"Retro" tends to be popular in about a twenty-year cycle. So when I was a kid, the Fifties are in and we watched Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley on TV. When I was in college in the 1980s, the late 1960s / very early 1970s were in, and we wore tie-dyed T-shirts to parties where we played or listened to Hendrix, Led Zep, and the Who. Today I was talking to our summer intern, a talented and articulate person who doesn't remember the time before e-mail existed. He was born around the year I was joining my first newsgroups on the Internet, in the days before it was synonymous with the World Wide Web.
Back then, the Sixties music we listened to seemed current and relevant, but the times it went with, times of protests and love-beads and psychedelia, were historic. We could remember the tail end of that time (I remember sitting by a speaker as tall as I was, listening to "Let It Be" on the radio) but it was the sort of thing you hear your parents reminiscing about -- tales of a previous generation.
I've been realizing lately that the 1980s are as far back now as the 1960s were then, and by extension that in the 1980s the 1960s must have seemed like a recent memory to my mother and some of my older friends. Another way to look at it is that Jimi Hendrix is as far back in history now as big band music was when I was a kid. "Layla" is as far back as Oklahoma! was when I was in grade school. And yet Jimi is still cool. Eric Clapton is still playing.
That may imply that, though the pace of technological and social change has accelerated in the past century we haven't had any upheavals to rival the Sixties since. It's as if the magnetic poles flipped then and we've been adapting to it ever since. Or it may just imply that I'm getting old.
Posted by dichroic at August 13, 2004 08:36 AM