Yes, it’s another thread about the 1960’s. This one is based on Explore Like Dora’s slightly off-topic postings in this thread on the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and the later suggestion that it would be better discussed in another thread. So, here it is! Debate away, I’ll chime in with my $.02 later.
I was a teenager in the '60s, so I’m exactly in the target group Explore Like Dora mentioned.
You had to be there.
Just like you had to be there during World War 2, the Depression, the belle epoque, the Lost Generation and every other era, semi-era and cultural period.
I agree. You had to be there. Especially for the music. You’d hear something new, like The Doors, and it would be: Wow, no one has sounded like that before! Sure, a lot of it was silly, but there was just something in the air (if you know what I mean 
).
Culturally, the 60s were not in any way overrated. Probably underrated, if anything, because people tend not to look across the cultural spectrum.
Rock music is the touchstone of the decade. As a boomer old enough to have looked forward to the first appearance of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I’m highly prejudiced toward thinking that the music transformed American culture.
You can look at it two ways: current value and influence on the future. Any day after the Beatles - and most of the days before, for that matter - you could turn on the radio and hear an assortment of songs that today are considered classics and are by any standard catchy as all hell. What astounds me looking back is how easy it all appears to have been. Tunes just poured out of the creators.
The Beatles put out 16 albums in seven years. The Brill Building writers (check out Always Magic in the Air : The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era, by Ken Emerson) pumped out dozens of hits but hundreds of songs in less than 10 years. The teams who wrote for Motown were almost as prolific. Brian Wilson alone had to put out entire albums several times a year, yet could casually turn out hits for Jan and Dean and even write the one true great rock Christmas single (Little St. Nick/Man with All the Toys).
As for influence, almost all music today is an outgrowth of the creative surge powered by the Beatles. Rock has fragmented into a thousand categories, many of whose exponents decry all connection, but my ears tell me otherwise. Rock is the default standard for what music sounds like, and can be heard in genres from Jazz to Broadway.
The subject deserves a book, lots of books, but I just wanted to start out touching on it. The real point I want to make is that the creative uproar was equivalently good, if perhaps not as overpowering, in almost every genre.
1950s fiction had its virtues, as all decades do, but if you had told people then that 50 years later people would look back at the decade and pick out Lord of the Rings and Lolita as highlights they would have consigned you to a loony bin. In the 1960s, the good stuff exploded in people’s faces.
Blockbuster American novels like Catch-22, To Kill a Mockingbird, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest start the decade off by staring into the face of the American Dream like few other books had managed. The 60s saw rise of the modernists - Barth, and Barthelme, and Coover, and DiLillo, and Vonnegut. (Others got their starts in the 60s but wouldn’t become better known till later, like Pynchon.) Philip Roth fulfilled his promise through outrage in Portnoy’s Complaint. Outrage fueled the fiction of the decade: they were outrageous times.
Good as the fiction was, the nonfiction was even better. You cannot separate out the coming of the New Journalism (everything was New in the 60s) from the renaissance in magazine publication that allowed/encouraged/was dragged kicking and screaming to it. Esquire led the way, but close behind were New York magazine, and Ramparts, and maybe even the good grey New Yorker. Tom Wolfe was a founder, but so were Gay Talese and Michael Herr and Norman Mailer and, hell, just read Smiling through the Apocalypse;: Esquire’s History of the Sixties. It’ll set your hair on fire. That’s in addition to Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mailer’s Armies of the Night and Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and all the others. The 60s were the last decade that the magazines were a major art form in the U.S. and this came out of the nowhere of the 50s.
It’s getting late and this is getting long. If I get a chance I’ll talk more tomorrow about the New Wave in science fiction that revitalized the field, and the movie makers from Kubrick to Nichols, and the changes that occurred on Broadway and the rise of the new stand-up comedy and how new fashions made 1969 look nothing at all like 1959 even though that year is mostly indistinguishable from 1949 and maybe a dozen other arts.
The 1960s changed everything. Culturally, they are the most important decade for the vast majority of Americans alive today. (How many can remember the 1920s?) Rock gets too much attention, maybe. But the political side of the 1960s continues to overshadow the importance of the cultural side.
Overrated, indeed. :rolleyes:
And you can still smell it at plenty of concerts today. The spirit lives on!
