Let The World Know: Swinging Blue Jeans, The: "Hippy Hippy Shake"

After great complexity and grief, something is needed to clear the mind, refresh the soul and encourage people to just let go and make fools of themselves; the world may be different now, but life does, indeed, go on. That the song makes almost no sense is almost a necessity (as Lester Bangs writes, "...rock and roll is at its core merely a bunch of raving shit, its utterly hysterical transience and intrinsic worthlessness the not-quite-paradoxical source of its vitality") and of course it's a cover version, pumped up on a desperate need for release. The sickness of "Hippy Hippy Shake" is something that doesn't need a cure because it is the cure for numbed-out grief, a positive sign of being ALIVE, dammit. Then, once the shaking stops, some people can go back to however they were, maybe a little abashed, perhaps. For some though, this is just the start of the high-octane Sixties, when anything goes. The Merseybeat boom is at its peak, about to take over the world, effectively. So why not dance?