Column: Music makes consciousness, makes History: ‘Rock’ and post-war youth
By Charles Jeanes
“Rock music has been more than just a genre—it has been a powerful cultural force that has shaped societies and generations. Since its emergence in the 1950s, rock music has influenced modern culture through its unique combination of energy, rebellion, and deep emotional expression.”
https://www.girlsrockcampfoundation.org/the-cultural-impact-of-rock-music-on-modern-society/
Introduction: popular music and generational culture
Can anyone say that rock ‘n’ roll was a musical form before the Second World War? I’m sure no one would assert that rock existed before 1950, because it is simply not the case.
Rock is post-war music, popular music of the young; it has not stopped being the music of Boomers as we got old – we individuals born after the war’s end to the early 60’s. But how can a music form with its cultural foundation among young people of the 1950’s, still be rock ‘n’ roll when the Boomers are old? It cannot be the same. Music must change, for the generations who make it and consume it.
Boomers have decades of pop/rock music now to give evidence of their culture, their particular badge. Will this music – now fractured into dozens of genres and sub-genres – die when Boomers have all passed?
There will be no rock ‘n’ roll after the Boomers have died and gone; our heirs will demand to make clear that an old generation has passed on permanently, and another is in power. Each generation since the war has wanted its own genre of rock. Every generation of humans has felt itself unlike its parents, and most likely, have felt in some ways superior – and each generation marks its unique identity with cultural signifiers, such as music, dance, and bodily adornment.
My purpose is to interpret relations between rock music, my generation, and the historical trajectory of we Boomers from childhood dawn to elder twilight. Our culture made history and our history made culture, and in all of that, our music sounded in the ears and minds of our enormous age cohort.
Our musical culture has been an effect and a cause all at once.
Elvis
Rock creates rock-stars. The outstanding First Founder of rock ‘n’roll super-stardom was Elvis Presley. (I am too young – born in late 1951 – to have fallen under his spell, but my very first 45 rpm record was by The King, Devil in Disguise.) Why Presley is a paradigm and icon of rock music fame is straightforward: he formed the mould of a rock god. His stage presence, his sexual appeal/ostentation, his turn to Hollywood movie-making, his sad slow decline in Las Vegas, addictions and pathologies, and his bad end, are the models of what male rock musicians ever after would riff on, each man with his own particulars but all Elvis-esque. James Dean was his peer, but with a better exit.
For me and other Boomers, Elvis and Dean set a high bar. He was what being free and eternally non-conformist looked like for us in our childhoods, and now that I am 75 years old, the recipe is unchanged. I marvel at the longevity of this image.
Rock is rebellious, and our parents worried about the challenge it represented to their authority over their children. Rock was connected to “delinquency” by 1950s observers of social behaviour. [ See https://www.furious.com/perfect/hallfame.html ]
Rock music was political from its inception, for the generation that made it and consumed it was certain of its power to make a better world – that is, ‘Better than the one our Parents lived in’
“Race Music”
What I most certainly did NOT know in my teenybopper innocence listening to pop, is that Elvis and his ilk had roots in music I’d never heard. In the US, the music was explicitly called “race music.” It is the music of black African Americans and it was political because blacks were not endowed with full civil rights in the US. America was an apartheid society in the twentieth century until the ‘60s.
Elvis had to be sanitized for white teenagers because he played music from across the racial divide, a fact unacceptable to American cultural norms. Black music was beyond the pale of polite society. So was sex: rock ‘n’ roll, after all, is a black American slang term for ‘having sex’. [See https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/the-history-of-the-term-rock-and-roll-part-3/ ]
Outside the USA, the racial context for rock was not so clear; I am one Canadian who had no clue.
The music of black Americans joined the mainstream after the 1950s, too. Motown, soul, funk, etc. A lot of money was to be made selling it. Black radical chic had a moment among young whites.
Folk makes Rock grow up
White Americans had their own political music with roots as deep as race music, with its concerns in American socio-economic reality. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were the stars of a tradition and historic heritage in the US that spoke for and to the Common People, the rural underclass, Depression-ruined farmers, working-class unemployed — generally the left-out of the American Dream, those whom Progress did not prosper. This stratum of “losers” protested, eloquently.
{*The tradition of Commons poetry and song-lyric that challenged the Ruling Class is ancient in English history. During the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, the serfs rebelling against feudal aristocracy had a brilliant Christian protest poem: “When Adam delved, and Eve span, Who was then, The ‘Gentle-man’ ?” The feudal Lords had their song: “The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, And ordered their estate. All things bright and beautiful, the Lord God made them all.”
