Tuesday, September 2, 2008

peace train

I have a new friend who insists that I am a hippie. Which is funny to me because I don't think anyone else has ever come close to calling me a hippie before in my life. Yes I do drive a Subaru and I drink a lot of water from my Nalgene bottle but welcome to Utah. I don't smoke weed. Isn't that like #1 on The Hippie Checklist?

I still think the boy is off base, but loving Cat Stevens as much as I do, and particularly loving Peace Train as much as I do, probably doesn't help my case. I fell in love with it in jr. high when that song was on The War soundtrack (best movie ever by the way) and I'd listen to it over and over and over and feel really emotional...the peace train! Why must we go on hating?! Why can't we live in bliss?!! I felt that song with the fervor only a 14 year old girl can feel.

Since then I've been kind of fascinated with Cat Stevens the guy; that he left music right when he owned it, converted to Islam and dedicated his life to humanitarian pursuits. And since he started playing music again, it's been really interesting to see and hear the difference this time around compared to when he was young.

Give yourself 10 minutes, it's really worth watching both.




And yeah, I still furiously love it...

5 comments:

i i eee said...

Yeah... I don't think your new friend has ever met a real hippie before, so he wouldn't know the difference.

I mean, do you love crapping into a toilet with no rim? I didn't think so.

k8 said...

i love when an artist revisits one of their iconic songs. hearing joni mitchell sing "both sides now" today vs her original version. the meaning is completely different.

Greg and Jayne said...

Nice to hear maturity and increased depth in a very fine voice. I played that tape to death.

vfg said...

Emily! I so love that you just posted this. The old Cat Stevens CD that I played to death with my then-baby-girl 10 years ago (it was her favorite dance album, poor music-starved girl) found its way to our car just this weekend and we've all been loving it again.

Peace Train is my put-on-repeat choice (Nathan's is "Oh Very Young", and, yes, it does make him tear just a bit), and I've been a little sad, not thinking we made a lot of progress in the ensuing 40 years, as I explained a little about CS's life to my girls...but the hope still in him was very good stuff for me tonight.

Anonymous said...

According to Dan's "4 types of hippie" theory, you and he are indeed members of the hippie clan. He insists that the traditional 6o's no shave/bath, feathers-in-hair hippie is the most extreme of the four, but that there are three other less well defined types that evolved from that common ancestor. He also says we just don't have words for the different varieties. I guess it's like when you take a kid to the zoo and every primate (even the Gorilla) is a monkey. Hopefully, we will one day have a more pc word for the others and avoid such broad stereotypes.

He has thought about this a lot. He works at REI, the gathering ground for all four types. It's really just a front for his research.