Why cultural "generations" are flawed

[Eric the Green]

(04-27-2021, 12:42 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: If "cultural generations" are about cultural (usually mass low culture) ephemera, then "generations" mean little. People cast off fads such as bad pop tunes and tired TV series quickly enough that such things rarely have lasting significance. Culture is often related to class and ethnicity, and the cultural traits of two people born in the same year, one attending an elite prep school and one living in a squalid slum, are likely to be very different. Most likely the culture of the child raised in a highly-structured environment that plans everything is likely to be more bound to traditions that change little.

The best of the pop culture (let us say much of the repertory of Viennese waltzes, ragtime, and the Big Band Era in music) are likely to resurface among people not having connections to the time. The cultural divide is often something like "before Chuck Berry", "around when Chuck Berry made his mark", and "after Chuck Berry made his mark". The better stuff has a tendency to be exploited as background in cinema related to history or fantasy.

In my case the pop culture left me... cold... in the late 1970's as it stupefied into disco and bubble-gum rock. Like most Boomers I found something else.

As you know, I think Mr. Brower you missed the highlight of pop, I say the all-time highlight of pop. I agree with your observations otherwise. Young people rave and fawn over pop stars and their "culture" and then either forget it or tune out everything that follows or came before it. But I might as well tell my story; why not? You make long posts too

Myself I was raised on classical music. My Dad was a radio engineer and built his own classical station. Ironically, later he sold it to a rock station called KOME, which became the flagship station of a nationwide network. I had access to lots of records through my Dad, and hung out at his station and heard the music there. I knew a fair amount. The grand tour was the Beethoven symphonies. It took me an amazingly long time to actually possess and hear them all, about 6 years. I was introduced to the Ode to Joy by learning to play the tune during my first piano lessons at about age 9. When I finally heard the Fifth finale, at age 11, it stirred my blood. I discovered it during a vacation trip on the way to Mendocino. The Sixth was my early favorite, at 6 years old, and it was only the most obvious way in which many of his symphonies attuned me to the beauty of Nature, which I concurrently discovered at Big Sur CA, and read about in lots of books too.

But when I got to be 14 and a half, I put the piano aside, which I had gotten pretty good at but got no appreciation for from my peers, and tuned into rock n roll on the radio-- on a station that my Dad used to work at and I had visited long ago. The waltzes, ragtime, Big Band era, Chuck Berry? They all pale beside the peak of the rock/pop genre. It's true that the pop music that meant the most to me came out when I was a teenager. But it was as if the composers and performers that created it, mostly born in the late 1930s and 1940s, were making music that fit the time and what was going on, both in myself and in society. And that was a key point. The music of the mid-1960s was not just the pop that happened to be the hits of the time; it came out of and expressed its time as fully as any music has ever done. It became the real cultural divide, and it has stuck and lasted and it became "classic rock." 

The songs I liked the best in this genre were naturally those that were most like classical music, even though the vocals were not always so great. But then, I never liked opera either. The best songs had a great sound, were well arranged and performed, were melodically and harmonically brilliant, and had a great energy and groove too-- but so did Beethoven's Ode to Joy and his other works; he paved the way for rock in a way that would later amaze me. This music attuned me to Nature too, and my dreams of hanging out in the hills with cool girls and guys, and while listening I was envisioning a better world in which the walls between people were falling and life was free.

The Beach Boys and the Beatles and their imitators appealed to me first, in 1964. Then after a slow start, the Motown Sound became my favorite for a while. Then the intimacy and sophistication of the folk music revival came into rock in 1965. That led straight into psychedelia in 1966, in which the purpose of rock became to expand consciousness and represent the LSD experience. A bevy of great bands from the USA and the UK from then on developed rock into an art form through the late 1960s and early 1970s. As our boomer generation unfolded this new consciousness revolution, the second turning of our saeculum, I myself was awakening along with the music and the revolution, but without any LSD. I was very curious, and questioned what I had believed before from my heritage of math and science, of which I was a good student. In late June 1966 I asked the universe what was the nature of this "beauty" I experienced in Nature and Music, and the answer came back "Love." Even, my own. 

At that very moment The Byrds went to the top of my weekly list I was keeping of favorites. I was wondering if something would come along; things were slowing down after 2 years in which a favorite would always come along. I didn't even realize how completely the lyrics of that song, "5D Fifth Dimension", corresponded to what I was discovering. "I opened my heart to the whole universe, and I found it was loving." Then Petula Clark came out with "I Couldn't Live without Your Love," right on the same day that I went to see "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians are Coming," a movie about a Russian submarine stuck in a small American town, filmed at the very town my parents had taken me to 5 years before, Mendocino. I was in bliss, and the experience and the images stuck with me, as The Beatles "Revolver" with "Yellow Submarine" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" came out in early August 1966. Later that month I got Dad (who was grouchy) and the family to go up to Mendocino to see where the movie was made, and I was feeling good and bravado as I drove the car, which I had recently learned to drive, up and down the hills of Highway 1 and back home through the Oakland maze, driving my Dad crazy. After Mendocino we went to Clear Lake, where I pinched a boat and went out by myself on the lake, sort of like Jimmy in my favorite rock album Quadrophenia would do courtesy of The Who 7 years later. And my all-time #1, I recently discovered, was actually patterned after a Beethoven Overture, in its music and its lyrics. That was by The Who too of course, but on an earlier album from 1971.

My all time favorite list: http://philosopherswheel.com/ericrock.html

"In my case the pop culture left me... cold... in the late 1970's as it stupefied into disco and bubble-gum rock. Like most Boomers I found something else." That was me too, but the period between Chuck Berry and bubblegum music was the great moment. As bubblegum took over AM in the early 1970s, there was still lots of great rock music on my Dad's former FM station, the same one for which I had surveyed the grounds and laid the bricks back in the mid-60s. Then in the disco era, the late 1970s, the FM sound cheapened too, and I found something else--- back to classical music! And new age/ambient too. But this time my growing fascination with Bach and one piece in particular inspired me to take up an instrument and play music myself again. My piano lessons were a good start for learning the organ. But I still can't play all of that piece! Another Toccata, the famous one, I DID learn to fully play.

And something else that I went on to; in 1967 I took a look at astrology, and predicted where the planets would be in my chart. I mused that a great conjunction among the outer 3 planets must have occurred when I and my generation and many others awakened and felt those "love vibes" in late June 1966, and so it was-- exactly. The subjects of astrology and history opened up to me too in the subsequent years, along with deep spiritual philosophy, and later the fact that the 84-year cycle of Uranus corresponds exactly to the S&H definition of a saeculum.