Rule and Rebellion had separate cultures. https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/blog/2014/03/23/119-when-adam-delved-and-eve-span/ }
I knew folk music very slightly and was lucky enough at 11 years old to attend Mariposa in Orillia, Ontario. But my serious listening to popular music, white-teen rock ‘n’ roll, began with CHUM-fm radio out of Toronto, where I heard Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys, and Leslie Gore, my first idols.
Folk music was not rock music, everyone knew that in 1962. Until the two streams joined: the single outstanding figure in that merger was Bob Dylan, a devotee of Guthrie’s folk and unafraid of rock’s electric sound. Folk lost out to Rock as the music of the Boomers; “folkies” became an amusing sub-genre of pop.
But Folk made Rock socially conscious, its lyrics so often political rather than teen love stories.
Generational Divide: Beatlemania and “The British Invasion”
Full Disclosure: my love for rock culture was indisputably connected to my conflicted relationship to an authoritarian father of the old school of English paternity – ‘spare the rod, you spoil the child’. He and I were at odds from at least when I was 12, and his complete contempt for rock music made it irresistible to me. The Beatles and all they stood for became a battleground for the two of us. I lost our battles — but I won the war of course, once I was out of his house and chose my own culture.
In this I believe I shared an attitude with a majority of my age-peers. This was the Generation Gap. Since my dad was also very much a bourgeois Englishman – an ‘English gentleman of the middle class,’ not aristocratic — Dad was offended mightily by The Beatles. He saw decadence and cultural decline where I saw genius and freedom.
For the sake of completeness, I must list some words that indicate how much Britain was a massive ingredient in rock culture. Rolling Stones, The Who, mods, rockers, James Bond, Carnaby Street, The Avengers (TV show), Led Zeppelin, Twiggy, Marianne Faithful, bell-bottoms, hair, sideburns. There, I’ve checked some boxes. This is not a history, it is a memoir. Let those who understand, hear and appreciate the nostalgia; I intend my focus to be on music and the political culture that provided rock’s context for Boomers. As our music grew in importance to the economy, we turned to political activism.
“Movement” Music: Draft-resistance, Peace, Aquarius, Woodstock, Love, ‘Hair’!
If the Sixties mean anything at all as a political moment in American history, it must mean the abyss between two sides of the issue of America’s anti-communist war in Viet Nam. The anti-war movement inspired beautiful music, period. No matter one’s stance on the war and American “neo-colonial imperialism,” the music of bands at Woodstock was anthemic for my generation. Many adults were against the war too, and many young people supported old patriotism by NOT protesting.
But that war unified our music lyrics. US culture split at that time between conservative and liberal – and it never healed. I cannot hear much of the music of that time and not think of war resisters and race riots in America. Riots and assassinations shook each of us, and the Generation Gap between Boomers and parents was a real thing. The musical Hair is a tightly-condensed drama showing that gap.
1973
I was at university from 1970 to ‘78 and fully conscious of my place in the divide of culture happening then. Viet Nam treaty, Yom Kippur War, the Oil Crisis, and Nixon: 1973 is the year I earned my undergrad degree in History, crossed Canada in my “hippie van” and grew a beard. Boomers drifted into paths that would soon be obviously incompatible in politics. Was our music making us ‘One’ ? No. Music alone cannot overcome such differences.
[Please read this short essay. https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/07/years-of-hope-and-days-of-rage/ The meaning of the 60s is intimately fused with the music of Youth in that era.]
“Cultures at War” then and now
A minor but necessary tangent to my survey of the musical culture of Boomers is about the 21st century ‘Culture Wars’. I relegate this discussion to the Appendix; read it or not.
Metal: no politics, just loud rock
Led Zep, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple were the holy trinity of heavy metal in 1973, a musical sub-genre of rock with conspicuous lack of political content. (“War Pigs” by Sabbath was exceptional.)
I loved metal but I noted that we had lost something important when the anti-war foundation of our politics faded because the War was over in 1973. No one believed by 1975 that ‘The Revolution is at hand’. The Oil Crisis focused us on money. A new wind was blowing. I thought, if the Revolution did not come, our music would have a new unifier; the unifying glue never materialized. Instead we got: New Right, war on terror, Moral Majority, Gulf wars I and II, MAGA, and the 21st century Culture War.
