Page of Aquarius

What can we salvage from the independent press of the 1960s?

Nov 22, 2024

Throughout the first Trump administration, my dad and I had a kind of a running joke. Every time I complained about the latest catastrophe, he would say, “Well, it isn’t as bad as 1968.”

That does seem to have been a rough year. The Vietnam War was in full swing. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were both shot dead. Protests tipped into riots across the globe, not least outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Richard Nixon, now our nation’s second-worst president, was voted into office.

So when an armed mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the first thing I did was call him up and ask, “Is it finally worse than 1968?” He reluctantly conceded that yeah, maybe it was.

As a late Gen-Xer, I find it endlessly entertaining to poke fun at Boomers. My entire generation grew up in the shadow of the 1960s. We were born too late to experience it firsthand but compelled to endure its cultural regurgitation across the decades that followed. The era’s reputation as uniquely disruptive continues to hold us in thrall, especially since so many of its survivors are still making money off it.

But as much as I might scoff, I’m not immune to the sentiment. Weird kids in the ‘90s had an abundance of past undergrounds to draw from - punk, the Beats, surrealism, New Wave - but the hippies and freaks of the ‘60s and ‘70s always seemed to represent the Big One, Alternative Ground Zero. They had the drugs, the music, the sex, and the will to get out in the streets and make noise. Their influence endured in the cultural monuments they left behind, many of which had been co-opted into the mainstream. It was such a rush to glorify the flower children and idealists that it was easy to overlook the fact that they ultimately failed.

I lived many years before realizing that much of this movement’s legacy was way more smoke on the water than fire in the sky. The ‘60s only looked like “The Sixties” to a relatively small group of people, an authentic core of which was surrounded by an Oort cloud of poseurs, scammers, and hangers-on. Most of America consisted of what the counterculture countered - Nixon’s Silent Majority, which, it turns out, was and remains a real thing. Outside of entertainment, the era’s real legacy has been as the catalyst for a rightward swing that was concealed beneath a sanitized, lopsided fable of rebellion that implicitly silenced dissent by saying, Hey! Rock and roll won! Now listen to the Stones on your Walkman while we systematically gut the middle class.

Between the recent election and the preparation of slips slips, I’ve been thinking a lot about what sort of authenticity we can squeeze from the legend of the ‘60s. Obviously there are still true believers of all generations trying to live their lives with the idealism that fueled the myth. But even the more skeptical among us surely must be wondering right now how we can combine art and community to create a fairer world immediately around us, in simmering defiance of the circus that will be trying to set the tempo from Washington.

One of the inspirations for slips slips has been the alternative rags of the past - small-circulation newspapers and magazines catering to groups that stood outside the norm, from local scenes to feminists to the gay community to Black Panthers. One of the early promises of our digital world was to bring such people together at greater scale than such modest print publications ever could - and it totally worked, until it absolutely didn’t. Print might be costly and limited in scope compared to the big ol’ Internet, but in an age of top-heavy tech giants whose futures depend on wringing various bodily fluids from angry trolls, these constraints suddenly look like an advantage. Algorithms are useful as far as they go, but when it comes to connecting with other people, there are virtues more powerful than convenience.

So, as I continue to bang the drum for contributors to slips slips, here are some images from a few of those bygone publications. Most of these come from a couple of books published in recent years - Power to the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter Culture, 1964-1974 (edited by Geoff Kaplan), and Free Press: Underground & Alternative Publications, 1965-1975, by Jean-Francois Bizot. I leave them here without context or commentary, as a glimpse at an inheritance worth holding onto.

It would be claiming way too much to say slips slips aspires to be an heir to this tradition. We’re not journalists, except in the sense that all artists record and reflect the world around them. But by creating a physical artifact that says loudly and clearly, “This is who we are, this is what we stand for,” we hope to slightly soften some of the hard, cruel edges that will thrust against us in the coming years. I suspect the reputation of the 2020s will be even more overwhelming than that of the 1960s - so let’s all try to get on the right side of it.

Page of Aquarius

What can we salvage from the independent press of the 1960s?

Discussion about this post