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July 8, 2004
Bruce Elder is celebrating the 1950s in the Sydney Morning Herald. it was more aboutr wild rock and roll than Robert Menzies. Elder says that:
'The zeitgeist of the 1950s was not grey, conservative conformity but technicolour rebellion. It was the decade when the profound changes, that had been created by the massive social, emotional and moral upheaval of World War II really started to take hold...In terms so clearly articulated by the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the old Apollonian world of "order, lawfulness, perfected form, clarity, precision, self-control and individuation" was being challenged by a new Dionysian world of "change, creation, movement, rhythm, ecstasy and oneness"'.
Rock-n-roll was the vanguard of cultural change in an industrial society with a corporate modernist culture:
Wolfgang Sievers, Photo of the Russell Offices, Canberra, architects Buchan, Laird & Buchan, 1962
Here is a good quote that I found here about the 1960s:
"Back when Chuck Berry was in jail, Little Richard back in church and Buddy Holly in heaven, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were needed to re-introduce Americans to their own music---American musicians imitated British musicians imitating American blues. British Pop bands revived the tradition of the songwriter/singer that had gotten lost between the cotton fields of Mississippi and the corridors of the Brill Building ....The best of the British bands offered a perfect balance of interpretation and innovation, juxtaposing a respect for diverse musical traditions with bursts of true originality (e.g. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band---a record that could only have been put together by a band that once played "Bsame Mucho" and "Twist and Shout" in the same set)."
Still rock music has to be located in context of a sterile corporate modernism:
Wolfgang Sievers, AMP St. James Building, Melbourne, 1970, (architects Skidmore Owens [i.e. Owings] & Merrill, USA Bates, and Smart and McCutcheon)
Is the Beatle's St Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band a good example of the balance of interpretation and innovation that juxtaposes a respect for diverse musical traditions with bursts of true originality? I haven't listen to the album for zonks. Last time I heard some tracks at a coffee shoppping whilst reading the papers I tuned out.
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