Boomers grow up
For me, there are two Hollywood movies which book-end the political phase of Boomers and draw brilliantly-clear lines between the ‘ progressive’ peace-and-love, Age-of-Aquarius ideals of the ‘60s Youth Movement on one side, and the creeping transition into materialism and career-drive that took over my big generation as it got older. We entered adult realms — being over 30 years old, getting married, having babies, and pursuing happiness with material possessions and career – “settling down”. It was bound to happen. I just did not believe it would happen so thoroughly to so many.
These films are Wild in the Streets (1968) and The Big Chill (1983). And a very fine and famous essay by Tom Wolfe, The Me Decade, sums up the emergent late culture of Boomers with genius perception. { See for detail: https://www.theendlesssixties.com/foresight/ and links in the first Appendix. https://s-usih.org/2015/04/whatever-happened-to-the-me-decade/ }
We were becoming more like our own parents, although we would rather have created a new society based on our ‘60s Aquarian dreams. Well, some of us would rather do that. Some of us aligned with the hecklers in Valdy’s song cited above. (See also Appendix One.)
All through this transformation of Boomers — from wannabe-revolutionaries, peacenik-hippies, anti-bourgeois, quasi-Leftist, draft-resisting, long-haired, drug-experimenting, sexy Youth into middle age — music was playing in our ears: Its lyrical content was fracturing as cultural preoccupations evolved.
Disco, New Wave, Punk, Grunge, Reggae, Ska, Emo, Dance, Rave, House etc.
I am again merely ticking boxes by naming some of the obvious genres inside of pop/rock music between 1980 and 1999. From bands like the Cars, through Sex Pistols and The Clash, to Nirvana, our music never stopped innovating – and at each phase of invention, SOME latched on to the new — and some like me stayed with the old (in my case, Beatles, Led Zep, Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Robert Plant and Mark Knopfler.) At each new turn, younger generations took some Boomers along with them.
It is my conviction, which I will not buttress with argument, that all popular music was still Boomers’ music; our age cohort made the music, wrote its lyrics, and made it a billion-dollar business by buying it – first as vinyl, then cassette and 8-track, then CDs, and finally streaming. Music is a multi-billion industry now, it was not in 1950, and the Boomers made it so. Music is Big Business – hardly revolutionary! Younger generations did not have the motivation for politics like we’d had.
Boomers grow Old
And now here we are, Boomers, all of us over 60, most of us over 70, and our social, economic, political power waning while younger generations move into our places. No, we do NOT rule as we did in 2010. But still my age peers exercise power. But we are hardly socially insignificant, for we have a lot of wealth. We are still affluent, more so than younger generations, and our consumer choices still drive many corporate agendas.
The landscape of rock ‘n’ roll and pop music culture has shattered. Taylor Swift is the Queen of successful musicianship now, and she is nothing like King Elvis or the Beatles. She is a corporate engine in herself, and her concert tours are billion-dollar projects. [ https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/taylor-swifts-eras-tour-boosted-economy-by-46-billion-now-here-comes-her-movie.html ]
The cultural content of music in 2026 is far too varied to be summarized, and anyone who tries would look foolish in my opinion. There are four generations younger than Boomers, and only members of the so-called “silent generation” (born 1928 to 1945) are older, so no one should expect Boomer culture to dominate. Still, I will attempt some generalizations.
Culture, nurture, consciousness, and the course of History
Admittedly the point of this Arc has not been sharp nor its focus lucid. I confess I am trying to connect two very diffuse things – my generation’s culture and what ‘makes History’ – by reference to only one example, the music of my generation and the course of history in my lifetime.
I am interested in the facts of change in my lifetime for ‘my civilization’, Western bourgeois civilization, and how the music we have elevated to a major ingredient in our culture also made our History. ( See the Appendix for a fuller outline of my purpose; the Appendix will direct readers to sample studies of key periods of history. I read historians who have attempted similar projects – to connect a generation’s culture with a particular period of history – as for example Jacob Burckhardt writing about the generation of Italians who carried the Renaissance forward or Paul Hazard and the Enlightenment of Europe.)
Historians of the future, assuming there are any who still study History, will not agree on the significance of the Boomer generation. It is inarguable that there were a very large number of us in this age cohort; in the US alone, there were 76 million born into the Boom from 1945 to ‘64. [ See https://okayboomer.substack.com/p/just-how-many-baby-boomers-are-there ]
My feeble effort here is best undertaken by specialists who know how to link culture to history-making; I confess I lack the academic theory and research to do that here. A generation or two can generate decades, centuries even, of historical change, and Boomers have done that.
Conclusion: can historians be of service to understand the present?
