Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Teach Your Children,” released 41 years ago, was one of those tunes that seemed hopelessly corny when I first heard it, preachy in the worst hippie fashion.

As an 18-year-old flower child, CSN&Y’s Deja Vu was supposed to resonate with me—it did for most of my generation ( the album’s tracks wafted from open windows throughout Berkeley). But I was a flower child about to go to seed and their musical macramé left rope burns on what was left of my hippie dippy sensibility. I understand deja vu as a kind of compression of space and time, but when things move swiftly, stopping in your tracks to observe frozen, insistent memories is the very antithesis of what made the youth movement so vital—we were moving forward not looking back and certainly not letting deja vu trip us up. Had we been here before? No. It just feels familiar because it feels so fucking right.

CSN&Y seemed like a bunch of rich hipsters whose biggest concerns revolved around whether to cut their hair and self-doubt about their parenting skills. My hair was still long, would remain so, and all I cared about was screwing the chicks hanging out in Ho Chi Min Park.

Looking back, I figure CSN&Y, along with the wave of Topanga Canyon and Malibu longhair country-rock bands that followed in their wake, factored into why I was driven in the direction of Iggy And The Stooges and the MC5. For me, CSN&Y marked the point when the Sixties became too hopelessly self-referential, choking on its own patchouli scented vomit.

But fuck the past, right now this song and these guys seem very real and soulful to me thanks to this video. David Crosby and Graham Nash are looking forward and deja vu is now the middle space between what was and what is going to be.

Brothers, I salute you.

Still waiting for the “Street Fighting Men” and Mr. “Born To Run” to make the scene. Where’s the rock and roll 1% when we need ‘em?

The fact that you can’t have electronic pubic public address systems in Zuccotti Park results in an amplification system that is flesh, bone, blood and communal.