by Charles Peterson

Created on: April 19, 2009

What is music?

In order to talk about popular music we must first place it in its setting.

Music means something different for each generation. My generation came of age during the 1960s. War was all around. In specific we had the Vietnam War. The country was divided between hawks and doves. The young people were mostly against the war. Even the enlisted men and wimon (oe) had questions regarding whether the war was right.

In the backdrop of this specific war there was the larger issue of the Cold War. People were suspicious of personal politics. The spirit of the Joe McCarthy led witch trials of communists in US America spilled over into our general lives.

War, or conflict between nations, wasn't the only factor driving suspicion during the 1960s. Our culture was being handed over from one driven by civic duty to one being driven by civil rights. Here we embrace so called minority groups. Men who would reach out for civil rights for wimon (oe) would have to be called feminists. White people who would reach out to and live with black people were resented by those who preferred to remain isolated.

In the midst of the tremendous upheaval in the 1960s popular music was born. If you think about it popular music in its present form hasn't been around too long. The first recordings were only made possible by the invention of Thomas Edison who lived from 1847 to 1931. Enrico Caruso (b. 1873, d. 1921) became the first performer on a high level to take advantage of the gramophone as a way to mix the performer with joh (his or her) audience. Bands didn't really become fully amplified until the 1950s. And it took until the 1960s for stereo systems to fully reproduce the sound that a band achieves when it performs live or in the studio.

Whether it was right or wrong we listened to music in cliques in cliques. You could see the girls going over to someone's house for the purpose of listening to music because they would carry their stack of 45 singles in a little box, about a foot on each side, sort of like a hat box. As a boy I would wonder what went on in these music gatherings. Were the girls showing off their latest clothes and jewelry while music played in the background? Were they discussing whether or not they liked their English teacher? One assumed some ties of loyalty were strengthened because the girls did this in the cliques they hung around with in school.

It was obvious at the sock hops and mixers in the gym that some of the time spent in the music cliques

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