Aeternal Flux II

    LOU REED, IAN CURTIS AND THE SEVENTIES ROMANCE OF DESPAIR   BY JON KROMKA          ‘Love is but a song we sing, fear’s the way we die’. The opening lines of Chet Powers’ peace anthem ‘Get Together’, unfolding in the diaphanous jangle of the Youngbloods’ 1967 version, conjures an ambiguous mood that some of us who were children of the 1970s remember as a prevailing climate. A stark dialectic is set forward in those lines that colours the rest of the song, undermining its rousing chorus, exposing it as a feeble plea to sustain a (largely imagined) state of grace that was already slipping through everyone’s fingers. It’s something felt better by us 70s kids than we were capable of understanding shifting social attitudes as countercultural moral imperatives turned into New Age platitudes and, by the punk era, despised hippie clichés. That’s why a historical overview such as Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed only tells half the story. By framing the decade’s collective