What Killed the 60s Counterculture Movement?

Having come of age in the 1960s, I can say from personal experience that it was the most vibrant cultural flowering of my lifetime so far, and it is not likely that it will ever be matched for breadth and depth. But it was as much a deep spiritual movement as it was artistic. The Beatles music began as highly romantic ballads and became increasingly spiritual as they innovated and grew into a world phenomenon. Other rock groups followed suit. Folk artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez made social justice and political reform their first priority over selling records. Yoga was popularized in the US during that period, which taught American youth how to begin searching for greater self awareness and, ultimately, greater enlightenment. And so on. I don’t need to elaborate as most of this historical information has been discussed in the media for quite some time.

A few weeks before the death of David Bowie I started thinking about when and how the movement came to an end. This aspect of the issue hasn’t been given due consideration as far as I know. My impression is that the decline began in the late 70s and gave out its last gasp in the early 1980s. Since then, we’ve had a mass entertainment culture that is more and more shallow and profit-driven. Anything that makes money seems to be the MO of Hollywood, the television networks, the record industry, and the major book and magazine publishers. Ironically, the emptiness of contemporary culture has driven the younger generation back to the 60s for inspiration. That’s a good thing.  But the negative side is that commercial interests on a mega scale are cannibalizing the 1960s counter culture movement for whatever will sell.

I believe there is general agreement that artists such John Lennon, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Glenn Frey (of the Eagles), David Byrne (of the Talking Heads), and Frank Zappa, to name only a few of the best, were dynamic forces who had a far-reaching and deeply lasting influence on popular culture, an influence that is unmatched by contemporary rock musicians. They all came of age and into their own when the music industry served art, rather than what it is today – art serving the for-profit industry. Today music videos and web streaming predominate, and the internet is an overheated, overhyped breeding ground for mediocrity.

Is it possible to reverse this trend? Is it possible for serious musicians to gain a foothold somewhere on the huge mountain of the pop culture media without compromising their artistic integrity? I’m doubtful, but I hope so.

A Hypothetical Question (Maybe)

The British physicist Stephen Hawking says the Earth is doomed but humanity will survive by moving to another planet. So the question is: If you could only take 10 books with you, what would they be? I doubt that I would want to move to Planet X, or wherever, so I would most likely perish with our home planet. But if I had to choose 10 books, here's my list:

Dante's Divine Comedy
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover or Women in Love
Twain's Huckleberry Finn
Tolstoy's War and Peace or Anna Karenina
Dicken's Pickwick Papers
The Bible
Whitman's The Leaves of Grass
Homer's Odyssey
Ovid's Metamorphoses

These books were a very tough choice, and no doubt I would revise it a few times before leaving. But my point is that I would never consider anything that was not a classic that had stood the test of time and my own enduring love. Would anyone with half a brain take a current bestseller?

This collective "Library in Space" could be the foundation of a New Culture.

Please add your own list.

AMERICA’S GREAT CULTURAL DIVIDE

I’m not sure what terms to use to describe the different groups on the opposite sides of the cultural divide in America. That the divide exists there can be no doubt. What to call them is not as important as acknowledging the enormous gap between what used to be designated as “high brow and low brow” culture.  Or should we say popular and serious culture? Is that more “politically correct”? In any case, let’s break it down by category:

Newspapers: The less said about tabloid and checkbook journalism the better. We all know what they are selling and why. Then we have The New York Times.

Magazines: Huge first group: Sex and celebrity gossip, fashion and luxury lifestyles. Scanty second group: National Geographic, Mother Jones, the Humanist, The Nation, Commentary, New York Review of Books.

Television: On one side, a plethora of reality shows, celebrity shows, talk shows, sit coms, and general fluff and nonsense. On the other, public television, BBC dramas, some serious in-depth interviews and journalism.

Movies: The vast ocean of entertainment is of course Hollywood movies. The small voice crying out with its head barely above the waves is that of some independent low-budget artistic feature films and documentaries. The auteur director Woody Allen is perhaps the only exception: he has managed to make consistently entertaining movies with psychological depth and witty social commentary.

Music: Pop music is everywhere and it all but drowns out jazz and classical. We have wonderful symphony orchestras struggling all over the country, we have Tanglewood and many other regional and local summer festivals of classical, jazz, blues, and folk, New York has the Metropolitan Opera as well as other opera companies, there are many small opera companies scattered throughout the land, and there are still many public radio stations broadcasting classical music, folk and jazz. And let’s not forget the concerts held at every university.

