Sixties icons still rocking
The Beach Boys release their first album of new songs in years next
week to mark their 50th birthday -- joining an elite band of icons
celebrating half a century of music that still rocks the world. In the
same year the California group first surfed into the charts -- 1962 --
Bob Dylan was strumming his way into pop culture history, while the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones led a revolution on the other side of the
Atlantic.
Why the sudden early 60s creative explosion? One answer: as post-war
baby boomers came of age in a world of growing wealth, they fervently
embraced the freedoms -- cultural, financial and sexual -- offered by
the new decade.
“They were just old enough to be the first people from the white
working class in the first world to grow up in relative affluence and
education,” professor Toby Miller of the University of California,
Riverside, told AFP. “They were white boys who had an interest in black
music that transcended color lines, and there were record companies and
TV companies and promoters that had identified these emergent market
niches for their eventual audiences.” Of the burst of history-making
music icons who emerged in 1962, arguably the biggest were the Beatles,
who exploded on the world stage as the “Fab Four” from their native
Liverpool, via an intense apprenticeship in Hamburg, Germany.
Their first single, “Love Me Do,” came out that year, triggering a
tsunami-like wave of Beatlemania which swept across the Atlantic at the
head of a British musical invasion of the United States.
AFP |