How The Music Of The 60’s Influenced The Differences And Beliefs Between The Older And Younger Generation

During the Fifties, popular music was divided prominently along class and race lines. There were hardly any African Americans on the popular music scene. Popular music was thought to be very middle-class; the upper-classes were confined to opera and classical music. In the Sixties, however, those lines were blurred and a new one became more pronounced; one that divided society by age. This division caused two ‘sides’ to the opposition. The older generation, the "consensus era" of the 1950s, as John Davidson, author of Nation of Nations described them, "[the consensus era]…embraced the material benefits of prosperity as evidence of virtue of ‘the American way.’ And they opposed the spread of communism abroad…Ethnic lifestyles were less pronounced … Class distinctions were more pronounced." The younger generation, those of the "counterculture," as opposed to the "consensus era," embraced anti-commercialism, sexual freedom, drugs, and generally revolted against the conventions of society and politics as usual. Thus the society was divided, and this partition shone through in the music. Some musicians

The commercialism against which the youth rebelled so became an integral part of the popular music scene. Songs such as "Masters of War" reached the ‘Top 40’ list, and each of the artists who were supposedly anti-commercialism were making more than a hundred times the minimum wage at the time. As J. Davidson notes in Nation of Nations, by the late 1960s, "Much that had once seemed outrageous in the hippie world was readily absorbed into the marketplace. Rock groups became big business enterprises commanding huge fees. Slick concerts with expensive tickets replaced communal dances with psychedelic shows…Ironically, much of the world that hippies forged was co-opted by the society they had rejected."

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