Wray Herbert wrote an impassioned piece April 3rd for the Huffington Post supporting the music of the 1960s as the best music anywhere, anytime. He mentions the great bands, the great sounds, the longevity of the legendary songs, and a psychologist from Cornell named Carol Lynne Krumhansl. Krumhansl studied how music affects and interacts with memory.
"To answer these questions, she took short excerpts from the top two Billboard hits from each year, from 1955 to 2009. She recruited a group of 20-year-olds, and had them respond to each song on several scales: Did they recognize the song? Did they like it? Did they have personal memories associated with the song? If so, was this memory from growing up and listening with parents? From listening alone? With others? Finally, what emotions did they associate with each song? Did they feel energized, or nostalgic? Sad, happy, angry?’
"For analysis, Krumhansl grouped these song samples into five-year periods, so that each of 11 periods contained excerpts from ten songs. As she describes in a forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science, she found that personal memories associated with songs increased steadily from birth to present day. This was not surprising: These music-evoked memories would presumably be part of the reminiscence bumps that these 20-year-olds would experience later in life."
"What was surprising was this: There was a spike in personal memories associated with the music of the early 1980s, and also a sustained spike in personal memories linked to music of the '60s -- the entire decade. Remember that these young listeners were born around 1990, which means that they're experiencing reminiscence bumps for music of previous generations. What do we make of these rich personal memories for music from before they were born?"
Herbert prefers an interpretation that those born in 1990 and later were sentimental about the 1960s music because "the music of Led Zeppelin and Dylan is better music, unparalleled before or since."
Summarized from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wray-herbert/is-the-music-of-the-60s-r_b_3007514.html?utm_hp_ref=science
Notes by the Blog Author
The great superiority of 1960s music? I just don’t think so. I hear, I sympathize, I identify with the music of the 1960s (having been born in 1951). But it doesn’t quite add up. It is easy to roundly and logically challenge this analysis.
My central criticism is aesthetic. Most of the 1960s music was sold to a set audience of teenyboppers carrying a predictable message to an easily swayed audience. As a grand, specific example, I offer Elvis Presley, the charming kid who sang in church and was managed throughout his adult career to sway the hearts of young women. When did he ever write a song? What did he ever do to rock and roll that he wasn’t already doing as a gospel singer or country singer?
Those who managed Presley used every trick of elevator music to keep him on top (see Lanza’s book Elevator Music, to see how advanced these techniques were by the end of the 1950s and how Presley was steered to take advantage of them).
The revolution of the 1960s, musically and aesthetically, was to overthrow Presley (and Crosby and Frank Sinatra) by demanding a singer-songwriter out, alone, on stage singing music he wrote and orchestrated himself. If I am to challenge the superiority of the 1960s, it is by saluting this revolution and honoring the time and names that did it.
The great American singer-songwriter was Hoagy Carmichael. As an old man, he was the favorite pop composer for rockers like George Harrison and John Lennon. Incredibly, Carmichael himself had a summer replacement TV show in 1971 in which he tried to do rock and roll.
What made Carmichael famous and world renown was one simple technical advance – live, coast-to-coast network radio in 1924. It also made a showboat coronet player, Louis Armstrong, a legend. Armstrong’s loud, precise, dead-on-key coronet was something Carmichael thought the whole world should hear. So a great talent could become a star by sheer network performance –without first winning neither a publishing house nor a series of Broadway smash hits.
Something else happened in the 1920s, something so obscure it was forgotten right away, a new kind of raunchy dance music played on broken down pianos – boogie woogie. It started out of Chicago under Meade Lux Lewis and Pine Top Smith. Pine Top even cut a record of his best boogie- and a singing boogie just before he died in 1929.
Boogie died! Meade Lux Lewis was washing cars to make a living in 1936. But the records were still out there. The big bands were growing and copying anything with talent they could get their hands on. By 1938 the big bands were reviving boogie-woogie. Black urban pianists took the art form back and advanced it through the 1940s. And in 1949 came the perfectly smooth singing piano player to croon his boogie woogie tunes on the radio – "Fats’ Domino.
So I nominate the period of 1924-1938 as the best music era – a complete and stunning revolution that ultimately created rock and roll (the most successful sub-genre of jazz) in the 1950s and 1960s.
