-or maybe the 1950’s were underrated.
I mean, is there an argument that it took more intellectual integrity to be a hippy than a beatnik? Not that intellectual integrity is everything, it’s just that its ultimately more significant than everything else.
Perhaps proof of this is a cultural movement’s vulnerability to evolve into a mere marketing demographic. This is what the counterculture of the 1960’s became, while nobody in their right mind ever tried to sell anything to the beatniks.
I disagree. A lot of the 60’s was just people with time and money on their hands. They didn’t have to go straight to work at 16 or 18 as they had grown up in a society of relative luxury. This gave people more time to focus on all sorts of things. In addition, the music business (and that’s what it was/is) had caught up with this generation and were able to package groups like the Doors etc. for easy consumption.
Again, I think the notion that the 60’s were somehow more relevant than other decades is being foisted on us by people who want to either relive or glorify their youth.
Remember kids…if you can remember the 60s, you weren’t really there! 
Culturally, the 60s stretch from 1963 or so until around 1974. In that time, everything changed. We were on a cusp, and for better or worse, we changed the world, or not. But yeah…you had to be there.
I read David Halberstam’s great book The Fifties last year, and I wish I had taken notes so that I could remember more specific things about what it said, but the basic thrust was that yes, the '50s were greatly underrated. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, the Kinsey report, the birth control pill, start of Civil Rights, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, Hugh Hefner, Elvis, Sam Phillips, Fellini, I Love Lucy – lots of great stuff from a supposedly boring decade.
But…rock music came about in the '50s. And how many of the developments in rock in the '60s are still so influential – or more influential than the developments of any other decade?
Anyways, that’s just music. Mr. Moto makes a good case for the '70s being underrated, and arguably more influential on today’s world. If I could time travel, I think I’d feel more at home in the '70s than in the '60s – in large part, perhaps, just because it’s a decade closer to the modern day. But in some ways I wonder if I wouldn’t find more in common even with the '50s than the '60s. That’s just conjecture, and maybe it’s a reflection of the relatively conservative cast of today’s society. But if I zipped back to the '50s I have the feeling the cultural climate (aside from any of the obvious political differences) would be more recognizable to me than the self-consciously counter-culture, tripped out culture I imagine from the '60s. Hmm. I dunno, maybe not…
We won’t be able to put things into perspective fully until the '60s generation has died out. But who knows, maybe their self-mythologizing will survive them.
Another boomer here, born in 1951.
Overrated? Let me echo everything Exapno Mapcase says and add two more words: Bob Dylan.
From the opening paragraph of Stephen Thomas Erlewine excellent biography of Dylan at allmusic.com:
“Bob Dylan’s influence on popular music is incalculable. As a songwriter, he pioneered several different schools of pop songwriting, from confessional singer/songwriter to winding, hallucinatory, stream-of-conscious narratives. As a vocalist, he broke down the notions that in order to perform, a singer had to have a conventionally good voice, thereby redefining the role of vocalist in popular music. As a musician, he sparked several genres of pop music, including electrified folk-rock and country-rock. And that just touches on the tip of his achievements. Dylan’s force was evident during his height of popularity in the ‘60s — the Beatles’ shift toward introspective songwriting in the mid-'60s never would have happened without him — but his influence echoed throughout several subsequent generations. Many of his songs became popular standards, and his best albums were undisputed classics of the rock & roll canon. Dylan’s influence throughout folk music was equally powerful, and he marks a pivotal turning point in its 20th century evolution, signifying when the genre moved away from traditional songs and toward personal songwriting.”
And this all happened between 1962 and 1966!
Overrated? No way!
Limiting myself to the subject of popular music, I was either not around or too young during the 60’s so I didn’t hear and experience things firsthand. Most of my exposure to the popular music from the decade (Beatles, Stones, Dylan, the Who, Hendrix, Motown, etc.) came long after the decade was over so my perspective of the time was a bit distorted. As a result, I developed the view as a teenager that the years from 1964 to 1971 represented a peak in popular music (especially rock) and that everything had been downhill ever since. I generally disliked most the music that came during the years I was in junior high and high school (1977 to 1983) and thought it was “dark age” in terms of popular music.
Since then, I’ve gotten older and developed a more balanced view on modern popular music. Sure, there was great stuff produced during the 60’s and I probably still have too many CD’s and tapes from the decade. But there was also music made during that time that would clear a crowded room in less than five seconds. There’s also been great music put out since then (including during the years from 1977 to 1983 that I inexcusably missed when it was new).
