What are the sixties

firefinga

Well-known member
The mythical 1960s were the greatest decade in the history of pop culture, all the rebellious music, drugs and free love and all that. At least, that's how the greatest generation ever, the babyboomers, convinced themselves and even more the music journalists to believe.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
The aftermath of WW2. When things are so thoroughly trashed that something new occurs. All the tech developed in the war turning their engines toward the consumers.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
Wanted to post something similar, namely: the 1960s - the last decade the working class (at least in the west) saw a significant increased income not only in absolute, but also relative terms.
 
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entertainment

Well-known member
as far as I understand, a lot of people were inspired by the free form of jazz and prose from the 50's to go and rethink how this whole humanity thing was set up. Heavily invested in the quest to humanise themselves and others, they had a hard time becoming satisfied with the ideas that the new way of thinking was diffusing and so the journeyed further and further inwards. When their new thinking could no more facilitate the apprehension whatever unexplored land they thought existed somewhere below or above them, they made up their own ontology and distilled their epistemology into the chemical formula of LSD. Somewhere on this tenacious adventure they woke up one by one in a sect hideout with an eerie hangover and didn't remember how they had gotten there. By this time, the whole thing sounded kinda silly and naive.
 

PiLhead

Well-known member
a conservative viewpoint

Christopher Booker wrote a book called The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English life in the Fifties and Sixties - it was published in 1969 and is well worth a look, despite - or rather because - his take is so unsympathetic.,

The overall theme is the idea of Sixties neophilia as a kind of collective national hysteria, a mass delusion, a mirage caused by the media that became self-perpetuating, stoking an appetite for shocks of the new and breaks with tradition... leading to an upward-spiraling demand for change that couldn't be satisified, short of revolution. It could only crash and burn into bitterness and disillusionment. Brooker is a persuasive enough writer that even a "Sixties fan" like myself began to feel like it was all quite insane. At the same time, you gradually become aware that his worldview is basically Christian - i'm guessing in the high Anglican tradition, moderation in all things, non-fervent. He views society as ideally homeostatic, things should change very very slowly indeed, and perhaps not at all. Things were better, people were happier, when everyone knew their place.... the right attitude to have is humility and fatalistic acceptance of your God-given lot, rather than striving to get above yourself or shake things up.

Curiously, Booker was a player in the British Sixties early on as one of the writers on That Was the Week That Was, so he was instrumental in the whole Sixties satire boom - that show broke ground in terms of its irreverence towards authority (e.g. David Frost for instance famously impersonated the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan - something deemed unthinkably disrespectful in 1962 or whenever it was). But by the time of writing The Neophiliacs, Booker has switched over to the other side and the satire boom is something he criticises.

But then he criticizes everything: fashion, the cult of photographers, commercial TV, the dissolving of class barriers, permissiveness, the Pill, feminism...

America gets blamed for a lot - rock'n'roll obviously, but also for the arrival of supermarkets in the U.K. And if I recall right he blames US influence for the liberalisation of gambling laws, with casinos opening in London for the first time. Another thing he doesn't approve of is James Bond movies: the glamorising of sex and violence (which Bond clearly enjoys).
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
the true believer, communal living, mysticism, pastoral, non-political, william blake 60’s:


the acid casualty, manson 60’s:


the americans being rubbish at psychedelia 60’s:


the urban, political, rioting, assassination, napalm 60’s:


the 60’s was made up by bbc 4 documentary producers 60’s:

 

firefinga

Well-known member
Popmusic wise the 1960s were 5,6 years of Beat, (Motown)Soul and Crooners (Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones). Around 1968, 1967 Beat/Rock (N'Roll) mutated into Psychedelic. Soul had an offspring mutating into Funk , and Folk got into the focus. Also, first prototypes of Glam and soon-to-be Metal have been launched. Additionally, there were the first Ska records to be found in the uk charts in the second half of the sixties.

In the early 1960s you had interesting but rather local phenomena like Surf or the Garage Punks, only to become popularized decades later via the Back from the Grave or Nuggets samplers.

IMO, the late 1960s had way more in common with the 1970s (up to the emergence of Punk and Disco) than with the early-to-mid 1960s.

 
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firefinga

Well-known member
The 1960s.... also the decade airtravel became finally a thing for the masses.

And the next step even looked supersonic!

 

firefinga

Well-known member
The 1960s also were the last decade assassinations of politicians (at least in the West) were successful: The Kennedy Brothers, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X
 
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