Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Why This Band Plays On - New York Times
It's also true, though, that the sort of youth power that the Beatles helped awaken is simply no longer even considered. The cultural perspective that defines youth has changed drastically.
We've infantilized adolescents. We view them as children whose judgments are immature, who have to be protected from influences that may steer them in wrong directions - directions that may threaten decency or disrupt social authority. True, the same things were said about teenagers in the 1950's and 1960's, but part of our ambition was to dispute mores and intimidate hegemony. Today, the pressures against such instincts for adolescents come from both within their peer group and the culture at large. Teenagers now are themselves often the harshest critics of young nonconformists.
Meanwhile, watchdogs across the spectrum - from Bill O'Reilly to the Rev. Al Sharpton to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton - worry over the effects that rude rap or scandalous video games may be having on the young. And today's conservative mind-set stigmatizes the sort of insurrectionary voice that the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and others exercised in much of their 1960's music.
Last year, when R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, the Dixie Chicks and others played concerts to promote a defeat of President Bush, their efforts were seen as a risky anomaly. It was as if songs like the Beatles' "Revolution" or Buffalo
Springfield's "For What It's Worth," James Brown's "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" and Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" had never filled the air in those years conveying a sense of political and generational transformation that, for a time, seemed imminent and irrefutable.
Maybe this sort of reflection seems too far a stretch from the joys felt on those warm nights in the summer of 1965. There's no denying that above all else the Beatles were fun; had they not been, they would not have enjoyed so much effect or such staying power.
But fun on the level that the Beatles managed to achieve - at least in those days - implied more than a collective, thrilling scream. We remember the Beatles for their music and spectacle, but we celebrate them because, when they stood before their American audiences in 1964 and 1965, we witnessed the social and cultural power that a pop group and its audience could create and share. From there, I guess, you measure how much we've learned, or how much we've lost.
We've infantilized adolescents. We view them as children whose judgments are immature, who have to be protected from influences that may steer them in wrong directions - directions that may threaten decency or disrupt social authority. True, the same things were said about teenagers in the 1950's and 1960's, but part of our ambition was to dispute mores and intimidate hegemony. Today, the pressures against such instincts for adolescents come from both within their peer group and the culture at large. Teenagers now are themselves often the harshest critics of young nonconformists.
Meanwhile, watchdogs across the spectrum - from Bill O'Reilly to the Rev. Al Sharpton to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton - worry over the effects that rude rap or scandalous video games may be having on the young. And today's conservative mind-set stigmatizes the sort of insurrectionary voice that the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and others exercised in much of their 1960's music.
Last year, when R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, the Dixie Chicks and others played concerts to promote a defeat of President Bush, their efforts were seen as a risky anomaly. It was as if songs like the Beatles' "Revolution" or Buffalo
Springfield's "For What It's Worth," James Brown's "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" and Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" had never filled the air in those years conveying a sense of political and generational transformation that, for a time, seemed imminent and irrefutable.
Maybe this sort of reflection seems too far a stretch from the joys felt on those warm nights in the summer of 1965. There's no denying that above all else the Beatles were fun; had they not been, they would not have enjoyed so much effect or such staying power.
But fun on the level that the Beatles managed to achieve - at least in those days - implied more than a collective, thrilling scream. We remember the Beatles for their music and spectacle, but we celebrate them because, when they stood before their American audiences in 1964 and 1965, we witnessed the social and cultural power that a pop group and its audience could create and share. From there, I guess, you measure how much we've learned, or how much we've lost.
