in spreading the new ideas and values of the period.
For a while they were a very effective form of mass media, communicating notions about authority, sex and drugs to kids around the world. This mattered because other media, such as newspapers, television and films, were still very conservative.
Eventually they caught up, but until they did pop lyrics had an importance they have never had before or since.
Most people, of course, paid almost no attention to the words. But some did, and often they were the ones who went on to be the artists and intellectuals and activists who changed the world.
A cultural revolution of the 1960s.
Sometimes the messages were obvious. Anyone who heard Bob Generation knew what they were saying.
But others, particularly those about sex, contained messages that were able to be played on radio only because so few people knew what they meant. In some cases, this was because few people paid close attention to the words. In other cases, it was because the words were obscure, at least by the standards of the time.
(It was, let's not forget, a bestsellers Pussy Galore.) This meant lyricists could get away with sentiments that were pretty blatant, even by more recent standards.
The Shirelles' 1961 hit Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
acceptable, if emotionally fraught. Given this, its considerable success in the conservative early '60s is surprising. It probably such matters could be spoken of publicly, provided it was done in a guarded manner.
realise what they were about. This was already a tradition in full of innuendo. (Consider, if you will, the reference in Bill Haley and the Comets' Shake, Rattle and Roll to "a one-eyed In 1967, the Who released Pictures of Lily, a touching pornography.
It spent 10 weeks on the British charts, rising to No. 4, suggesting that for most listeners it was just a pretty tune. In the same year, the Small Faces' Itchycoo Park, about the joys of taking LSD, also charted well, as did their Here Comes the Nice, a paean to the singer's drug dealer.
(In this case, include, "He knows what I want, he knows what I need, he's always So how did songs help change the world in the 1960s? The biggest more pervasive throughout the culture. Where once the young aspired to grow up, by the mid-1970s many people wanted to stay young for as long as possible.
education, which postponed the responsibilities of adulthood. Pop music recognised and celebrated this shift before other media, because it was created by the young.
Of course, the music was more important than the words.
The music because the beat predominated. Rock'n'roll brought back some the words were bland and most of them were. But in a small proportion of songs the words were not about love, as lyrics had always been, but about anger, discontent, breaking free and seeking raw pleasure.
Atlanta, the backblocks of Yorkshire and Ontario, received legitimacy for feelings ignored or criticised by their parents, teachers and the rest of the mass media.
To nominate the songs whose words made the most difference, I popularity.
For the markers of cultural change, I referred to my favourite book on the period, The Sixties, by American academic Arthur Marwick.
He likes the idea that the decade was a "mini-renaissance" that actually ran from 1958 to 1974. In the first of those years, the forces that had been building through the 1950s (civil rights, affluence, the extension of adolescence through expanded higher education) accelerated. The latter date is when the end of the crisis hit home.
liberation; more sex; more drugs; and black civil rights. In its most developed form, all these and more (including an interest in revolution, dropping out and Eastern religion) became the counter-culture, and I'll add them to the list of changes that were I've looked only at how songs charted in Britain, because Britain was the crucible of the mini-renaissance. Marwick suggests two interesting reasons for this.
One is that it was a philistine place, so there was only a weak cultural establishment in place to pop culture.
The other is that it was more secular, or at least tepid in its religious enthusiasm, compared with the United States and continental Europe, and therefore more tolerant of (or, if you prefer, less capable of resisting) changing values.
Rolling Stones, No.
1 in 1965 and 12 weeks in the charts. thought embarrassingly juvenile became accepted and celebrated. The default position in human consciousness switched to aimless, self-centred angst.
Dozens of other songs, by performers as distinguished as Bob Dylan and the Kinks, were basically just three-minute whines. It's to the Beatles' credit that they largely avoided this.
Dylan made it to No.
9 in 1965, as did Subterranean Homesick Blues, with his most schematic rebellious song, Maggie's Farm, reaching a respectable No. 22. Dylan was never a huge seller, but he had a big audience among people who went on to affect the culture in all sorts of ways.
Promotion of youth: My Generation by the Who. It made No. 2 in 1965 and was in the charts for 13 weeks.
Respect as sung by Aretha Franklin in 1967. But this is version was by Otis Redding). You might want to wait until 1972, choose from.
Most pop music is written and performed by men and masculine anger.
Likewise, black civil rights, another feature of the 1960s, figures hardly at all in the lyrics of pop music. But you could a major role in persuading whites to accept black people.
More sex: Rock'n'roll had always been partly about sex, become explicit. The Who's Pictures of Lily went to No. 4 in 1967 and was in the charts for 10 weeks.
As for sex involving more than one person, there are many songs to chose from. I go for Let's Spend the Night Together by the Rolling Stones, No. 1 in 1967.
There are earlier songs with the same theme, but I suspect this makes it on grounds of obviousness. We'd come a long way from Spend the Night Together reached only No. 55 on the American Billboard chart.
It's not that Americans didn't like the Stones, Itchycoo Park fared very badly, not even making it into the Indeed, the failure of most of the songs on this list to succeed lyrics was limited. And, as noted earlier, even in Britain interesting lyrics were in the minority; in 1967, the act that Stones but Engelbert Humperdinck.
interesting theory about this.
He notes that Dylan introduced the sing "I get high, I get high" in I Want to Hold Your Hand, when they were actually singing "I can't hide, I can't hide". Dylan wanted to show them he, too, was cool, so he put drug references into his next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. Later, the Beatles wanted to show Dylan they were cool, and included a drug reference in their song She's A Woman.
And so it went.
through their songs. Essentially, it was about introducing more and more anti-establishment references into their lyrics.
with the general public, unless you want to get excited about 1969's Aquarius, which I don't. Opposition to Christianity Devil in 1969.
I Did It My Way, which gave Frank Sinatra a hit in 1970, a found an audience a decade earlier.
Today it is reportedly the most popular song at British funerals.
Side referred to homosexuality, oral sex and transvestites.
By the mid-1970s, the mini-renaissance in Western culture had occurred, bringing pop's importance as a channel for new ideas pretty much to an end.
The wider culture had caught up.
Books, films and television, government policy and school syllabuses were all responding to the changes of the 1960s, in many cases with enthusiasm. There would be later periods when popular music, such as punk and hip-hop, would briefly matter again as a way of communicating ideas, but they would generally be the same as those of the 1960s, although Christian rock would provide an interesting counterpoint.
attention anyway. But for the long decade of the 1960s it was the only way to talk about some things to a large audience. Perhaps Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.
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