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| The 60's | | Date Created: Sep 27, 2005, 11:01 PM |
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Interesting Sam Allis article on the 60's in the Boston Globe. I have to agree with most of it including his conclusion about the music, "Remind me again who today is in their league?". My 22 year old daughter isn't quite as fixated on the Beatles as his but I don't think they'll be listening to the music of today 30-40 years from now.
Also it should be pointed out that "The 60's" really started with the Kennedy assassination or the advent of the Beatles and lasted into the early 70's with the fall of Saigon or Nixon's resignation.
I'm not so sure the 60's are overexposed or tiresome. I'd generally agree that the music (and maybe some movies) are all that was really great. The rest, as he points out, turns out to be largely mistaken, wishful thinking, and just wrong. Plus we're still paying for it.
That '60s show
Dear PBS: It's time to get over that decade
By Sam Allis | September 25, 2005
"IT WAS IN 1969 that Dan Hicks & his Hot Licks came out with their existential classic, ''How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?" The same could be said for that decade.
You can never really get rid of the Sixties. They're like teenage acne. Someone's always repackaging the March on Washington or Tet or Monterey Pop. There is zero new to say about those years, but that hasn't stopped PBS from unloading 10 hours of prime-time TV this week, much of it about the culture of that epoch, built around Martin Scorsese's four-hour opus on Bob Dylan. Let's see, we've also got the Beatles, the history of pop music and protest, and, my personal favorite title, ''The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation."
The great gift of the Sixties was the right to believe without appearing foolish or lunatic that anything was possible. But the further we get from those years the more precious they seem. It's hard to imagine a more self-indulgent decade. Or intolerant. You were either righteous or evil...
I cringe at our lockstep mentality about Vietnam and so much else. We assumed that, merely by mouthing lofty words, they were true... From the perspective of the new millennium, we can discern in those years the roots of the political correctness that courses through college campuses today...
If there's one thing about the Sixties that has stood the test of time, it's the music. Don't take my word for it. My 22-year-old daughter instantly got the greatness of Neil Young and Dylan and the Beatles. Remind me again who today is in their league?
That said, it's time to give the Sixties and its hagiography a rest. We could use some truth in advertising about it. Our obsession with the period is tiresome. It is, in marketing parlance, overexposed."
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