Why the 60's?

Last time I wrote about the importance of the Beatles in the history of popular music, and really I could have written much more.  I didn’t get into the fact that they were one of  the first popular music acts that actually wrote their own material as opposed to relying on professional song writers.  I could have talked about the haircuts, the clothing styles and outrageous comments in the press and, yes, the drugs (which shouldn’t be ignored), and this all could explain their social impact in the 1960’s, but I’m not sure that would explain why are they still so popular.   

When I was a teenager in the 1980's, none of my classmates listened to Jimmy Dorsey, or at least none that I knew of.  No one had a poster of the Andrews Sisters over their bed or went to school wearing a Xavier Cugat t-shirt.  In 1985 no one under the age of 50 was listening to the music of the 1940's and early (aka pre-Rock and Roll) 1950's.  Today the kids are listening to Lady Gaga (God help them), Kanye West and Katy Perry, but you'd be surprised how many tell me that they like the Allman Brothers Band.  At a Sunday Mass a few weeks ago a little girl, she couldn't have been more than 11 or 12, had a Let It Be t-shirt on.  It's an album released 40 years ago,  probably before her parents were born.  This could've been a fluke; maybe the shirt was on sale and it could have just as easily said Heinz 57 on it.  But the teenager who plays guitar at the 10:30 Mass has a Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon pin on his guitar strap.  There was a teen age girl who used to come to religious ed. in Chicago who wore a shirt with a different Beatles album cover on it each week.  One Sunday it was Revolver, the next it would be Abby Road, and so on.  I'd make a comment and she'd be shocked the I knew who the Beatles were.  The gap between the 60's and now is actually greater than the time that had passed between the 1940's and 1980's, yet people, really young people, are still listening to the music of Beatles and their era unlike previous generations did with their antecedents.

So I’m left with the question, why the 60’s? I think some of it has to do with what I wrote about in an earlier post on the topic: that there is a romanticism attached to the age that has endured.   There is an image of freedom, liberation from oppressive social norms and a utopian belief in a better world to come that has endured.  As I also wrote, the impression in the immediate aftermath of the 1960’s was that the hippies had failed.  But the long term belief is that the 60’s generation did succeed in changing the world, especially in ending the Vietnam War (historically this is highly debatable).  Either way it is undeniable that the sixties, and one year in particular, 1968, changed the course of social history in the West, and the US in particular.   More on that pivotal year later.

My next post will be a total change of gears.  I turn my attention to Mexico, and the great suffering being experienced there right now.  Until then, I’m praying for you.  Please pray for the people of Mexico