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Born 1953. I've noticed this phenomenon. Ten years ago or so I noticed a lot of enthusiasm for the Beatles among nieces & nephews & the kids of friends my age. Beatles were a wonderful group of musicians, of course, but it struck me as odd that people their age would like them that much, or in the way they liked them. I subtracted the number of years between the Beatles Era & these younger peoples' times from, say, 1970 — when I was just about to graduate high school — & wound up in the Swing Era. Now, I like Swing well enough, but then, I like all kinds of music, & the thing is, when I was seventeen, I wouldn't have liked it, not the way these kids liked the Beatles. It would have been old folks' music, very uncool.
So why is this? Boomers no doubt grew up in interesting times, but all times are interesting, really. I don't think my generation was particularly special. For every charismatic angel-headed hipster in tie-dye & bells there were several crew-cut jerks waiting to beat him up, not to mention a whole crew of dozing neuters. Probably similar demographics will be found in all generations.
It seems to me that the difference which makes the difference lies with the media. The 1950s through the 1960s was when technology finally achieved wide enough spread & coverage that people could talk about a global village, all linked together by the media. But this media, largely, was sponsored by commercial interests. Commercial interests have their own agenda, which can be summarized as, first, run down the individual & destroy his or her self-confidence, followed by presenting the now-tenderized individual with a commercially-available alternative that "everybody else" likes, uses, thinks is cool. This moves the products off the shelves. The problem is, the commercial interests have very little genuine imagination. So they keep presenting variations on the "he's a rebel," "sensitive, misunderstood, alienated youth," "wacky but cool beatnik" stuff that was current when their first big media boom happened. Worked fine then, why change it?
Or it may be simply that those approaches do work really well. When I was a kid & bellbottom pants were in (for everyone, not just females as it seems to be today) we would get our mothers to split the seams of regular pants & sew in a wedge, making them flare. Home-made bells. Then manufactured bellbottoms began to be available, & soon, you couldn't sell anything but. What the commercial interests ended up with was several million individuals all expressing their individuality in exactly the same way. Sure made manufacturing simpler & increased profits. So they keep selling individuality by the container load, & keep using the alienated rebel meme that worked so well in the past, & which now seems to be permanently symbolized by, y'know, all those '60s images — protest marches, painted faces, dope smoking. Paisley.
Or — here's a little paranoia (another hallmark of the '60s) — maybe there's a concerted effort by the Powers That Be to strongly associate individuality, questioning authority, the unspeakable visions of the individual, with the '60s & the '60s only. That is, "Rebellion was fun in high school, citizens, but that was then. This is now. Get to work." And the phenomenon we're discussing here is an unintended side effect.
Or maybe today's romanticization of the '60s is due to the fact that there is one hell of a lot of unfinished business left over from then.
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