“Man, come on. I had a rough night,” says Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski. “And I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.”

Immediately after this line is uttered in the Coen brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski, the Dude is physically removed from the cab he is taking home from Malibu — the beach community he has also just been kicked out of — while the Eagles’ 1972 hit “Peaceful Easy Feeling” trills from the car radio. It’s a plea that encapsulates the conflict at the heart of the movie: the aging New Left adrift and in retreat in George H. W. Bush’s America.

But it goes deeper than that. The Dude’s preference for the sublime, authentic sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival, whose album he loses when his car’s tape deck is stolen, draws a bright line between good and bad culture. It’s the hippie desire for transcendence — late 1960s rock ’n’ roll, in this case, instead of drugs — that makes him hate the easy-listening Eagles, a global smash-hit group that defined the sound of the 1970s every bit as much as Creedence did that of the late 1960s.