As mentioned earlier, teens were expected to leave rock behind once they had graduated high school and gone to college or joined the work force. In fact this was not always the case. Folk music, which had enjoyed popularity in colleges for years, was amalgamated with rock to create a more mature form of popular music. When "protest singer" Bob Dylan went electric in 1966 at the Newport Folk Festival, folk purists were shocked, but young people raised on rock were thrilled. By 1966, pop charts were littered with folk rock songs that reflected a more mature audience and concerns beyond losing or getting a new girl/boy friend. Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", Simon and Garfunkel "Sounds of Silence" and Barry Mcguire's "Eve of Destruction" suggested that all was not well in America and young people were not happy with the inability the dominant society to reform fast enough.

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By the mid-60s colleges and universities were scenes of free speech rallies, anti-war demonstrations and demands for a more open society. Black America was growing dissatisfied with the pace of desegregation and understood that while the government could attempt to legislate against racism, it was impossible to legislate for personal attitudes. Under Lyndon Johnson the US was drawn into the escalation of the war in South East Asia, believing they were protecting the region from Communism. While post-war prosperity had given people jobs, it had created dull, unimaginative people, content to let the politicians govern while middle America enjoyed cocktail parties, three martini lunches and football on Sunday. Pop music as a synthesis of folk and rock and roll became a voice of youthful social criticism. The music grew increasingly mature in subject matter and addressed personal alienation, frustration and growing political dissatisfaction. To put this development into perspective, it can be argued that Crane Brinton's notion that rebellion occurs at a point when expectations fail to be realized quickly enough can be seen in this shift of attitude among American youth and minority groups. It can also be suggested that the industry of popular music was secure enough to market social protest for profit, realizing that most middle class youth were not likely to participate in political protest.

Dating back to the 1950s, San Francisco had been the center of social dissatisfaction focused on City Lights bookstore and the Beat poets. The city had been able accommodate a small counter-culture which had, by the mid-sixties, evolved into the hippie movement. Like other young people they had been educated to rock music, but their life style included folk rock, Blues and experimental pop. Hippies prompted a communal life style, recreational and spiritual drug use, a rejection of the mainstream values and institutions, and certainly non-participation in the war in Vietnam. In fact this small "community" became a magnet for disaffected youth, pop stars who wanted to expand on the imposed limits of their creations, and growing anti-establishment intellectuals. By 1967, increasingly dissatisfied youth were migrating to the Bay area lured by promises of a new, free life style.

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The summer of 1967, the "Summer of Love", opened the door again to major changes in popular music. The most meaningful technological development was the shift from an interest in the 45rpm format to 33 1/3 lps broadcast on FM radio. The new format allowed artists to expand beyond the ~3minute limit of the 45 to longer, more experimental rock music which allowed more mature subject matter to be developed. This was especially true of the Beatles' Seargent Pepper's Lonely Heats Club Band and long album cuts featuring vituoso solos by bands such as Cream, The Mothers of Invention (Frank Zappa) and San Francisco's Jefferson Airplane. Rock music, along with its audience and performers were maturing, rather than simply reinventing itself for each successive generation of teens. The short lived hippie movement's most unique feature was that by promoting an alternative life style, musician and fans were seen as part of a community rather than stars, distant from the consumer. The lifestyle of musicians which included drug use, casual sex and anti-social conduct was now not hidden, but promoted as part of a anti-establishment movement, creating heroes such as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, noted as much for their personal conduct than their music skills.

In England and Europe, plagued with different problems than the US, the hippie, escapist, life style had only limited appeal. In Black America, social critique stemming from middle-class white youth had little appeal as well. Most middle class youth did not even embrace the lifestyle promoted by hippies. There was, to the astute promoter a growing variety of youth cultures, not a single potential market. While white America listened to Country-Joe and the Fish and the Mamas and Papas, Black music feature dance music more suitable to the 45rpm format. It was in the same period that the hippie movement flourished that Soul Music from artist such as Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding was popular. Attempting to avoid the overt anti-establishment nature of the more politicized rock music, groups known collectively as "Bubble Gum Music" were offered to the public as an alternative.

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If Woodstock was the apex of the Peace and Love movement, Altamont marked the end of an era. The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club killed a fan and the atmosphere was one of disharmony and violence as well as poor-quality drugs. The hippie movement in fact was over prior to Altamont in the early 1970s. The fashions and less anti-establishment nature of the movement had been, yet again, co-opted and sanitized, depriving the sub-culture of political relevance. By the 1970s American pop music had broken down into a great many sub-genres, reflecting a fragmentation of American society along individual interest groups: Jesus Freaks, feminists, environmentalists to name only a few. There was a Country rock movement highlighted by the Eagles, A Heavy Metal movement linked to Led Zeppelin, an Art Rock movement dominated by British bands such as Yes and Pink Floyd. Blues and jazz continued to develop and mature in the early 1970s as well, however the new dominant, and most marketable form of pop music was Disco.

Although Disco suffers from a reputation as among the most commodified and intellectually stultifying form of pop culture, its beginning are rooted in the urban working class communities, especially those of Latin Americans and Blacks. Hippies and psychedelic music, social protest and dropping out had an appeal to middle class youth who could easily drop in and out of the movement. This was less so the case of urban working class youth that faced immediate problems of poor paying dead-end jobs and who had neither the education nor the inclination to promoted utopian cooperative movements. Urban youth instead adopted a music and life style that better responded to their reality. They wanted music that was escapist, promoted individual accomplishment and required a sense of cultural currency. They found this in Disco, a dance music with no politically radical meaning, which encouraged great skill and athleticism and made a virtue of dressing up. It was a form of pop culture that promoted escape from the realities of the daily grind (this general response can be seen in the 1960s Mod movement in England, stemming from a similar social class, embracing music that was danceable, and emphasizing good grooming as social critique). While Disco, like the hippie movement, was closely related to relaxed drug and sexual practices, drugs allowed for endurance in dancing and casual sex was admired for its immediate and personal gratification, rather than the "spiritual" experience.

