This week, Jack and Bob explore how music and culture changed over the decades in the past 100 years. Do you identify with the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s - or all of them?
BTN Episode #3
What Decade Are You From?
So, as we go forward with this podcast journey, it’s probably a good time to set the cultural definitions of the “decades.” We all define ourselves by the decade we came of age in, but the decade that defines you may not always be accurate in a chronological sense.
We tend to define cultural shifts by decade: The Sixties were separate from the Seventies which were different from the Eighties. When someone mentions “the Sixties” our minds instantly conjure an image that represents our personal connection to the decade – regardless of how old we are. I see peace signs, granny glasses, paisley and my older brothers and cooler cousins orbiting the zeitgeist. I hear the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane and I’m not embarrassed to say this – the Monkees. I was a little, little kid in the Sixties, so that’s a fair memory for me.
But when did the Sixties really exist? To answer this we need to roll back forty years and look at how modern Western culture evolved. Prior to World War I, culture didn’t shift as rapidly as it did in the post-war twentieth century. I wasn’t there, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say 1830 wasn’t a lot different from 1850. For a host of reasons, the American Civil War and the Industrial Revolution started the rapid pace of cultural change. But rapid change didn’t really kick in until after World War I, so we can look at 1918 as the start of the Roaring Twenties.
The Great War was over, the Industrial Revolution had changed the face of society and leisure time was no longer the sole domain of the bourgeoisie. Young women were climbing out of the cultural double-standard. When you think of cultural pioneers, the young women born around the turn of the twentieth century who embraced the culture of Roaring Twenties were the first generation of women to turn their back on the traditional male and female roles.
With its Speakeasies, roaring economy and technical advances, especially in the areas of leisure and entertainment, the Roaring Twenties were quite the time. They also came crashing down on a specific date: October 29, 1929, the day the Great Depression started. That’s also the date the Twenties turned into the Thirties. Because of the drastic difference between the twenties and thirties, this is also when the perception of cultural shift by decade started.
For whatever the twenties were, the thirties were the horrible opposite. My father and uncles, who grew up in Elizabeth NJ, collected coal from the train tracks near their home to use for heating and cooking or to sell for additional income for the family. This was a commonplace thing. It’s interesting to note that culturally the thirties were also a pretty dull decade. Movies were a big thing because people needed a cheap escape from the misery of the outside world, but music was still a regional thing, divided by race and class. However, during this time, jazz, Country & Western, swing, blues and even rock & roll were starting to take the forms we’re all familiar with today. Although the thirties and the Depression technically ended several years before, we can generally think of the thirties as ending on a specific date: December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The US went to bed on Saturday night the sixth of December living in the thirties and woke up Sunday morning in an entirely different world.
Culturally, the Second World War was fertile. To this day a lot of the cultural things we call our own were first imagined. Jazz, by this time forty-years-old, had matured and spawned styles that crossed racial and class boundaries for the first time. Even though the Grand Ole Opry was now in its teens, Country music jumped out of the holler and was embraced around the country, thanks to radio. Jump, blues, crooners, and other micro-styles all found their places among the war weary. But the forties didn’t end in 1945. In fact, the forties didn’t end until after the Korean Conflict ended in 1952.
The fifties were ushered in by three things: television, rock & roll and the Cold War. At this point, the Cold War and the Korean War were nothing more than extensions of World War II, so the cultural fifties didn’t begin until after Korea was no longer a hot war. Culturally, the early years of the decade had no idea where they belonged. How Much Is That Doggie In the Window and schmaltzy pop music had taken over from Big Band, swing and real jazz. Rock & Roll changed that, but that didn’t really happen until 1954, and in the mainstream, which in this context has to have the double-meaning of “white society,” rock & roll didn’t happen until after 1955 and the release of the movie Blackboard Jungle with its signature tune Rock Around the Clock. Even jazz music went further underground with bebop and hipster music. Prior to that, rock & roll was purely underground music, disparagingly referred to as ‘race music,” because it was solely the music of black clubs and dance halls. The thing that took all of this art and put it before the entire nation was the radio, and to a lesser extent, the television.