I hope others will do what I cannot do, to put flesh on the bones of my hypothesis. But my purpose is to start a conversation about Boomer music and our history. I have been making a first sketchy outline of the way Boomers – and of course, I have meant people in the West who were born in the Boom, not in other parts of the globe – were narrating and interpreting history, history we made, with a musical lens.
There have been far too many individuals born in the Boom for any generalization to be valid for our cultural legacy, no doubt, but popular music made between 1945 and 2000 is still, I assert, one phenomenon, and can be unpacked to understand significant parts of Western consciousness and history. “Popular” music as we have known it is simply inseparable from the material facts of:
(1.) our sheer numbers in the West, and
(2.) the historically-unprecedented material affluence Western Boomers exercised. To produce music, to consume it as material (commodities and technologies), and to mould the world into the economics and politics we observe now, is OUR cultural contribution.
The absolutely skewed distribution of wealth among the individuals of our species has yet to reveal its meaning. The speed of change in the lifetime of the Boom generation is indisputable.
When Boomers have all passed from life, our musical culture will leave legacies – but without the people who made and loved the music, the genre will be transformed by new generations — as they have already been doing since rap and hip-hop left the old groove of rock 20-odd years ago.
What History did we make? Well, we are still making it. But I would suggest that historians will have at least this much consensus: in the lifetime of Boomers, the world was transformed again, and again, and yet again, due to technologies, economics, and political evolutions/revolutions that came faster, closer together, and led to an enormous increase in human population without a corresponding increase in an equitable sharing out of the material wealth humans create.
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Appendix: Historical Change where Culture meets Politics
- The Culture Wars
What are the culture wars about? To summarize, they are about the significance of the ‘60s. Were those years wonder-full, positive, full of promise, and fertile of great new advances in rights and freedoms? Or -were they dismally decadent and negative? Did the USA come apart then, never to be reunited?
As one writer has observed of the Sixties, “For some, it was a golden age of liberation and political progress; for others, an era in which depravity was celebrated, and the secure moral and social framework subverted.” (Arthur Marwick, cultural historian)
Take note of this fact: Both sides in the 21st century Culture Wars once listened to pop and rock throughout the Sixties; Boomers fight on both sides. We had a Generation War in the 60s, then our music culture broke apart and fragmented along fracture lines political, economic, and social.
The Culture Wars we see in 2026 are inherited from the divides of 1973.
Aquarian Age Eden was a minority worldview, as many Boomers did NOT groove on visionary vibes and loudly disliked psychedelic ingredients. In the words of a Canadian folk-singer, Valdy, we see how Boomers were splitting apart.
Don’t play me songs about freedom and joy
Play me a rock ‘n’ roll song
Or don’t play me no song at all.
I played them some songs about peace and contentment
The things that I’ve come to believe in — When I was through to a chorus of boo
Some track star yelled ‘thank God he’s leaving’Now someone play me a rock ‘n’ roll song!
I’ve had it to here, with your flowers and beads.
Boomer music, just like Boomer individuals, came apart. We were not one social Youth mass after War in Viet Nam. University youth was remote from proletarian life. Rednecks disliked hippies.
(See Eisenstein, Appendix 3.)
- The Boomer Generation and the Sixties
“No single narrative will neatly canonize Boomers or tie a bow around their time on earth. Whether they deserve it is beside the point. The conditions for closure no longer exist. They are wealthier and healthier than any generation before them, deeply embedded in political, economic, and cultural power, and often (understandably) reluctant to step aside. Their senior years are unfolding not in a confident, triumphant “end of history” America, but in a fragmented, strained, less trusting society already struggling to renew itself.”
https://jeffgiesea.substack.com/p/long-boomer-farewell
https://newcriterion.com/article/what-the-sixties-wrought/
“If the World Wars defined the first half of the twentieth century, the Sixties defined the second half, acting as the pivot on which modern times have turned. From popular music to individual liberties, the tastes and convictions of the Western world are indelibly stamped with the impact of this tumultuous decade. Framing the Sixties as a period stretching from 1958 to 1974, Arthur Marwick argues that this long decade ushered in nothing less than a cultural revolution – one that raged most clearly in the United States, Britain, France, and Italy. Marwick recaptures the events and movements that shaped life as we know it: the rise of a youth subculture across the West; the sit-ins and marches of the civil rights movement; Britain’s surprising rise to leadership in fashion and music; the emerging storm over Vietnam; the Paris student uprising of 1968; the growing force of feminism, and much more. For some, it was a golden age of liberation and political progress; for others, an era in which depravity was celebrated, and the secure moral and social framework subverted. The sixties was no short-term era of ecstasy and excess. On the contrary, the decade set the cultural and social agenda for the rest of the century, and left deep divisions still felt today.
https://www.commentary.org/articles/tod-lindberg/do-you-believe-in-magic-by-annie-gottlieb/
https://jeffgiesea.substack.com/p/post-boomer-world
NOTE Marwicks remark: the decade set the cultural and social agenda for the rest of the century, and left deep divisions still felt today.
