Now we have finished posting Jon Pennington's terrific "The Most Influential Songs Of The 1960s" series (if you haven't read it, check out the tag of the same name), it feels as though there is ABSOLUTELY nothing to say about the 1960s anymore. I mean, we're done here, right?
More or less. The 1960s stand as a pivotal decade. The modern age may have begun with Einstein and Quantum Physics but its effect on the world only became clear in the 1960s, the same way Galileo lead the way to the Industrial age a coupla hundred years later. Musically, everything we listen to today with the possible exception of EDM had its birth in this decade so when Pennington writes about influences he means influences on today not on the 1970s or 1980s.
The Sixties was such a powerful decade that it overwhelms modern times. I mean, we don't even know what to call 2000 – 2009. The naughts? What sort of a name is that? And really, what we we have to show for it? File sharing and long lines at airports. Maybe women and gays became mainstream, the PC took over, and rap, pop and dance formed an unholy alliance. Rock and roll continued on a respirator. But it doesn't feel clearly nostalgic bound… nobody really thinks about it all that much. We are in 2013 and it is hard to see where the demarcation of the naughts actually occurred.
Look at it this way: in the 1980s Sixties nostalgia was in full effect but in 2013 who thinks about the 1990s. Indeed, it is hard to think of another decade with such a singular character. Even the 1940s, which included a World War if memory serves, doesn't have the cachet. Who wants to have been a teenager in 1942? But to have been 12 in 1962 (I was 6).
From the end of WW2 through the Korean War in 1953, the US was the closest thing to the happiest Kingdom of all (if you were white and make, mostly, still…), everybody was Frank Sinatra. The 1960s were both more realistic and more idealistic: there was music in the air at night and revolution in the air.
So what Pennington's overview reminds us is that we who lived through it and those who wish they had: musically at least, it really was that big. Now let's hope we can get Jon to do the same thing for the 1970s. A pretty great decade itself.