the point where the dissolution of cultural norms reached its maximum, the full moon which signified the apotheosis of critical, analytic thought — and "Surrealistic Pillow" is what followed.

The album is inconsistent, messy and generally listless, much like the interregnal period in which we find ourselves; but it presents a vision of a world completely opposed to the capitalist hegemony from which it was born. It’s a world too complicated and vast to provoke any response beyond reverence, a world in which ungrounded assertions must be made and actions taken in the face of one’s own ignorance, because the relevant questions are too large to answer. The album sifts through the remains of our values to find the few too resilient to dissolve under the grinding wheels of the 20th century, and from these fragments, it begins to create a new world of positivistic assertions. As a work of art, "Surrealistic Pillow" is the first tumble down the slope that faces us still and the first faltering step up the next rise. It will remain relevant until the gyre spins back on itself, and we once again find ourselves staring the fabric of our reality in the face. Give it a listen — it’s on Spotify.