Hair

More about the importance of hair, from the movie on that very topic. The musical Hair dates back from a time when having long hair genuinely meant something. Everything was a revolution in the sixties; music, hair, clothing.   Our anything-goes current condition is a result of that. I won’t get into deep political issues. One thing that hasn’t been the same since the so-called youthquake is how people dress and present themselves. It’s hard to imagine, but not that long ago, there were very strict expectations of how one ought to dress. According to status, according to age. According to everything. Hair is about the ending of those times when a long haired man or a woman in pants could expect to be denied service, barred from public places, spat upon, or infinitely worse. It’s about the freedom of a generation to draw the line on conformity and express itself. The fallout is the sight of middle aged fat people wearing shorty-shorts in public, but that in itself is a victory. When I was overseas (in Ukraine) a couple of years ago I witnesses a conformity of dress not seen in America since the fifties. Everyone was slender, chic and stylish, but everyone looked exactly alike. I breathed a sigh of relief landing back on American shores. Americans may not always dress well, but we dress to express ourselves, not to merge facelessly into the safety of a crowd. It’s only one of many legacies from a turbulent time. No wonder there’s so many songs about hair.

Good Morning Starshine

I once saw, in the days of print media when such things were much more impressive, this song topping some humorist’s list of the most terrible songs ever recorded. To be specific, this was in the nineties, the humorist was Dave Barry, and he dedicated several columns to exploring what the called “the issue of song badness”. In those days when most people still read their humor columns on paper, a column that someone had taken the trouble to type and publish still had some semblance of credibility, even if the author was Dave Barry. Personally, I loved Barry’s column and agreed with most of his opinions on song badness. But it was a little shocking to find a song that I’d always adored considered one of the all-time worst. With a little thought though, I had to admit, Good Morning Starshine is pretty retarded. Lyrically and musically it not only fails to reach the wit and thoughtfulness of James Rado and Jerome Ragni’s other work, but doesn’t even reach the high standards required by some of the lesser Muppets. But such objective critical question aside, it still somehow never fails to make me happy. Perhaps because Hair is such a great movie that anything associated with it is bathed in reflected affection, or because its own shameless silliness is inherently charming in and of itself, but Good Morning Starshine might be the best bad song we all love to sing along to.