1967 is still with us
The Letter, by the Box Tops. Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane. Brown Eyed Girl, by Van Morrison. I Was Made to Love Her, by Stevie Wonder. Get On Up, a forgotten gem by the Esquires. For What It’s Worth, by Buffalo Springfield. I’m a Believer, Happy Together, Ruby Tuesday, Groovin’, it just goes on and on. And towering over them all, Aretha Franklin’s incomparable Respect.
These weren’t the exception: they were the rule. Look up the charts for any given week from the same year, and you’ll find at least a dozen classic tracks. This week 40 years ago, with the Summer of Love in full swing, the top singles included A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum, Carrie-Anne by the Hollies, Light My Fire by the Doors, Let’s Live for Today by the Grass Roots, A Girl Like You by the Young Rascals, plus Aretha’s Baby I Love You.
What, I wonder, will be the songs we remember from this summer -- next year, never mind 40 years from now? Umbrella, by Rihanna? Makes Me Wonder, by Maroon 5? Do You Know (The Ping Pong Song), by Enrique Iglesias? Every era has its share of clunkers -- Somethin’ Stupid by Frank and Nancy Sinatra was the seventh top-selling single for 1967 -- and there are lots of good bands around now, if you can find them. The difference is that in 1967 the good songs were all over the radio. And the good weren’t just good: they were great.
And 1967 wasn’t even a particularly good year! Dylan had had his motorcycle accident, the Beatles were traipsing around with the Mahareshi, Brian Wilson’s disintegration had begun, Elvis was lost in Hollywood. If 1967 gave us a hundred timeless songs, any one of the three previous years are good for twice as many -- songs that are still heard at parties, from passing car radios, and in countless TV commercials.
It’s traditional to dismiss this as so much Boomer nostalgia, or, among those too young to remember, self-conscious revivalism. Today’s music is tuneless, mindless, and unspeakably vulgar? That’s what people said about Elvis. But today’s music is tuneless -- deliberately so. And whatever else anyone said about Elvis, or the Beatles, no one said their songs lacked joy, or passion, or excitement, qualities that are as lacking from today’s music as, well, musicianship.
If some great music was once reviled, it does not follow that any music that is reviled is great. Cultural relativism is no more appropriate across time than across countries: cultures have peaks and valleys, golden ages and dark, and while only time will ultimately decide which is which, we are entitled to form our own judgments in the interim. If the Sixties are still with us, it may not be because of all those aging Boomers. It may just be because they really were better: the music was cooler, the clothes were cooler, the kids were cooler. Deal with it.
As, indeed, today’s kids may be doing. Some while back the Toronto Star ran a piece asking a class of Grade Fives to name their ten favourite songs. I glanced at the story, expecting to see Britney and Avril in heavy rotation. There was some of that, but alongside were Rockaway Beach by the Ramones, American Woman by the Guess Who, Three Little Birds by Bob Marley, Crazy by Patsy Cline, Layla by Derek and the Dominoes. These were 10-year-olds, but their lists included songs from every decade in the last fifty years. Imagine! It’s as if a similar class, interviewed in 1967, had said they were really into Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson.
It’s possible they got all this from their teacher. But it’s possible something else is going on: namely, that kids today don’t see music in chronological terms, the way previous generations did. In the Boomers’ day, children and their parents viewed each others’ music from across what became known as the generation gap; music was indeed one of the ways in which the gap was created and reinforced.
Even within a single generation, music was expected to change and evolve along with the culture. Perspectives were short, as befits a teenager’s sense of time. As early as 1963, the Beach Boys recorded a song called Do You Remember? about "all the guys that gave us rock ‘n’ roll" -- seven years earlier.
But now? It isn’t just the generation gap that has collapsed: for today’s kids, time itself has been flattened, compressed into a single plane. Every era’s music exists simultaneously for them. The notion that some music is reserved for their parents, and some for them, must strike them as quaint.
The Sixties’ vast shadow is part of the explanation. But in part it is technological. This is the first generation to be able to listen to the previous generation’s music in more or less the same form, and with the same sound quality, as their own. The same with video: old movies used to distance us by the use of black and white, if not by the graininess and jerkiness of the film. But a song, film or TV show from 40 years ago looks and sounds more or less the same today as it did then.
To listen to music from 40 years before in the 1960s, you'd have to put a 78 on a wind-up victrola. Even as late as the last decade, a song’s provenance could be reckoned by whether it was on vinyl or CD. Now it’s all digital, and all downloadable, from iTunes or hundreds of other sites. Today’s music, yesterday’s, 1958’s, it all sits on the same server, reissued and remastered, an infinite hit parade, eternity’s Top 40.
The result is a curious stasis in popular culture: everything is with us, at the same time. All of the music and cultural trends of the last 40 or 50 years now coexist alongside one another, rather than proceeding in sequence. Time was when everyone did the same thing together -- listened to the same songs, wore the same clothes etc -- and everything and everyone changed together, in rapid succession. The Beatles grew their hair long, so everyone grew their hair long; Dylan smoked up, so everyone smoked up. I can look at an album from the Sixties and tell you when it came out within six months -- three, if pressed -- just by the clothes and hairstyles.
But today, that's all been knocked on its side: mainstream culture has divided into thirty or forty different subcultures -- and nothing ever changes. There are kids today wearing long hair and stoner t-shirts, smoking pot and listening to Led Zeppelin, who look exactly the same as they did in 1974. There are punks, mods, hippies, the works, all looking much as they would have twenty, thirty or forty years ago. Again: It's as if in the Sixties there had been kids wearing striped jackets and straw-boaters singing through megaphones.
Once, we called these revivals. But revival suggests an attempt at going back in time. For today’s kids, that would hardly seem necessary.
7/21/2007
