A rising tide lifts all boats. The generation of the thirties was lifted by the tide of the Boomers in all things. That was their advantage.
Culturally, they had a large audience in the Boomers which meant broad support for arts. Economically, they benefitted from the large cheap labor pool of the young Boomers who pumped gas for $1.10/hr. and throughout their working lives Boomers have paid (and paid and paid) into a Social Security system that gave the thirties generation generous benefits that the Boomers will never see. Managerially, that thirties generation was lifted into management positions by the hordes they needed to manage. Militarily, they took advantage of a large pool of draftable and expendable infantry. Did you miss that the Vietnam war got really hot when the Boomers reached draft age?
Demographics is destiny.
Yeah those boomers never managed anything musically.
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Though, granted, their main architect was born in 1944.
"The real force behind the 1960s revolution was a generation born in the 1930s and, to a lesser extent, in the early 1940s. We speak constantly about the baby boomers and the "Greatest Generation," the veterans of D-Day, but we rarely refer to the generation born in-between."
Wow! You've really nailed it!
Think of all the high-profile figures from the sixties and check out their decade of birth.
Here's a few: Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem, Abby Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Yoko Ono, Peter, Paul AND Mary, etc, etc. Every "hippie" leader was born in the 30s
It's just a theory, but perhaps this generation felt overwhelmed by the achievements of those who immediately preceded them, and so they decided, thus, to denigrate and deconstruct everything the "greatest generation" had accomplished.
To Dara: Led Zeppelin is "70s". Well, ok, late 60s too, but mostly 70s.
Sixties music is best represented by disks such as The Beach Boys "Pet Sounds".
I disagree. The Boomers were the consumers that drove the change--it was demand driven, not supply driven. What have the Rolling Stones done that is significant or an engine of cultural change in the last 25 years, without a young Boomer consumer base? On the supply side, it seems rock/pop music simply exhausted itself as a genre. Much like opera--we have not seen a great opera composer since Benjamin Britten, or a great symphonic composer since Shostakovich.
The in-between generation has not been a significant group of leaders. Look at US presidents. Members of th Greatest Generation (Kennedy to Bush Sr.) and then right to the Boomers, skipping a generation.
Look at the computer industry. Once the Boomers got in there, then things began to happen.
Ya, Cause a demand for greatness always invents it... We're talking people here, not products. You can't have an Einstein "supplied" just cause one is "demanded."
On the other hand, just what a shadow they cast! This is the generation that single-handedly destroyed 2000 years of western civilization, racked up a huge debt and refused to pay for it. And were followed by the baby-boomer mini-me's through the whole thing... I curse their very existence.
I tend to agree with the premise of this fine article but their are obvious exception...ahem...the four lads from Liverpool....I would put Lennon and McCartney up against Beethoven and Mozart and I am a person that appreciates classical music .....okay, mayby that's a bit of an exxageration but the Beatles were brilliant to be sure...
But oy....at least popular music wise.....it has been pathetic for a good 25 years really...I often thought that music videos were the real death knell for popular music...
I take your point on great creators, although Einstein would not be my example. The math for Einstein was in place once Hilbert and Noether had advanced Reimann's work and some physicicst would have come up with special and general relativity in the early 20th century. Eistein was not so great in that he could not accept quantum theory, on which he was dead wrong.
Similarly with the Boomers, they wanted fresh new music. Enough variety gets thrown against the wall and, with the influence of producers, sounds are developed to satisfy the market. Are the Beatle's Mozarts? Get real. The acid test is to look at what each did individually after 1969. Pretty slim pickings for Mozarts. Mozart continually improved. The progression from MAriagge of Figaro, through Don Giovanni and Magic Flute is remarkable for inventing romantic music (pathos over ethos) and for philosophical development (particularly Enlightenment political philosophy). Indeed, there is a profound evolutionary conjecture in Don Giovanni on will-to-life and sex drive, which Nietzsche picked up on. Mozart's genius ran in multiple levels. The Beatles? Yesterday is plainly great, but it is miniaturist work at best. I have a deep affinity for the Beatles' music, but I just cannot rank it near Mozart, or Wagner for that matter.
The full article is especially interesting on writers.
Mark
Ottawa
But Albertanator, what about all those performers who influenced the Beatles so heavily--who galvinized them, really, when they were still kids in Liverpool? Chuck Berry, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Gary US Bonds, etc.--all born between the wars. When you listen to the early Beatles, or the early Stones, or even early Springsteen, you hear an entire generation of blues and R&B performers behind them.
