Sometimes I wonder if artists are so attuned to what is going on in the culture and can intuit things even if they can't intellectually explain their intuitions.

You can feel in the rock of that era that they knew what was coming - a descent into despair, emptiness, nihilism. They may not have known the money was at the root of it, but they could still sound the alarm that something is profoundly wrong...and it's corroding our psychology.