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Music and Revolution in the Long 1960s

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JonSavage, 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), ISBN 978-0-57127-762-9 (hb), (London: Faber & Faber, 2016) ISBN 978-0-57127-763-6 (pb).
DominicSandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination (London: Allen Lane, 2015), ISBN 978-0-24100-465-4 (hb), (London: Penguin, 2016), ISBN 978-0-14197-930-4 (pb).
PeterDoggett, Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music (London: Bodley Head, 2015), ISBN 978-1-84792-218-2 (hb), (London: Vintage, 2016), 978-0-09957-519-1 (pb).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2018

ODED HEILBRONNER
ODED HEILBRONNER*
Affiliation:
[email protected]
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Extract

When discussing the relationship between popular music and social-political change in the long 1960s, historians and critics have tended to fluctuate between two opposing poles. On the one hand, there is Arthur Marwick's approach, echoed in Jon Savage's recent book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. In Marwick's cross-national survey, he examines social change in the West during the ‘Long Sixties’ (1958–72), when a ‘cultural revolution’ occurred in which protest music played a major role. On the other hand, there are Peter Doggett's and Dominic Sandbrook's observations that the top-selling albums of the 1960s and 1970s did not include some masterpiece by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Queen, or other leading figures in rock music, but rather the soundtrack of The Sound of Music. Sandbrook writes that it ‘projected a familiar, even conservative vision of the world, based on romantic love and family life. In a period of change it offered a sense of reassurance and stability, not only in its plot but also in its musical style . . . [T]hese were the values of millions . . . in the Swinging Sixties’. Doggett similarly points to the popularity of Julie Andrews and the soundtracks of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. These soundtracks ‘made no attempt to alter the culture or educate the listener’ he suggests, and that is why they have been relegated ‘to a footnote in the history of popular music’ even while being the top-selling records of 1965 and 1966.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , October 2017 , pp. 463 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2018 

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References

1 Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958–c.1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

2 Sandbrook, Dominic, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Little, Brown, 2006), 404–5Google Scholar. See also Heilbronner, Oded, ‘“Helter-Skelter”? The Beatles, the British New Left, and the Question of Hegemony’, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 13/1–2 (2011), 87–107 Google Scholar.

3 Doggett, Electric Shock, 8.

4 Hall, Stuart, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the “Popular”’, in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Samuel, Raphael (London: Routledge, 1981), 442–53Google Scholar.

5 Doggett, Electric Shock, 8.

6 MacDonald, Ian, quoted in Paul Gorman, In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press (London: Sanctuary, 2001), 41–2Google Scholar. See also Turner, Steve, Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year (London: Ecco, 2016)Google Scholar; Chapman, Rob, Psychedelia and Other Colours (London: Faber & Faber, 2016)Google Scholar.

7 Savage, Jon, England's Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber, 1991)Google Scholar.

8 Sandbrook is the author of Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Little, Brown, 2005); White Heat; State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974 (London: Allen Lane, 2010); Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

9 Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, xxvi.

10 Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, 426, citing MacDonald, Ian, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, 2nd edn (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), xiii–xvii Google Scholar. On art colleges’ ‘individualistic ethos’ see Frith, Simon and Horne, Howard, Art into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987)Google Scholar.

11 ‘Profile: Daniel Cohn-Bendit’, The New European, 16 January 2017, 6.

12 Groes, Sebastian, British Fictions of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 1–2 Google Scholar.

13 MacDonald, Ian, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (London: Fourth Estate, 1994), 1 Google Scholar.

14 Doggett, Electric Shock, 8.

15 Doggett, Electric Shock, 401.

16 ‘Lennon Remembers, Part Two’, Rolling Stone, 4 February, 1971. www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lennon-remembers-part-two-19710204 (accessed 20 September 2017).