To what extent is there too much emphasis on the 1960s in music history?

They don't. They try to ignore and undermine it as much as possible, but the impact and influence of Hip-Hop on Pop culture is too ubiquitous to be swept under the rug. There's people that honestly think it's destroying our country and having a negative affect on our youth. Seeing Taylor Swift rapping Kendrick's verse on instagram, Katy Perry featuring Rap artists on her singles, and Adele twerking probably angers them as much as the conservatives of the 50's who were outraged by the popularization of "Jungle music" aka Rock and Roll.

 

Influence is influence. When you hear the rhythms and the vocals in something like Korn, you near the impact of hip-hop outside of its own genre, for better or worse.

 

R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.

My boy Mellencamp nailed it on that sucker. It is a type of folk music that pervades the minds of people who want to meditate on wild things like love, blues, rocking, rolling, surfing, Beatles, cars, and music itself. It is an interactive and complex art form in that it stimulates the mind by way of the literate minds who penned the lyrics combined with that relentless and addictive backbeat. Rock certainly tackles subjects in a more aggressive and revolutionary way than the pop music that preceded it, even though the pop music recordings of the early to mid 1950s are a gas in their own right and certainly influenced rock through Johnnie Ray and others.

The electric instruments are on full display in rock, whereas they are not found as much in pre-rock pop. People like electricity with their music for some reason. Must have something to do with stimulating the brain, like with electric shock therapy. The combination of great lyrics with electric instruments is something to behold. Lots of power in those electrified pickups.

 

Why was that decade so important?

The 1960's produced the Grateful Dead.....'nuff said.

 

I've always been annoyed by the myth that nothing was happening in American rock n roll between Buddy Holly's death (or Chuck's jailing or Eddie Cochran's death etc.) circa '59 until the Brits showed up and saved rock n roll in Feb. '64... yeah, there were the Bobbys etc. but the frat scene in the States was smoking in the interim... the Sonics, Wailers, Kingsmen in Washington for one... or upstate NY... I'd put this up against ANYTHING coming out of Britain in 1963... recorded at the same studio where Freddie Cannon's "Tallahassee Lassie" was laid down a few years before...

 

the people who hold the 60s in such high regard are, for the most part older folks. it's ancient history to young folks.

 

Funny I was asking a early 30s fella what music he was into as he said the 70s were the best.
He mentioned...Hendrix, doors, Beatles, Pink Floyd etc. I told him they were all sixties bands and he was very surprised

sean

 

Young people I know (many, not all) are quite aware of the 60's and find it interesting. No different than when I was young. Some of my peers were interested in previous decades. Some not.

 

I think 60's band like The Beatles had a massive impact simply because they were the first band to be world known (the same goes with Elvis). Before that the only music available to the masses was the local music. In the 80's you had already so much choice : you could listen to pop, hip hop, techno, house, local music, world music, etc... the impact was diluted.

 

The Grateful Dead certainly dug it..
The Grateful Dead - The Grateful Dead (Debut Album, March 17, 1967 Re-issue) »

 

I don't know about "justified" but I think that the focus on the 60s as a reference point is because those in positions of power within the media institutions, not to mention a significant and influential part of our society's demographics (which translates into spending power), came of age during that decade. After we all die off, I think you'll begin to see a change.

 

Worth noting, millennials -- classified by the US census bureau as those born between 1982 and 2000 -- now outnumber boomers in the American population, 83 million to 75 million, and they are the largest generation in the American workforce.

 

There is absolutely no way someone born in 1982 is of the "same generation" as someone born in the late 1990s.

 

Not my category, but it's what the Census bureau uses....There's no consensus among demographers. You know it's always the way it is though, I mean I was born in 1963 which places me at the end of the baby boom, but there's not all that much I have in common culturally with people born in 1946 at the start of the baby boom. Nevertheless, there are more American 18-34 than there are Americans from 51-70, which would be the age range of baby boomers. And interestingly, it's not necessarily because of higher birth rates but because of high enough birth rates (and of course death rates of boomers) and increasing immigration, so, ethnically and cultural its a much more diverse cohort than boomers.

 

Darn. If only people could be categorized into neat little packages.

 

to what extent is there too much emphasis on beethoven and mozart in classical music ?

 

Yes, and whose classical music?

 

................make no mistake, I love the Dead.

 

This is some interesting reading: When Pop Broke Up With Jazz »

Seems relevant to the conversation we've been having here.

 

We went from Thelonius Monk to Felonius Punk!

 

It goes without saying, the 50s/60s were the golden age of
music, art, design and architecture no doubt about it.

 

A good friend of mine argues that the 50s were more important - Sinatra, the jazz greats, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard etc.
Personally, I think the importance of the 60s is being re-evaluated. The generation that lauds it is passing away. Media perception, social and other, of what is important or relevant has changed beyond recognition. It isn't relevant to today's generation (nor to the same degree is music generally).
I think the 60s will be evaluated much like the 50s. It was important. But it's a long while ago now.
I think the 70s is increasingly being seen as more important - the diversity of the early part of the decade from 70-72. And the new wave era of 77-79.

 

Its not that one decade or another are/were 'more important.' There is simply no objective measure by which to evaluate such a general concept, any more than a certain years span of a humans life is more important. Its all connected.

The 1940's and 60's had something no other decade did: widespread, rapid, dynamic political and societal upheaval and change. And for this the 40's and 60's will likely stand well above the others for a long time. The world that went into 1940 emerged a mere six years later a very different one: bi-planes & piston engines to jets, 10 second rocket flight to the guided ballistic missile, the splitting of the atom, top secret and 'black op' government agencies not accountable to governing bodies, advanced technology that within a decade became part of everyday life, the potential for thermonuclear armageddon. The 60's while not as overtly and internationally dramatic, and not as easily pigeonholed time wise, had widespread human rights movements which altered American culture and thinking and politics, the environmental movement, the mass exportation of western culture / politics into the non western world. That included a true widespread pop culture. A Coke machine in a dirt poor third world village became a reality. 1960's popular music was not some profitable entertainment commodity sold to teens by the 'establishment' -- but a perceptible cultural anthem - a soundtrack to the upheavals and changes. It cannot be separated from the times. By the end of the 70's pop music had become massively profitable and reverted back to a commodity embraced by various subcultures.

 

Actually I think the 1910s and 1920s, especially the years surrounding WWI had something similar, and saw an enormous outpouring of new and different art from the work of Stravinksy, to the work of the Vienese atonalists in music, the emergence and probably creation of jazz, to the emergence of cubism and dadasim and surrealism in the visual arts, and the great works of literary modernists like Pound and Eliot and Joyce and Andrei Bely, and the emergence of film as a new medium, and the geopolitical upheaval with the Bolshevik revolution and women's suffrage and the collapse of European imperial monarchies and the Ottoman empire, and huge technological changes like the arrival of the first commercial aircraft and the commercial emergence of recording technology and radio broadcasting, and the practical roll out of urban electrification and the arrival by '25 of electrical recording. I think the first 25 years of the 20th century may trump all other periods in the century for dynamic political and societal technological and artistic upheaval and change, and in particular those years from like 1910 to 1925.