Theater: There’s Broadway looming above the nation with its bright lights and loud mixture of melodies both past and present. Broadway tends to dominate the theatrical life and consciousness of the country.  Opposing this are the many small theater companies of New York City that stage new work by emerging and established American and European playwrights. Every state in the union has a regional theater company, and some are thriving, some do quite well, most struggle, but none of them could survive on ticket sales alone and all of them are dependent on some form of sponsorship and expend a great deal of time and energy on fundraising. There are many fine college and university productions of the classics.

Books: The gargantuan commercial publishers of New York have swallowed up most of the serious literary publishers such as Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, Knopf, Random House, Atheneum, and Scribner’s. They stand like so many colossi astride the main river of book publishing. One great exception is New Directions, the house started by James Laughlin. However, we still have many small presses around the country, presses run by the blood and sweat of dedicated men and women who love literature and are devoted to its preservation at all costs – publishers such as Steerforth in Vermont, Coffeehouse Press in Minneapolis, City Lights Books in San Francisco, Melville House in New York,, and many, many others, as well as august university presses such as Yale, Harvard, and Wesleyan.

In conclusion, there has always been some sort of cultural divide in America, and no doubt there always will be. But never before in our history has culture been so polarized and the division so deeply entrenched. The mainstream or low brow or popular culture seems to grow stronger and bigger every day, perhaps because of the internet, while high brow or serious culture is weakened by the lack of big profits and seems to become more marginalized and in danger of being labeled as “elitist” simply by virtue of its appeal to a smaller and smaller segment of the populace. Yes, there are exceptions, as always and with everything – new generations of young people who study the classics, dedicate their careers to classical music or jazz, discover the opera, and follow young classical musicians on YouTube and in concert halls, but they are relatively few and rare compared with the numbers of fans and followers of popular culture.

America's Cultural Breakdown

 America appears to be on the road to cultural extinction, the eradication by public consent of culture of any true and profound value, that is. And if not total extinction, which is probably highly unlikely because of the sheer mass of popular entertainment material it produces, then surely it is in a steep decline and will undergo a profound diminshment. When a popular film critic died recently, the media exploded with eulogies. A day later a former poet laureate passed away and there was hardly a ripple in the news. When a man who writes about movies is deemed more worthy of media attention than a prominent poet then you know the mainstream culture is becoming more and more diluted and diverted into the shallows. Where are the deep currents of American culture that once flowed from the rich sources of the ancient past? Fading fast, I’m afraid.   

I wish I could be more optimistic. No doubt many intellectuals will dismiss my declarations as cynical at worst or curmudgeonly at best. Why can’t I be more positive? Because I have been a college teacher for 20 years at a wide variety of institutions and have witnessed among my students the erosion of multi-level thinking, the dismissal of both new and older ideas of great value, and the rapid narrowing of their perspectives. And they are the bellwethers, I’m afraid.

It is so tragically ironic that the young generation’s constant exposure to internet has not broadened their mental activity but rather made them less tolerant of carefully examining anything that does not fit into a preconceived format. And what is perhaps even more disturbing to me is that the internet has made complex human interaction and exploratory conversation a thing of the past.

The mass media has both fed into this mania and developed out of it. We have sound bites and visual snapshots. We have plenty of superficial information. We have crowd sourcing and mass thinking.  We have celebrity culture. We have tons of information. We have lots of noise and very little substance out there in Mass-Media-land. But America no longer has a genuine culture of true significance.  

NOTE: Ava Gardner said, speaking about herself, "Deep down I'm pretty superficial." Couldn't the same be said of American culture in the 21st century?

What is this blog all about anyway?

The general consensus among many American artists and intellectuals in the 21st century is that American culture is dead. When did it die? Hard to pinpoint the moment when it started to go bankrupt. The sixties saw a huge flowering of creativity, a tremendous surge of energy in all the arts. It peaked with the seventies and after came a precipitous decline. And then, by the end of the decade, the last gasp came. By the early eighties it was dead. So what's left, and how can we restore the health of a vibrant American culture? This blog will help to point the way by first diagnosis our current cultural failings and diseases.