Posted at 2006-06-07 14:27:06 [PermaLink]Read the full article. Good point on the writers, but again the entire genre is in flux or without direction, recovering from postmodernism (as classical music is recovering from atonality). Further, the "artist" generation (as they are referred to in the Fourth Turning, which is a much deeper and compelling analysis) was churning out similar work through the 1950s, but they did not become a force for social change. Only when the Boomers came of age and gained social influence (in the mid 1960s) did the influence become significant. Thus beatniks (1950s)were an oddity, hippies (1960s) were agents of social change, or at least emblems of social change. So sure, the better writers in their mature stride in the 1960s who matched the geitleist would have influence.
I really don't think television has had such a negative effect. Boomers did not go into book writing so much. Spielberg, Lucas, etc.--they went into film. Ditto many budding composers. There is amazing film scoring out there--not much for symphonies, but superb classical music writing in film scoring. Film has also displaced live theatre as a genre that leads social change. Even the musical has been displaced by film.
I agree strongly with the point that cultural homogeneity pre-1960s was a major factor. Heck, we have not had network/cable TV in our house for over a decade.
In a real country, Marchand would be a household name.
Posted at 2006-06-07 16:55:16 [PermaLink]Marchand is typical Star--he confuses cause and effect. The pre-Boomers were like children dancing in front of a parade; they only appear to be leading it. Marchand's evidence disproves his thesis--why did the so-called leaders from the pre-Boomer generation (and 1943 is generally considered the first year of the baby boom) suddenly quit producing culturally influential work once the wave of Boomer-driven change had swept through? Answer: there was no longer a unified parade for them to play in front of.
Posted at 2006-06-07 17:31:00 [PermaLink]At least the Boomers are light years ahead of Generation X in music. (Not including the Boomers who inflicted disco music on the Earth.)
Posted at 2006-06-08 01:00:27 [PermaLink]I disagree, Murray. The tone, the parameters, the objectives, the policies and the goals that characterised everything about the 60s are the expressions of the 30s generation.
The people born in the late 40s and early 50s had absolutely no input into the "creative" decisions that marked 60s culture and politics.
When the women's movement began in earnest, for example, the leaders who set goals were all 30s born whereas their minions, and very naive minions at that, were only in their late teens early 20s. The latter were just bodies, grunt workers and nothing more.
Some will reproach me for saying this, but from what I remember of the 60s, the children of the late40s/early50s (my older siblings) appear more as 'victims' of various manipulations engineered by savvy older 30s born agitators, than anything else.
The 30s born crowd did fracture the culture and they harnessed/expropriated a whole generation in order to do so.
John, no doubt that much of the 1960s dynamism was lead by people older than the Boomers who were in their young 20s. However, none of the ideas in the 1960s were new. The women's movement, for example, was under way in the US since Stanton presented the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls NY in 1848. It was the Boomer generation (moalists by nature) that finally gave the movement full disruptive, dynamic energy. Recognition of equal rights of blacks was a significant issue since before the Civil War. It was the Boomer generation that finally gave the movement full disruptive, dynamic energy--not that the students were necessarily the agents of the movement, but their social dynamism make deep change within the realm of the achievable. The "artist" generation attempted their own "beat" movement in the 1950s, but were not a significant social force for change. Again, it was the Boomer generation that gave the movement full disruptive, dynamic energy. Generally, I find, ideas and advocates pre-date movements by years and they languish until the social conditions are ripe. Is there anything Marshall McCluhan came up with that Harold Innis didn't do earlier and better? Yet McCluhan is the "innovator".
Posted at 2006-06-08 07:31:22 [PermaLink]Murray, I prefer to put it this way; the Boomers put the flesh on ideas developed by the "beat generation".
They provided the demographics, but had no role in terms of creative input.
And you're correct as pertains to all the antecedents you've cited for the so- called "60s" movements. Social trends don't come out of nowhere; they develope in the shadows and when the time is ripe emerge and exert influence.
How about this--the boomers en masse put on the flesh (muscle) whereas an avant garde minority of the previous generation(s) put on the flesh (skin)? The social changes would not have happened unless the boomers were moralistic, rebellious and uncompromising by nature. Beatniks were a side-show curiousity that did not do much for social justice writ large, the hippy movement a transformative force.
Posted at 2006-06-08 14:49:55 [PermaLink]Well said.
As a matter of fact, your argument can equally be applied to other realms of boomer self-celebration.
Was the Civil Rights movement really a boomer phenomemon? It seems like the WWII and "Silent Generation" that you reference did most of the heavy lifting. Other than implementing a few campus speech codes and lionizing the Black Panther Party, I'm not quite sure what they're so proud of.
The same goes for cognitive freedom, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and others were already challenging social conventions on mind-altering substances long before the boomers embraced this issue. Indeed, perhaps the most high-profile individual on the marijuana legalization front was John Sinclair---who was born in 1941.