The picture above is of Times Square in New York in 1956, when Elvis Presley was a major star and the rock and roll generation were being created by the media of the time. Sixty two years later they have not gone away.
If you search
the TV and radio channels there are numbers of them devoted to the various pop
stars, bands and production and those that came along later. It seems that many
of the followers of musical fashion at the time are still plugging in their
hearing aids and cleaning their spectacles to tune in nod and shake away.
Go back
another sixty two years, see Music in 1894 in Wikipedia and you are the very
beginning of recorded music and the first moving pictures, silent for a while
to come, might be seen. There are no channels for these or for the music before
from the period, the originals are lost and can only be restaged, if that.
But the
activity was there and on a large scale. In the towns, notably the bigger ones,
there were an astonishing number of theatres and halls where the different
kinds of music and musical theatre could be seen and enjoyed, You could buy the
paper music etc. for your own home, but that was expensive.
It is very
like the divide you have been a period when some documents and materials have
survived to give a partial reality to their past and the other periods where
the best you can hope for is the archaeology and a few scraps of written
material. You can try to recreate on the evidence you have but this is theory.
Even then we
have to be very careful. What we are told was the life of the sixties and
seventies are very much what the media at the time liked to describe it and how
they wanted it to be, mostly because that is where the sales were. For most
ordinary people, life was, well, ordinary.
In the 21st
Century, how are we doing? We seem to be ruled by a self selected class of
media cum finance cum political people who want to tell us what we are, how we
should think and behave, what life we should lead, what we should buy and the
rest.
Meanwhile, as
we are so busy as all that we may not have noticed that a lot of our music and
entertainment seems to have entered a period of stasis, only flashier, noisier
and more shouting.
One of Elvis's
songs in 1956 was "How's The World Treating You" which did not make
it to the top and is now forgotten. But we can see it on Youtube if and when we
want.
Our grandson tried to tell me about life in the sixties because it was one of his school topics.
ReplyDeleteI had to correct him on one or two things but he wouldn't believe me until I reminded him that I'd been there and lived through it. He was astounded.