It was a blast to be young in the ‘60s, yes. I remember. But the late twenties were the cat’s pajamas, incomparable, brilliant, and successfully defiant. Before you dismiss this argument, listen to the sixties playing tribute to the twenties – Etta James’s definitive version of Harry Warren’s "At Last." And Ray Charles’s ultimate version of Hoagy Carmichael’s "Georgia." And The Beatles playing tribute to Fats Domino (and ultimately to Pine Top Smith) with "Lady Madonna."
"For analysis, Krumhansl grouped these song samples into five-year periods, so that each of 11 periods contained excerpts from ten songs. As she describes in a forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science, she found that personal memories associated with songs increased steadily from birth to present day. This was not surprising: These music-evoked memories would presumably be part of the reminiscence bumps that these 20-year-olds would experience later in life."
Herbert prefers an interpretation that those born in 1990 and later were sentimental about the 1960s music because "the music of Led Zeppelin and Dylan is better music, unparalleled before or since."
Summarized from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wray-herbert/is-the-music-of-the-60s-r_b_3007514.html?utm_hp_ref=science
Notes by the Blog Author
The great superiority of 1960s music? I just don’t think so. I hear, I sympathize, I identify with the music of the 1960s (having been born in 1951). But it doesn’t quite add up. It is easy to roundly and logically challenge this analysis.
My central criticism is aesthetic. Most of the 1960s music was sold to a set audience of teenyboppers carrying a predictable message to an easily swayed audience. As a grand, specific example, I offer Elvis Presley, the charming kid who sang in church and was managed throughout his adult career to sway the hearts of young women. When did he ever write a song? What did he ever do to rock and roll that he wasn’t already doing as a gospel singer or country singer?
Those who managed Presley used every trick of elevator music to keep him on top (see Lanza’s book Elevator Music, to see how advanced these techniques were by the end of the 1950s and how Presley was steered to take advantage of them).
The revolution of the 1960s, musically and aesthetically, was to overthrow Presley (and Crosby and Frank Sinatra) by demanding a singer-songwriter out, alone, on stage singing music he wrote and orchestrated himself. If I am to challenge the superiority of the 1960s, it is by saluting this revolution and honoring the time and names that did it.
The great American singer-songwriter was Hoagy Carmichael. As an old man, he was the favorite pop composer for rockers like George Harrison and John Lennon. Incredibly, Carmichael himself had a summer replacement TV show in 1971 in which he tried to do rock and roll.
What made Carmichael famous and world renown was one simple technical advance – live, coast-to-coast network radio in 1924. It also made a showboat coronet player, Louis Armstrong, a legend. Armstrong’s loud, precise, dead-on-key coronet was something Carmichael thought the whole world should hear. So a great talent could become a star by sheer network performance –without first winning neither a publishing house nor a series of Broadway smash hits.
Something else happened in the 1920s, something so obscure it was forgotten right away, a new kind of raunchy dance music played on broken down pianos – boogie woogie. It started out of Chicago under Meade Lux Lewis and Pine Top Smith. Pine Top even cut a record of his best boogie- and a singing boogie just before he died in 1929.
Boogie died! Meade Lux Lewis was washing cars to make a living in 1936. But the records were still out there. The big bands were growing and copying anything with talent they could get their hands on. By 1938 the big bands were reviving boogie-woogie. Black urban pianists took the art form back and advanced it through the 1940s. And in 1949 came the perfectly smooth singing piano player to croon his boogie woogie tunes on the radio – "Fats’ Domino.
So I nominate the period of 1924-1938 as the best music era – a complete and stunning revolution that ultimately created rock and roll (the most successful sub-genre of jazz) in the 1950s and 1960s.
It was a blast to be young in the ‘60s, yes. I remember. But the late twenties were the cat’s pajamas, incomparable, brilliant, and successfully defiant. Before you dismiss this argument, listen to the sixties playing tribute to the twenties – Etta James’s definitive version of Harry Warren’s "At Last." And Ray Charles’s ultimate version of Hoagy Carmichael’s "Georgia." And The Beatles playing tribute to Fats Domino (and ultimately to Pine Top Smith) with "Lady Madonna."
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