By the early 1960’s, television became the driving cultural force and it stayed that way for the next forty plus years.
The fifties lasted from 1955 until February 1963, when the Beatles first appeared on American television. At the time, Europe, and in particular Britain, were culturally way ahead of the US, embracing rock & roll and the blues long before white America did. But once that power was unleashed in the US, it altered the entire country – and the world. And while rock & roll spoke to teenagers, jazz and folk music captured the imaginations of the post-college crowd.
The sixties brought about a cultural sea change. Musicians like Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the San Francisco scene groups crept into our living rooms and shocked mom and dad, while the Baby Boomers – the largest generation of humans in history, saw their own futures in the change. The sixties ended in May of 1971 at Kent State, but the peace and love sixties had been on life support since Altamont. In fact, the peace and love sixties were largely a sham – a commercial construct to appeal to the wallets of baby boom teenagers. In the early 1970s, heavier blues-based rock, early metal and Glam Rock nailed the 60s’ coffin shut.
Punk was the natural extension of glam with the added twist of spitting the harsh realities of the state of society and government back in our faces. Punk started in the US, but once again, the Brits made it real. Punk was never going to be mainstream – frankly, most of the music just wasn’t good enough to capture the attention of the masses. That doesn’t mean punk wasn’t important, it just means the folks who were only paying marginal attention were never going to be attracted to it.
The eighties were a time of great pop music, even if a lot of it was silly and hasn’t aged well. New Wave – the commercial step-child of punk – and synth rock ushered in the eighties. There is one often overlooked album, released in 1978, that bridged punk and New Wave while taking a stranglehold of the culture at the time. Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp! featured top-notch writing, stellar musicianship, and a chip on its shoulder that was impossible to knock off. At once a great punk album, a seminal New Wave album and a brilliant pop record, whether we knew it or not, Look Sharp! heralded the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties.
You might be wondering where disco fits into all of this. From 1974 until the mid-eighties, disco played a major role in music and culture, but after it rose out of the Gay clubs in Manhattan, it became more commercial than cultural. There was of course a disco culture and current genres like EDM owe their souls to disco, but just like the Beach Boys were great to listen to, Bob Dylan made you think. Disco was fun to dance to, but it was not a deep-thought genre.
The eighties lasted until September 1991. Hair metal became the silly offshoot of rock & roll, mimicking glam without the danger, and by the physical start of the nineties it was all bloated, boring and repetitive. Not unlike the musical culture today. When Nirvana released Nevermind, everything changed. Overnight. Corporate rock and roll was dead, hair metal was dead, MTV started to die and most importantly, Classic Rock was over. Plus, spandex on guys was seen for what it truly was – a cartoon version of fashion. There would still be some great Classic Rock albums, but as a cultural movement it was done, finit, over. The nineties were here and even though they were similar in feel to the eighties, a darker time was upon us.
The nineties ended on September 11, 2001. The digital revolution, most importantly Napster, had already started the nineties on its death spiral, but the end happened abruptly on that September morning, and a case can be made that the musical culture is still trying to figure out what it wants to be in the wake of that madness.
Hip hop owned the first decade of the twenty-first century, but sadly hip hop has been usurped in the general culture by pre-packaged pop music, mostly featuring pop divas whose talent at working out and taking selfies far surpasses their ability to sing. Add the reprehensible American Idol to the mix and all of the pretenders that followed, and there you have it, the death of popular music as it approached AARP eligibility. Hip hop is now corporate music at its worst, but then again so is Country, so no wonder older music is still so popular! We’re still a little too close to that time to look at it from a historical perspective, but at this point it looks like the first decade of the twentieth century was a longevity record breaker, lasting until March of 2020 and COVID.
And here we sit wondering where the culture will take us next.