So, do I think the decade was overrated musically? A bit–but only because the people who came of age during that time just can’t seem to shut up about it. Still, as Exapno Mapcase pointed out in this post, the cultural changes during those years were far greater than anytime we’ve experienced since. For example, if you compare the music that was popular in 1958 with what was popular in 1963, the difference seems fairly slight. Yet, if you then compare 1963 with the music of 1968, the change is so abrupt it’s like hearing music from two different planets. If you then, however, compare 1968 with the music of 1973, the difference, while noticeable, is nowhere near as radical. Regardless of all the hype and misty Boomer memories, the impact of such sudden changes cannot be ignored.
Well, the one thing everyone keeps coming back to is the music. Maybe that’s the biggest cultural accomplishment of the decade. Exapno’s made the best stab so far at defending the decade’s output in other cultural fields so far, but I’m still not quite convinced. In film and television, at least, I’m fairly comfortable in saying the '60s (in spite of some high spots) were overshadowed by other decades; literature I’m not as familiar with. Anyone care to take up the baton?
Born in 61 and came of age in the '70’s, I have to chime in here to say the 70’s were completely lame. I think the boring 70’s made the 60’s look better by comparison. Damn, 10 years earlier I could have seen Easy Rider instead of Saturday Night Fever, Hendrix instead of the Bee Gees, ad nauseum.
I’m on deadline, so I didn’t post yesterday and I don’t have time for as long a post as I wanted today.
Without trying to make a case for every division of the arts, I think my point would be that the 60s are the first truly modern decade, the first decade that, looking back, we see as similar to the present day.
I already mentioned mainstream fiction and nonfiction. Obviously, major works can be found in any decade before or after. But the New Journalism and the nonfiction novel and ironic novel and identity novel either are invented or are fully developed for the first time in the 60s. You can find precursors earlier - nothing appears out of nowhere - but today’s literature, from the gay novel to the coverage of events by inserting the author, all stems from the 60s.
Does this apply across the board? I think it does.
Take comic books for an obvious example. Stan Lee reinvented the comic with the Fantastic Four in 1961. We’re still living in the Marvel Age of comics. Yes, DC started the Silver Age in the 50s, but Marvel changed everything. Today’s comics are their outgrowth just as today’s music comes from The Beatles, no matter how important 50s music was.
Mysteries were a dying genre in the 50s. The classic whodunit was collapsing into a hideous mangled corpse, with not even Ellery Queen at his peak able to invent new ways to express it. Mickey Spillane managed to drive a nail into the private eye novel even as he was selling 50 million copies of them. He didn’t have a second act, and neither did anyone else. But John LeCarre came along in 1962 with The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and made spy novels and suspense books and thrillers relevant worlds to explore. (Sure, James Bond was 50s, but he was male fantasy lacking all realism.) Three brilliant young British writers - Dick Francis in thrillers, Len Deighton in spy novels, and Gavin Lyell in adventure - wrote taut thin paperbacks that launched bestselling careers and many imitators. In the U.S. similarly, Ed McBain took his 87th Precinct books from formula to works of art and Donald Westlake reinvented the comic caper novel and the hardboiled crime novel simultaneously. From a dead genre, mysteries became the most popular mass market books in the country.
Though most people on this board worship 50s science fiction, that genre too was slowly dying. The collapse of the major distributor killed the magazine market (which went from about 46 to 6 magazines overnight) and the big name authors tried hardback novels with little success. The so-called New Wave, which featured the arrival of Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delany, Tom Disch, Ursula K. LeGuin, R. A. Lafferty, and new careers for Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and Michael Moorcock created a literary end to the field that is taken for granted today. The success of marginal and odd writers like Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle), Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon), and Walter M. Miller Jr. (A Canticle for Leibowitz) helped sf gain both respectability and sales. Good sf would sell books to a larger audience. This is what the field still looks like today.
I can’t agree that the 60s were a great decade for television. But the were the first modern one. Even though there were three-camera and one-camera shows earlier, all of today’s sitcoms came from either the three-camera, studio audience, home/workplace set-up of The Dick van Dyke Show or the one-camera, outside locations, dream sequences zaniness of The Monkees. Today’s tv does not look like 50s television at all. The structures and rhythms are all wrong. But 60s tv is completely modern to our eyes.
