Talking about My Generation

I hope you don’t mind me harping on about the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus again, but something important has come out of it, important for me anyway.  I am 53, and while I watched the Stones, The Who, et al doing their funky thing, in a circus tent back in 1968 (when I was only 9 years old) I couldn’t help but remember my parents when they were roughly the same age as me now, watching a TV programme featuring The Glenn Miller Orchestra filmed sometime during the war years. 

They enjoyed what they were seeing, and - I suspect – experienced a delicious frisson of nostalgia for their lost youth.  But I don’t think the music meant any more to them than that. 

My generation, which basically means anybody born between 1940 and 1970, have a completely different relationship to music than have the people who came before us, or indeed, the generations who came afterwards.  For us, music was a call to social and intellectual revolution and pushed an entirely different set of buttons than it did to other generations.

I cannot help but wonder why.  What was it about the music of the late-‘50s, the ‘60s and ‘70s that had that affect on people.  It’s not because the music made before or after was significantly better or significantly worse.  I, for example, still listen to and enjoy music from both before and after the rock and roll era, and I find that stuff from the late-‘80s, the ‘90s and even from the 21s Century still pushes the revolutionary button in my psyche.  No, I think it is something to do with the times, not the music that was made in it.

But what?  Why do I (and thousands like me) have a completely different relationship with music than do my younger friends and relations who often listen to exactly the same songs as I do? For example, my adopted nephew Max is as big a prog-head as anyone who has ever graced these pages.  But the music just makes him want to dance , or tap his foot, and doesn’t act as a call to arms. I really would like to know why.