Brent Alger

Per. F

4/11/2014

How 1960s Music Changed Society

In the 1960s, music was much more crucial than it is today. Today it is to a great extent

less serious, but 50 years ago, music was very key to the evolution of society. In the 1960s,

society was beginning to wear on people, especially females and people of different races.

Because of this, people turned to sex and drugs for relief. However, these things did more than

relieve them, it enlightened them. Music in the 1960s brought drugs into the mainstream, made

sex more acceptable, and raised equality among gender and race.

One of the effects of 1960s music was it brought drugs into the mainstream. Many bands

in this era used drugs to help write more creative songs and even help with performances. The

most sought-after drugs of the 1960s were cannabis and LSD. Some of the most popular

musicians, including The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Pink Floyd, used these two drugs (Richards

2). Usage of these two usually led to harder drugs, such as cocaine and heroin (Richards 3).

These drugs were used to influence bands music. It is believed that the album, Sgt. Pepper’s

Lonely Hearts Club Band was inspired by drugs, specifically the song Lucy in the Sky with

Diamonds, which abbreviated is LSD. Another band recognized for drug use was The Grateful

Dead, whose singer Jerry Garcia openly utilized and promoted drugs. The bands improvisational

skills significantly relied on drugs. For example, the band improvisational song Space was

explicitly made for people who were using LSD (Richards 6). Countless albums and songs in the

1960s were inspired by drugs.

 Bands use of drugs not only helped write and perform music, it also got many fans

hooked on drugs. Although drugs started being used shortly after World War II, they did not

fully explode for recreational use until the 1960s. Fans started using drugs to get the same feeling

that their favorite bands were getting. Fans would go to concerts and festivals with the intent of

using drugs. The most famous of these festivals was Woodstock. Woodstock was a music and

arts festival that took place August 15-17, 1969. Many major musicians of the era, including The

Who, Jimi Hendrix, and The Grateful Dead, performed at this festival (American Decades 4).

This festival attracted over two hundred-thousand people and lead to the usage of many drugs.

Police arrested about eighty people for possession of hard drugs and gave up on arresting people

for possession of marijuana because there were too many cases (American Decades 3). Festivals

and other concerts like this are the main reason that people got addicted to drugs in the 1960s.

Drugs have continued to grow in popularity since the 1960s. Use of tobacco, alcohol, and

other illicit drugs cost our nation over $600 billion a year through crime, lost work productivity,

and health care (NIH 2). It was estimated in 2012 that 9.5% of people above age twelve to

seventeen use illicit drugs (Samhsa). The usage of drugs has been on the rise since the 1960s.

Drugs were relatively new in the 1950s, and were mainly used for medicinal purposes. However,

the 1960s saw drugs being used for more recreational purposes, and the main reason of this was

the music. With bands being so open about using drugs, such as LSD and cannabis, regular

people saw these as ok. This ideology has stuck around and is still in full force today as many

people today are starting and using drugs.

Another effect of 1960s music was it made sex more acceptable. Before the 1960s, sex

was never really discussed in public. For example, works of literature such as D.H. Lawrence's

Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928) and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) were banned until the
1950s for their explicit content (St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture 1). Also in the 1950s,

psychiatrists, marriage counselors and gynecologists started to agonize over woman because

many could not have orgasms during sexual intercourse (Williams 2). Another problem was that

in the 1950s, premarital sex was considered sinful, deterring sex even further. All of these factors

made sex a rare practice. However, music in the 1960s changed this dramatically.

Sex rates increased a lot in the 1960s. According to sociologists in the 1960s, patterns of

sexual partnering underwent significant change (St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture 2).

One of the reasons for this is music. As more and more bands started writing songs about women

and how attractive they were, it increased sex drive (Labbe 11). One example is the song,

“Sherry” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, which says:

“(Why don’t you come out) with your red dress on

(Come out) Mmm, you look so fine
(Come out) Move it nice and easy
Girl, you make me lose my mind”

This passage of the song is extremely sexualized as it says, “move it nice and easy”’, which is

the singer talking about the woman’s body, which he says looks ‘fine’. Another example of song

to be sexualized is Fire by Jimi Hendrix. The song is considered to have sexual overtones, with

fire being a metaphor for a woman’s sexual organs. This metaphor can be applied to sex in the

line, “Let me stand next to your fire”, which is repeated multiple times in the song. With songs

like these, which over sexualized woman and discussed sex, it is clear to see how music aided

sex in becoming more common.

In the 1960s, sex went from being publicly discussed minimally to being a nation wide

phenomenon. With books like Jacqueline Susann's, Valley of the Dolls and movies like I am

Curious (Yellow) being released in the late 1960s, its clear to see sex was becoming much more

justifiable (St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture 1). This “Sexual Revolution” was a major
turning point in american history, and it would have been practically impossible without the help

of music.

The final effect of 1960s music in society was it raised equality among gender and race.

Even though African Americans had been freed from slavery in the late 1800s, there was still a

lot of animosity towards them in the twentieth century. Segregation was a big deal in the U.S.

during the 1950s. African Americans rights were so poor that in the late 1960s, a ‘Black Power

Movement’ was started. The Black Power Movement was expression of racial pride for African

Americans which called for racial equality (Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and

History 1). It was clear in the 1960s that something needed to be done with racial equality.

Another group that had limited rights in the 1960s were women. Aside from their looks

being heavily focused on, they were paid significantly less at work than their male counterparts.

During the 1950s, newspapers ran two different columns of jobs, which were divided by sex.

Higher paying jobs were almost always offered for men, and very few were offered for woman

(Brunner 1). It was estimated in the 1960s that a woman only made sixty cents for every man’s

dollar (Brunner 3). Also as a problem for women, domestic violence was practically fine in the

1950s and 1960s. Domestic abuse was considered a, ‘family problem’ and police could only step

in as a last resort (Young 4). Women's rights were a major problem in the early twentieth

century.

One of the key factors to raising equality among gender and race, was music. There were

many artists who wrote songs about racial equality, such as James Brown with Say it Loud, I’m

Black and Proud, and Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come (Fink 3). However, the biggest

artist to spread the idea of equality was Aretha Franklin. Franklin was an African American

women, so her songs talked about gender equality as much as racial equality. Her songs, like
Respect, Think, and Natural Woman made it known equality was salient. To even further spread

the idea of equality, there was Woodstock. Woodstock sent a huge message of peace and is

considered by many to be the climax of the 1960s. With Woodstock ending the 1960s, it sent

people into the 1970s knowing that the racial and gender situations in the U.S. had to change

(Fink 5). This message of equality among races and gender is now firmly rooted into most

american’s beliefs, and it is all thanks to music.

Music in the 1960s brought drugs into the mainstream, made sex more acceptable, and

raised equality among gender and race. Music has always been important in history, and one of

the most important times was the 1960s. Music in the 1960s, for better or worse, changed society

forever.