In the 60’s television took off too. The 50’s had some great shows, comedies and drama. (I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, it is late.) The 60’s brought Star Trek, Batman, The Wonderful World of Disney, COLOR TV!, Saturday morning cartoons, and NET, the precursor of PBS.
If my hippy-dippy jam-band-listening, non-bathing, sloppy, dumbass intern is any indication of this, then God help us all.
I was thinking about how great the 60s were culturally due to the “What music were you listening to at 15/16” thread. I was struck by the fact that my friends and I had no back catalogue. Before 1963 you had to skip back to early rock from the 50s. A teen today can be a fan of any band that existed in the last 42 years, my friends and I were listening to bands that had just come in to being, the older “stars” were anethema.
Most of the people who are pushing the 60’s as the end all and be all tend to be those who lived through it. Sorry, but a lot of what made the sixties was kids with time and money on their hands who hand little else to do but chill out and think deep thoughts. Cool? Definitely! Deep and meaningful, I really don’t think so. Unknowingly being the final conduit from an agrarian to an urban society doesn’t make you any deeper or more profound than any other generation.
That’s pretty much a stereotype, Lochdale. The cultural revolution was transgenerational and brought together people with and without a lot of personal income. Parts of the changes were not particularly lasting or important and others led to a renaissance which continues to shape our lives.
I was 24 in 1967 – “The Summer of Love.”
Life was lived in day-glo colors back then.
I dunno, I thought it was all pretty overrated at the time.
Of course even at a young age I basically disliked all forms of music that were “age appropriate.” I was more into music written by men who had been dead for at least 100 years and typically more than that.
Oddly enough I did start to appreciate some of the rock music that came out in the later 70s. But in general I found the Beatles boring, I like music that is harsh and powerful, their music is more flowing and rambling. I recognize the talent, but I still don’t have a preference towards them or other musical groups who sort of were part of the Beatles “explosion” per se.
Personally the idea that the 1960s was some special time innovatively is one I dismiss. The 1960s was a period where music technology advanced, but the actual “framework” for a lot of the stuff that was released then had been in place for centuries.
There’s nothing new under the sun is how the saying goes, and in general that is true. The 1960s presented very little that was truly original or new, it just presented old things in new ways. Which to the casual observer is the same as presenting something truly new.
I’d say the '60s are overrated almost by default, since they’re the decade that’s been the most incessantly mythologized, analyzed, and praised in recent memory – mostly by self-congratulatory boomers themselves. (Ask their parent’s generation what they thought of the '60s culturally and you’ll inevitably get a different answer).
Do you rate a decade culturally by how much things changed in those 10 years, or by the absolute value of its cultural output? If you rate it just by how much changed, then maybe the '60s deserve top prize – but even there it’s hard to separate cultural changes from political changes. And even then, I don’t know as much about other decades to make an accurate comparison – did the '20s change things just as much (if not more) culturally than the 60s? The '20s saw (IIRC – don’t crucify me if I fudge this a bit) the flowering of the movies, including some of the best silent movies ever made and the development of sound; the broad spread of radio; women’s suffrage; the development of jazz music; the development of the American musical (Showboat in 1927); the Bauhaus; etc.
Based on the “absolute value” of its cultural output, I don’t know that the 60s were that great. The '70s are generally regarded as the better decade for cinema; there have definitely been better decades for television; from a layman’s perspective, lots of the art and fashion from the era seem downright silly today. Architecturally I can only speak to what I like, but lots of stuff from the '60s was horrible. (Something I’ve ranted about before, ;).) Back in my college-touring days it seemed that every campus had at least one plug-ugly cement monstrosity hidden away somewhere; the tour guide, when asked, would usually grimace and explain that the building was from the '60s. Everyone would nod sympathetically – no further explanation needed.
Music – yeah, some great stuff. Rock wasn’t exactly invented in the '60s, and the importance of rock in general is, IMO, overrated, but still, there were some great bands in the 60s.
As somebody who wasn’t really “there”, I have to agree that a lot of the sixties’ reputation is based on some people thinking that the most profound period of their own life was also the most profound period of human history.
We all like to have role models and I think people want the 60’s to be a “role model decade”. I don’t believe that any decade is necessarily better or worse than the other, as long as we don’t experience wars or depressions. Our lives are only limited by our imagination and I see that opportunities given increase in numbers as time goes by. Want to spend your youth wisely? Start a punk band, read russian litterature, teach yourself how to cook and how to become an independent person. Let the current decade be the best decade there ever was.
