“Break on Through”: Counterculture, Music and Modernity in the 1960s

Abstract

This paper examines music and the making of the American counterculture within a wider social context of the modernity and modernism that developed in the period after World War II and would become exhausted by the end of the 1960s. Buffered and emboldened by affluence, the American modernism of the 1960s was characterized by a spirit of innovation and faith in progress, and the counterculture expressed this sense of possibility in its experiments to discover higher states of consciousness and more authentic ways of living. The mediating link between music and the modernist spirit of innovation and progress was youth, in this case a generation raised on the prosperity and promises of post-war America, benefiting from massive state investments in public education as well as a discursive celebration of "youth" as symbol of hope and transformation. Beginning with the free jazz and folk music scenes in New York at the beginning of the 1960s, my analytic focus then moves west to consider the different variations of rock music that emerged from San Francisco and Los Angeles.