Forty years ago, Sixties radicalism reached its peak, so why was 1968 such a bad year for pop? CRAIG BROWN offers up some theories
THIS YEAR HAS BEEN A MAJOR anniversary for baby boomers: 40 years on from 1968. For cultural commentators and academics 1968 looms large as the moment of generational dislocation, when the counter-culture scaled the barricades and pushed the old o
rder out of the way.
As the Parisian cobblestones flew, university campuses became hotbeds of political activity and the world's youth moved – as they saw it – to set the world to rights.
The odd thing is that, musically, 1968 was all but a dead-end, or at very least, a serious wrong turn into the cul-de-sac of rock. The point was made forcefully on 22 November, with the release of The Beatles' White Album.
During the 1960s, the Fab Four were a bellwether of the cultural and musical climate. They may never have been the first to do something, but when they took up a musical direction they felt was worthwhile, the world and its wife would inevitably follow. But when the stylus fell on the White Album, what did people hear? A sprawling album containing dross and diamonds in equal measure, but all rooted firmly in the studio. For all its musical spread it feels small, homespun and contained. It is difficult to believe that the band who had barely a year previously produced Sgt Pepper, an album that had done more than any other to blast open the possibilities of what pop music was capable of, seemed to have lost their ambition for invention. Gone was the dimension-hopping, shape-shifting sound of Strawberry Fields Forever and in its place was Yer Blues in all its downbeat, ramshackle bluesy-ness. It must have come as one hell of a shock to fans.
But it wasn't just The Beatles; 1968 saw pop's serious creative efforts kicked into touch. Having produced two tune-laden prime pieces of pop psychedelia with Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love during 1967, Jimi Hendrix headed back into the studio the following year and returned with Electric Ladyland, a double album full of blasting solos and elongated jams. The pop nous of its predecessors was virtually absent.
The same goes for the Rolling Stones, who released the freewheeling Between the Buttons and the diseased psychedelia of Their Satanic Majesties Request in 1967, before leaping with both feet into the turmoil of 1968 with the scratchy southern rock of Beggars Banquet. The Stones were perhaps the only group whose creativity grew exponentially from that year on, but that may be because, at their very core, they were a rock band in waiting.
At the same time, the likes of The Grateful Dead, Neil Young and Van Morrison were creating albums that stepped away from any sense of "pop" – that is, memorable melody-based songs that are done and dusted in three minutes flat. Even Bob Dylan, the man who had deliberately stepped away from his folksy civil-rights roots to become the counter-culture's grinning Cheshire cat, was drawn to this downbeat introversion. Gone was the wired, wide-eyed surreal sneer of Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited, or even the cryptic fables of John Wesley Harding, and in their place was the nasal country tones of 1969's Nashville Skyline – no-one's favourite Dylan album.
It's not that the music was bad in itself – any respectable "100 Best Records" lists will contain records from 1968. It's just that in a year of increasing political and social momentum, the soundtrack was one of musical retreat.
Why was this? For a start, there were the politics: was there ever a time when the question "whose side are you on?" had more significance? Faced with the Cold War, Vietnam and the hardening political attitudes of their now-student fanbase, musicians couldn't help but find themselves pulled in – even if they were motivated more by protecting their careers than a desire to nail politics to the mast.
Unfortunately, when a musician adopts overtly political, socially aware views, they can't help but bin any "bourgeois" pop creativity or sense of melody in preference for some misplaced desire for "authenticity" and "credibility", whereby the message takes prominence over the medium. They start to tie themselves in knots as they try to navigate the various flavours of left-wing ideologies and activism. A scoop of Leninism, sir? How about a bit of Trotskyism? A little Stalinism? Perhaps not. The result, invariably, is a mish-mash of half-baked platitudes that does them few favours and will invariably be a source of much embarrassment at a later date. (The one exception that proves this rule is the Gang of Four's first album, Entertainment.)
Given the political ferment of 1968, it is little wonder that when recording the two versions of The Beatles' Revolution, John Lennon apparently spent hours fretting over whether he should be "counted in" or 'counted out' of said activity. In the end, the student activists decided they didn't like either response – nobody likes a fence-sitter – and roundly castigated him.
In search of the authenticity that the times demanded, musicians on both sides of the Atlantic looked back to the old blues artists. The likes of Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, who spent their lives in poverty and were now entering their dotage, suddenly found themselves on stage at festivals facing a sea of fresh-faced white students, kicking to one side the soul influences which had fed the Mod scene up until then, and which had sustained the previously questing pop scene.
In the absence of the "anything is possible" approach to creativity, bands simply turned up the volume or, if they were American, adopted a country and western sound, for example, The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Of course the deepening drugs scene didn't help pop either. By 1968, what had started out as experimentation and an aid to creativity – and let's face it, without drugs most of the best records would either have been markedly different or never even made – turned into a form of acid fascism. "Turning on" became as much a political act as pinning a Maoist button or pulling on a Che Guevara beret. For those who abandoned consciousness expansion for something a bit more "serious" and "bluesy", there were always amphetamines, and heroin for the comedown.
The jamming on of the creative brakes was already being tracked by social trends elsewhere. San Francisco's Haight Ashbury scene, the ground zero of the original counter-culture, had already sunk into a quagmire of teenage runaways, tyro cult leaders and drug abuse, as witnessed by Joan Didion in her article "Slouching Towards Bethlehem". The dawning of the Age of Aquarius, a time of renewal and creative flowering that everyone in the late 1960s had been promised, had obviously been postponed. Indefinitely.
In the face of such disillusionment and disappointment, it's perhaps unsurprising that musicians who had preached love and peace sought some sort of cultural retrenchment. At times of uncertainty and fear people fall back on the familiar for comfort and reassurance, just as in times of economic crisis they look for a form of escape – Glam and New Romanticism were both born in subsequent gloomy periods.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the stratospheric creativity that had powered music throughout the 1960s should eventually run out, in which case it's unfair to be so down on 1968. Of course, the baby boomers will clasp their copies of Creedence Clearwater Revival and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks close to their breasts as talismans against such attacks on their heritage, but there was a clear line drawn in the sand by the youth in that year that said, creatively, "here and no further".
So, whether they like it or not, 1968 is as much to blame for prog rock, heavy metal, country rock and all their abysmal AOR permutations as it was responsible for the creation of its inevitable nemesis: punk.
There is more than a hint of irony in the fact that Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren was obsessed with the Situationist politics and slogans that drove the student riots of 1968, and used the very same approach in shaping the career of his protégés, whose sworn aim was to wreck the orthodoxy established by that year. However, if we're being really honest, it could be said with some validity that there was no real challenge to 1968's hegemony until the advent of hip-hop and rap in the late 1970s, the shockwaves of which we are still feeling 30 years on. Perhaps that was the real revolution.
