The idea that generational shifts happen in neat, tectonic fashion, bang-on the first day of each decade, is useless for encapsulating eras. So I’m gonna fix it. Well, at least the years between 1952 and 1982. Those thirty years were split into two parts, not three: The Fixties, and The Endless Bummer. The thing everyone calls The Sixties never happened.
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Now, the Fixties are often maligned as a cultural wasteland, mostly by people with rings in their intellectual noses. Well, the Fixties gave us Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and the atypical Dave Brubeck’s Take Five in the same year. Wes Montgomery was inventing smooth jazz right in front of your eyes. There was the birth of bossa nova. Broadway theaters were heaving with musicals. And they didn’t call it the Golden Age of movies for nothing. The industry had to compete with the television all of a sudden, and managed it just fine by giving much more to look at.
I wish I could write as well.
If you want another sample, try Hostile Workplace
It is perceptive. It is very much the transition I experienced. I was a Child of the Fixties up until sixth grade and 1965, but when I moved to a suburban school and learned that the currency was coolness in seventh grade, very quickly adopted an Endless Bummer mentality. My older siblings were disdainful, my younger brother copied me immediately. All are still locked in those positions. Only I tread uneasily across the boundary.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that the experience of the 1970s was one that people who experienced it more than I did (I was a child for about half of it) is one that they'd describe as 'Endless Bummer.' It was an era of phenomenal music in multiple genres that one was getting to hear for the first time. When I read stories people share from their lives it sounds like they were having a lot of fun, more than we mostly do now. There was a lot more physical activity, which kept people in somewhat better shape; there was a lot less obesity.
ReplyDeleteYet people don't seem to have enjoyed it very much. I wonder why that is?
Maybe it's a contrast between the enthusiasm and vigor of youth with the actual content of the cultural offerings. If you're young and strong and have friends, a little dreariness isn't going to phase you much. But after a while the culture starts to tell on you.
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