Quickthink

This is the second post in a short thread about some cultural baggage that we carry around from the sixties.  Here is a link to the first post — it’s about becoming cool. 

So becoming cool is a great sixties storyline. It starts with loss. But where does the story go after that?  Stories from the fifties led up to a happy ending. Even stories that touch on moral ambiguity, like Rear Window, end happily. Good people lived well. Like Doris Day. They even died well, bravely and without a lot of fuss (as John Wayne would expect).

In the early sixties, you still see happy endings, for example in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But at a certain point, the sixties storyline challenged that standard.

I would argue that making that challenge was a logical step. If the story focus is “me” (becoming cool), then the ending should be about “me” too. Not some sort of morality play. We move from Doris Day to  “The Happening” and celebrate a moment of heightened engagement. One stepped out of time.

Just listen to Dancing in the Streets to get the idea. Martha sang, “Are you ready for a brand new beat?” Folks in the sixties were ready. And it was a wild beat, as you can hear from Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane.  If you feel a bit more soulful, how about dropping everything and heading to San Fransisco? Scott McKenzie did. Or just California Dreaming with the Momas and the Pappas. Just a few examples of stepping out of time, or as Lou Reed sang  Takin’ a Walk on the Wild Side. There are many, many more. It is an essential sixties storyline.

How does this look in film? The hip film, “Blow Up” is about a murder. Ir is it? The hit film, “Easy Rider” is about being free on motorcycles. Or is it? In both films, one can easily get lost in the events of the story rather than any sense of morality or learning about those events. And that was the point.

Was something gained? Freedom, of course. And what did extended freedom offer?`Well, asking that question misses the point. Sixties culture was about opening the door. It was less about assessing what would happen next. Thus the climax of the film Harold and Maude is about an act of freedom, not the meaning of it. Similarly, when Jim Morrison sang “you know that I would be untrue …” he fit into the scene rather well. Being free could also mean being free of shame or guilt. One was supposed to suspend judgments like that as long as the party lasted.

Not for the faint of heart. But like it or not, Morrison had a point. In this millieu, one has to accept the dark side. And BTW, you can pretend that you step out of time, but you really don’t. Time remorselessly moves on. And the more you celebrate being out of time, the further time moves on without you. The wider the disconnect becomes. And this leads us to the last great sixties storyline: the great hangover. I think Johnny Cash sang about that as well as anyone in his song Hurt. But Johnny’s lament was not the first. Traffic sang “Feelin’ Alright” back in  1968. While waking up, one might lament that the experience seemed unreal, as in The Windmills of Your Mind or in MacArthur Park. And for some, there was a sense of innocence lost, as Simon & Garfinkle sang about in The Boxer. One might say that these expressions of guilt or waking up to reality or lost innocence are about transcending cool. Coming back to earth.

So we have moved from becoming cool (She’s Not There) to being cool (The Happening) to transcending cool (Hurt). Great sixties storylines. I have argued that these stories still resonate today. In my last post in this thread, I will say a few words about that.

This kicks off a short thread on some cultural baggage we carry around from the 1960’s. Here goes!

Something happened in the 1960’s. For rather complex reasons, 1960’s culture was about rejecting things. Not building on what was before. But tearing things down and starting over again. This was not totally dissimilar from the 1920’s. But the youth of the 1920’s had a reason for their pique - rejecting the horrors of the war. What caused the break in the 1960’s?

Was it the Vietnam war? I don’t think so. The mass anti-war movement was a late comer to the decade. Anger about the war was consistent with the rejecting mood of the times. But I don’t think that the war started it. Something else was already percolating. What was it?

Here is my take — it started from an exhausted storyline. The second great war had been over only for five years when the fifties got going. And many of the storylines that you see in fifties media are still reactions to the war. The longing for home. For security and love. Honoring heroism and doing one’s duty. These stories fit the mentality of people who had lived through the war. They were part of their language.

But by the sixties, you have a new generation of kids growing up who were not yet born when the war ended. They listened to the storylines of their parents and couldn’t figure out what was the big deal. So you have a vacuum. A need for new stories. And I think this desire was at the core of the sixties rebellion.

I think you can see this new type of storyline emerging in The Zombie’s hit song “She’s Not There” from 1964 (video below).  On the surface, it is just another song about lost love. She’s not there — get it? But just beneath the surface, She’s Not There breaks with tradition. From the blues, love songs had celebrated how good things were before the break (Like - You Don’t Miss Your Water Till the Well Runs Dry). She’s Not There doesn’t do that. We find out in the song that “she”, whoever she was, was a liar. She hurt people. So this is not about lost love at all. Well … what is it about then?

It was about a new type of story. Instead of courage (stiff upper lip young man!) we focus on the emotion of loss (it doesn’t matter whether what was lost was worth having). Having experienced a loss, the singer now can wear a badge of honor. He has a story to tell and this makes him cool. BTW, this story was not totally new. The fifties gave us the rebel without a cause story line which was essentially the same thing. But those rebels were outsiders. As being cool became a cultural norm, the badge of loss became a mass phenomenon. The outsiders were suddenly the insiders.

Pop music turned loss into a fetish. From the Stones (Paint it Black) to Rod Stewart (Maggie May). The Beatles caught the mood with Yesterday.  Of course, who wore the badge of loss better than Janis Joplin?  Jim Morrisson took this theme to its logical conclusion — narcissism and nihilism (The End). Well, I could go on and and on. Loss as a starting point for artistic expression distinguishes the more romantic and pessimistic sixties from the optimistic fifties.

And how was this story used? Well, something had to happen to cool folks. Stay tuned for my next installment on the culture inheritance we have from the sixties. I will use a relatively recent song from Johnnie Cash called “Hurt”.  Here is a great video of Johnnie performing the song. Enjoy!