The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The years from roughly 1968 to 1971, when, as noted, the American population was less “diverse” than at any time in its history, were also the high-water mark of the country’s post-war culture, certainly of its popular music. In the four-and-a-half months of 1970 that separate the albums Workingman’s Dead (June) and American Beauty (November), the Grateful Dead alone cranked out a dozen songs that have endured through the generations. It was an impermanent flourishing, a transition. The rock ’n’ roll stars of the 1960s and (to a degree) the 1970s had been trained to the old culture. They had mastered instruments and become real musicians, if only to play piano for guests in their parents’ living rooms, or the organ on Sunday at church. Once rock was established, however, aspiring rock stars began modeling themselves on rock musicians, or even non-musicians. Paul Cook, the drummer for the pioneering punk band the Sex Pistols, recalled the early punk music periodicals that came out after 1976. “In one of the fanzines,” he wrote, “there’s even a diagram showing you how to play three chords—C, D and A—with the caption, ‘Here’s the chords. Now go and start a band!’ ” Similar things were said by Rod Stewart and the musicians of Bachman–Turner Overdrive. The countercultural culture that lasted for a decade or two after the 1960s can seem a progressive reworking of old values, a drawing out of new possibilities. Or it can appear a mere looting of the old culture, a decadence, a sp...