But, you know, still. Damnit if the french wave of movies of the 1960’s aren’t the most aestietically appealing films that have ever been produced.
+1 - again, I was just born then, so didn’t participate, but I think Exapno does a brilliant job laying out some of the basics.
Again - this is culturally we are talking about here. When I go through the decades, about the only other decades in the 20th century that might compare are:
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the 20’s - emergence of Jazz, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner (and Sinclair Lewis), ex-pats in Paris, flappers and bathtub gin. A huge cultural awakening in the U.S.
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the 50’s - post-war emergence of the U.S. as the true superpower (with the USSR of course). Mass-produced foods, big Caddies, the birth of rock n’ roll, the Beats. Basically a true U.S. culture - with homogenized Corporate Wonder Bread culture facing off against some big counter-culture and teen culture movements.
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the 60’s - all the exploration mentioned thus far
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'85 - '95 - the tail-end of the Arbitrage Greed 80’s, the emergence of rap/hip hop, Grunge, gaming as a viable mainstream form of entertainment, etc…
Of those, each has a claim on big cultural significance, but of them, I look to the 60’s as the most enduring, in terms of what was started and what still has currency today. Hip hop is clearly still huge, but morphing into something very different than it was then (just like Rock has evolved). Gaming is likely to take everything over, but isn’t there yet…
So, yeah, the ‘60’s. Is it tiring to hear aging hippies say “ya had to be there, man” and hear my parents say "I like the Beatles’ songs, but not sung by them - I like the Ray Coniff Singer’s version" - both grate on the ears…but objectively, a whole lot of stuff was happening.
Moderator comments: As long as this thread is kept on the topic of culture – music, movies, whatever – it’s fine here. Please do NOT take this into the political realm: if you want to discuss the political impact of the 60s, do it in a different thread in a different forum.
All agreed?
I was a kid in the 1960’s. Keeping it strictly cultural, HELL YEAH the 1960’s were overrated. An awful lot of what was on TV was shit, just like now, luckily since there were only 3 networks there an overall smaller quantity of shit. The movies were at an awkward stage where “Old Hollywood” dead and the rebirth of the 1970’s hadn’t yet happened. Good, locally brewed beers were in the process of dying out and canned national-brand swill was acheiving dominance. Same-same for soft drinks. The clothes were silly looking and synthetic “space age” fibers were all too much in evidence. Then there’s the music. Yeah, there were some talented bands and performers that we remember today. There was also a lot of just plain shit that everybody tends to forget when we look back. For every For What It’s Worth, I can show you several Abigail Beechers. On a more personal memory note, my recollections of the hippies are mostly of people who were dirty, needed a haircut, unemployed, and were drunk/stoned a lot of the time. When I see film from Woodstock, the first word that comes to mind is “hogwallow.”
I’d like to posit that, if anything, the 1970’s were vastly underrated as a decade of culture.
Rock music flourished in the 1970’s, taking numerous interesting directions. The singer-songwriter movement flourished, as did heavy metal and punk. New wave music was also born, and the roots of future alternative music were set in the soil.
The decade remains a great one for rhythm-and-blues. Great dance music was produced, and the first hip-hop and rap recordings were made. It was also an era when country acts still had vast crossover appeal, regularly hitting the pop charts. This would decline rapidly from 1980 onward.
Musical theater made a stunning revival.
The decade was a great one for cinema and television. Television drama and situation comedy were especially great. The miniseries format began to be explored in very exciting ways, and the first programs to be produced exclusively for cable television were made. This would become a very important trend later, obviously.
In culinary arts, cookbook sales and celebrity chefs like Julia Child began to make fine cuisine far more accessible. The most revolutionary event in this area was the Paris wine tasting of 1976, which had been rigged so that French wines could beat upstart American reds and Chardonnays. Instead, the American wines won in blind tests, giving California producers a huge boost and later opening up palettes worldwide to wines from nmany different countries and regions. This has led to a lot more good wine being available at much lower prices.
The evidence is clear that there was a lot more going on in the world in the 1970’s than just disco. The decade should not be routinely dismissed as a cultural dead zone.
…After a television interview at WGBH-Boston, the station asked Julia to try out a series of TV cooking shows, and The French Chef was born on February 11, 1963.@