THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
29 July 2008
The 1960s: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Second Generation
Rock provided the soundtrack during a period of social and political change
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
Few eras in American history have been as controversial as the 1960s, a period marked by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Popular music played an incontestable role in defining the character and spirit of the 1960s. The baby boom generation played a vital role in the political and cultural events of this period, and the boomers were a generation identified with rock ’n’ roll.
Three important trends emerged in the early 1960s. A new kind of social dancing, inspired by “The Twist,” gave rock ’n’ roll music a distinctive set of movements and social customs. Members of the first generation to grow up with rock ’n’ roll began to assume positions of shaping power in the music industry. And new stylistic possibilities for rock ’n’ roll began to emerge out of California, spearheaded by the Beach Boys.
Brian Wilson formed the Beach Boys in Hawthorne, California, in 1961. The band was achieving national chart hits within a year. Wilson was the first self-conscious second-generation rock ’n’ roller. He explicitly acknowledged his reliance on, and reverence for, his predecessors in the rock ’n’ roll field, by covering and quoting from their records. At the same time, he carved out distinctive new ground, by deliberately moving the lyrics and the music of his own songs beyond the territory carved out by his predecessors, into novel areas that were of particular meaning to him, to his time, and to his place in America.
If we were to conceptualize a defining model for the career of a self-sustaining, trend-setting rock group of the 1960s, it would look something like this:
• Start out by demonstrating a mastery of the basic early rock ’n’ roll ballad and up tempo styles;
• Create original material based on, and extending, those styles;
• Eventually branch out totally beyond the traditional forms, sounds, and lyric content of rock ’n’ roll to create something truly different and unique.
The reference point that most people would use for constructing a model like this would probably be the Beatles. But the group that first established this model, and did so with outstanding success, was the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys were in fact a clear, and stated, model for the Beatles, especially during the remarkably productive and innovative years (for both groups) of 1965-67.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