“The Sixties, Mr. Marwick writes, prominently featured: black civil rights; youth culture and trend-setting by young people; idealism, protest, and rebellion; the triumph of popular music based on Afro-American models and the emergence of this music as a universal language; . . . the search for inspiration in the religions of the Orient; massive changes in personal relationships and sexual behaviour; a general audacity and frankness in books and in the media, and in ordinary behaviour; gay liberation; the emergence of “the underground” and the “counterculture”; optimism and genuine faith in the dawning of a better world. …which is to be contrasted with the Fifties, a dark, uncreative time whose “key features” include rigid social hierarchy; subordination of women to men and children to parents; repressed attitudes to sex; racism; unquestioning respect for authority in the family, education, government, the law, and religion, and for the nation-state, the national flag, the national anthem; Cold War hysteria; a strict formalism in language, etiquette, and dress codes; a dull and cliché-ridden popular culture, most obviously in popular music, with its boring big bands and banal ballads. Mr. Marwick is quick to add that “of course” a conservative would regard the Fifties quite differently. And he admits along the way that much of what was done in the name of the Sixties “was downright stupid” (the violence, the “mindless” drug-use.”
In 2026, it is unavoidable to consider Culture Wars in the politics of the USA. The division among Americans is profoundly tribal. Either you believe that on the whole the Sixties were a positive phenomenon, or you are just as certain that that is when America left the path of greatness. Reagan wanted to restore American greatness too, after the humiliating defeat in VietNam and the horrible memories of race riots, anti-war riots, and the oil crisis.
Boomers have split over their memory and reaction to the 60s, and our music has not united us.
- Two views from Charles Eisenstein: on The Dream of the ‘60s
https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/the-america-that-almost-was-and-yet-dea
“In the 1960s, it seemed to those in the radical counterculture that the Age of Aquarius was dawning, that within a few short years we would live in a world without war, without borders, without money. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Instead of the Age of Aquarius, we got the age of Ronald Reagan, the “me generation,” the War on Terror, continued ecological degradation, the moral, social, and political decay of the West, rampant depression and addiction, increasing polarization of wealth, deteriorating health, intensifying social division, and an accelerating slide toward a crypto-fascist totalitarian corporatist state which waves a progressive banner as it consolidates its control through technologies of surveillance, censorship, and narrative management.
Given the betrayal of the promise of the 1960s, it is no wonder that the term “New Age” turned into an insult.”
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/why-the-age-of-the-guru-is-over/
“So it was on a cultural level, that after the enlightenment and exuberant expectations of the sixties, much of the counterculture turned to the hedonism and consumption of the Me Decade. What a sense of betrayal we felt, as the psychedelic revolution gave way to the War on Drugs.” – Eisenstein
“Don’t play me songs about freedom and joy, play me a rock ‘n’ roll song, or don’t play me no song at all. I played them some songs about peace and contentment, things that I’ve come to believe in. When I was through, to a chorus of boo,
Some track star yelled‘thank God he’s leaving!’– now someone play me a rock ‘n’ roll song, I’ve had it to here with your flowers and beads.” – Valdy, 1972
- The Enlightenment Generations and a ‘new European Mind’
“Paul Hazard’s magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the process by which new developments in the sciences, arts, philosophy, and philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world, with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage. Hazard shows how travelers’ tales and archaeological investigation widened European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon’s new historical exegesis of the Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion.”
Hazard posits that a multiplicity of ideas and possibilities were slowly seeping through the collective consciousness of Europe. More and more, people see others unlike them and wonder how to account for the differences.
- The Italian Renaissance Generations and emerging Modernity
Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy stands as a seminal text in Renaissance historiography, offering a comprehensive analysis of the cultural, political, and social dynamics that characterized Italy during this transformative period. Burckhardt’s central thesis posits that the Renaissance marked the genesis of modern individualism, highlighting a distinct shift toward personal identity, secularism, and the complex interplay between man and the state. His work is not merely an exploration of historical events but a profound meditation on the emergence of the Renaissance as a critical rupture from the medieval past.
https://historycollection.com/the-civilization-of-the-renaissance-in-italy/
