Babyboomers’ memory loss
The Sixties eh? A golden period when everything was amazing according to those who were there… even though these same people say that ‘if you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there!’ — cue laughter track.
There was a load of decent stuff in the Sixties, for sure — just like any other decade. There’s a lot of memory loss about it too. The Sixties has been beatified by Babyboomers who completely forget about all the crap that went on back then. Like most people who are nerdy about music and pop-culture, I’ve studied the Sixties hard… and the Sixties were great AND shitty.
Take, for example, the above comment, swiped from Twitter account Daily Mail Comments. Let’s pick it to pieces, bit by bit. I’ll paraphrase a bit, but you’ll get the gist.
Kids left school at 15… from an education that wasn’t dumbed down… with good literacy
During the ’60s, there was the Eleven Plus, which ruined countless lives, denying children — many of them from working class families — further education. Oh, and the teachers used to hit children and use degradation as punishment. Marvellous.
Kids weren’t cooped up in their bedrooms
Millennials did not invent the sulky, lazy teenager. From the ’50s onward, when teenagers were invented (before that, you went straight into adulthood from childhood), kids ignored their parents, burrowed into books, sloped off and smoked cigs out of sight, and got into trouble. They still do. There’s always been anti-social kids. There’s always been lazy kids. There’s always been kids who are complete dicks. While ’60s kids didn’t have PlayStations or internet connections, ’60s kids didn’t have a window outside of their own street corners, which is shite.
No binge-drinking… no drugs
Firstly — the Sixties didn’t have any drugs. Not only did the counter-culture hammer as many drugs as they could get their paws on, ‘straights’ got stuck into prescription medicine like nobody’s business (check The Rolling Stones’ ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ which takes the piss out of exactly that). And binge drinking? In the ’60s, people drank ‘Breakfast Ales’. Some of the first real studies into the effects of alcohol and alcoholism were made during the ’60s. Why? Because the ’60s was filled with raging pissheads.
There was no dumbed down celebrities and reality TV
The Profumo Affair was exactly the kind of dumb, titillating nonsense that works today. It made a star out of Christine Keeler, who if you don’t know the tale, was a young showgirl who shagged some politicians. Obviously, the paparazzi is part of this ‘dumb down culture’, and it was already such a thing in the ’60s, that in the film La Dolce Vita, the photographer in it was named Paparazzo, which obviously entered the English language, and it was widely used in the Sixties. While reality TV wasn’t a thing, celebrity culture was a boom area in the Sixties — pulp magazines didn’t talk about celebrities for their talents, and of course, tabloid papers hounded rock stars about orgies and drug taking, so leave off thinking that the Sixties was somehow highbrow.
No selfies… no obsession with looks… no designer brands…
Fuck. Off. The Sixties were an incredibly vain period in history. You tell me mods and rockers weren’t absolutely obsessed with their looks? During the ’60s, kids were getting suits imported from Italy, and young mods were getting their hair styled, rather than just cut, at ladies hair salons. There was a boom in celebrity models, fashionistas and the rest, with people like Ossie Clark and Mary Quant, and of course, with higher purchase being more accepted in the ’60s, people had more disposable income (well, that’s what they thought) to spend on clothes, and haircuts, and the rest. The Sixties was a peacock of a decade, so piss off with the idea that it wasn’t self obsessed.
Mums stayed at home… Children didn’t get hundreds spent on them… gardens ringing out with children playing… and all the other stuff they said
Some mums still stay at home. Mercifully, they don’t feel that they’re obliged to. And why? Because of the work done by feminists in the ’60s. And not all kids get spoiled — there’s still poor people and frugal families. And the fact that there’s less children playing in gardens, is because the babyboomers created a financial state that means young parents can’t afford their own houses anymore, so they don’t even have gardens for their kids to play in.
In short
Fuck babyboomers. Maybe the worst generation of humans who ever lived… even if they did make a load of good records.