(You also have to include news as a genre. Remember that when Kennedy was shot, there were no 24 cable news channels - there were no cable channels at all in the modern sense. There were no all-news radio stations. TV news had just gone from 15 minute newscasts to gasp 30 minutes in September of 1963. People still got all their news from newspapers just as Jesus had. When all television paused from that Friday through Monday to run Kennedy 24 hours a day continually, without commercials, it changed television entirely and led directly to today’s patterns of coverage, for good and ill.)
Same with movies. Of course there were great movies in the 50s. And foreign films were far ahead of what the Hollywood studios were doing from the moment they got their industries started again after WWII. But watching 50s movies - and their counterparts in the early 60s - sometimes seems like viewing a more distant world than the totally artificial 30s movies. Mainstream Hollywood movies don’t get really modern until around the time of The Graduate. That’s why that movie is considered such a breakthrough.
I don’t think that this is all rosy-eyed nostalgia from someone who lived through the decade. In reality, while I was the right age for The Beatles and Marvel comics, I was too young for most of these other, more adult, genres and had to discover them a few years (or many years) later. I was also too young for Bob Dylan. He burst onto the scene when I was 11 and believe me, no one in those days in my neighborhood was listening to radical folk music. It sure didn’t get played on the radio either. I appreciate Dylan’s early years far more now than I did even in the 70s. He gets better as time passes, the mark of a true genius.
I mentioned the 20s earlier as the other decade in the last century that had such radical changes. But the Depression and the War kept them from taking hold in quite the same way. There’s been so such discontinuity since the 60s. We still live in them. Too much so? That’s something you can argue. Culturally, however, the power of the 60s has only intensified rather than faded.
But Post-Modernism started in the 1950s. That’s when Barth and Barthlemes wrote the novels that defined the movement. Coover really didn’t come into his own as a novelist until the 80s. Roth wrote five books in the 60s, and only one is remembered. Also, bear in mind that Portnoy was a crap novel. It was funny and outrageous, but it wasn’t much for being literature, and cannot compare to the Zuckerman tetrology, or string of stunning novels Roth has finished in the past decade. The 60s did produce some great literature, but no moreso than any other decade.
Also, the Beatles wouldn’t have the same impact they had but for Elvis. I think a lot of it goes to young people having the time and the money (relatively) to be able to justify the creation and distribution of certain types of music (much of it self-indulgent claptrap imho) rather than any cultural metamorphis.
Not true. Barth wrote the relatively traditional The Floating Opera and The End of the Road in the 50s, but his real success came with The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat Boy, and Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice, all of which were 60s works.
Barthelme put out no books at all in the 50s. His first works - the ones that made his rep, were all mid-60s or later: Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Snow White (1967) and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968).
Irrelevant. Coover, if he never wrote another word, would be one of the major writers of the century just for 1969’s Pricksongs and Descants.
All three writers put out major works of short stories, therefore, in the 60s, and it was these short stories far more than any individual novels that defined the new fiction of the era.
Well, he wrote three novels in the 60s, but he broke through with Portnoy, which is not a crap novel. Yes, he and the other writers here continued to write after the 60s, but that’s not my point.
And this is simply irrelevant to whether the 60s were overrated or underrated.
I’ve said all along that all decades produce great culture. The question that needs to be examined is whether important works were produced in a great variety of arts, whether they represented new forces in or revitalized those arts, and whether they were major influences on subsequent decades. The 60s have more claim to rank high on each of these criteria than any other recent decade other than perhaps the 20s, and the 20s are less critical to today’s culture than the 60s.
My brief take on it – between 1960 and 1970 I went from age 3 to age 13-- is in some ways yes, in others no.
Basically that decade was a social catharsis the likes of which we haven’t seen before or will likely see for sometime again. All of what is important about the 60’s grew out of this social thrashing with authority, repsonsibility, personal accountability, corporate (as in all of us together) responsibility still ripples through American Culture. In fact, I don’t think it would be an understatement to say that we are still trying to redefine ourselves in relationship to some of the questions and upheavals brought to us through the 60’s.
In the 60’s everything that was underground shot up like a mountain and cultures clashed (and continue to echo that clash). Everything we’ve done since then has been an attempt to put the pieces back together in a way that makes sense, and draws us together.
Some of the music, personalities, literature and lifestyles may be overrated, but the decade itself simply can’t be overlooked as a sort of cultural ground zero for America (and possibly Europe). Frankly almost every discussion we have about ourselves is refracted somewhat through the lens of the 60’s.
(Please note, I was not one of the “in” folks as a child or teenager, this is all my looking back over my shoulder as an adult and observer, not a participant)