By contrast, in the 1970s, England had become increasingly conservative, with major developments in dismantling the Welfare State and attacking Trade Unionism as a hindrance to personal, individual, growth. In reaction to this trend the Punk movement emerged as a specific response to England's social development (see Mods and Disco). Dick Hebdige argues that English Punks employed aspects of mainstream culture in ways not intended which mocked and insulted the mainstream. This was particularly true of music. With Sex Pistols, guitars became percussion instruments. English pop music, once known for its sophisticated presentation such as The Wall and the work of Yes, Supertramp and 10CC, was shifting to short, aggressive, unmusical songs which, in the hands of The Clash, also incorporated West Indian styles. Lyrically the music was anarchistic and nihilistic for some, while the Clash and the Jam were more overtly Left Wing in their politics. Here, as elsewhere, popular music reflected a response to particular social realities and typically, while the innovators remained dedicated to its social intent, Punk too was co-opted and sanitized. Punk began as political protest of an authentic youth culture but gained no real cultural currency in the US, in the same way the hippies' political responses to uniquely American realities did not engender the same passions in Europe.

More information about the Sex Pistols

The women of the 1970s Punk scene

By the end of the 1970s, popular music was a huge industry that identified and marketed to niches and sub-genres of youth culture, as well as to older music buyers who never (as the 1950s marketing assumptions predicted) abandoned their taste for the music that defined their youth. This resulted in the huge nostalgia movement that has prospered by reinventing the past. Pop music has not become disposable, but recyclable in commercials, movie soundtracks, repackaging the past through CD collections of the 40s, 50s 60s etc. At the same time, since the 1970s new popular music continued to reject much of the past and search for new ways for youth to express themselves and respond the realities of mainstream culture.

The difficulty in creating a clear understanding of popular music in the twentieth century is that while it is on one hand a commodity based on a formula of reproduction for profit, in the hands of the consumer it has multiple functions, unanticipated by the producer. In fact the exact same music can, in the hands of different people have very contrasting functions, for example the song "My Way" by Sid Vicious and Frank Sinatra. Music has been used as social protest and social critique in the case of jazz in the inter-war years in France, or the hippie anthems of the late 1960s, or Rap music of the 1980s and 90s. Music has also been used by youth cultures to mark differences between sub-genres of youth. To the outsider, all pop music might sound the same, but to the trained listener the subtle differences can mark out the certain social terrain based on musical preferences. Like other commodities, music in the hands of the user has unanticipated use. The sense of "knowing" within sub-cultures which makes some pop music acceptable and others unacceptable cannot be controlled or dictated by the music industry no matter how it tries to manipulate the consumer.

In the study of history, pop music has come to reflect general, broader, trends. For example the racial segregation of pop music mirrored the racial attitudes of the day in America. Not accidentally, as racial prejudice began to break down in America so too could this trend be seen in music. While there have been important strides in the eradication of racism, it remains a feature of American life and dissatisfaction can be seen in Rap, House and Hip-hop music of the 1990s. In the 1960s while some popular music attacked American government policies and promoted alternative life styles other songs advocated support for the mainstream. This can be seen in "The Eve of Destruction" which was countered with the song "Dawn of Correction". 'The Ballad of the Green Beret" was a big success in the middle of America's struggle with the war in South East Asia. To return to a previous remark, individual preference for "The Ballad of the Green Beret" over Country Joe and Fish's "Feel-like-I'm-Fixin-to-die" Rag" would indicate certain conflicting social attitudes and connect the individual with specific sub-cultures of youth, as would preference for the Beach Boys over the Beatles, Sinatra over Sid Vicious, Blues over Tin Pan Alley and Bob Dylan over Burt Bacharach. American pop music's popularity in Europe in the inter-war years reveals a great deal about European's rejection of tradition. So popular music does function as historical evidence in that it helps to reveal subtle social attitudes.

Like all forms of popular culture, pop music reflects the culture in which it functions. This can be to either promote mainstream values or to challenge them or both at the same time and consequently this is where confusion occurs. The capitalist institutions which seek to profit from popular music seek out, sell and promote music with lyrical content which attacks the basic values of thrusting capitalism, such as the Clash or moral values such as those assumed to exist in Blues. Rather than being a contradiction, it is an indication that the present stage of capitalist development is so secure in its dominant position that it can profit from the very attitudes that assault and insult it. When in the case of Rap and Hip-hop where the music became too disturbing for mainstream tastes, the dominant culture has united to suppress the music, but for the most part teen rebellion has been promoted for its profitability.

A brief history of banned music in the United States

If popular music of the twentieth century has had a coherent history it can be synthesized in simple terms. Using a variety of ways of establishing authentic protest, young people develop an alternative culture. The marketability of which is not lost on those in the shaping taste for profit. Aspects of youth culture, once employed as serious social critique, are co-opted, sanitized and re-packaged to the mainstream. This in turn creates a need for a new form of social critique, which is again co-opted and marketed as respectable, purged of its anti-social meaning, this process has been repeated over and over. For example, as a form of legitimate working class youth protest against dead-end jobs and lack of opportunity the Mods of the early 1960s appropriated commodities such as tailored suits, hand made shoes, scooters, duffel coats and fastidious grooming in what has been called grotesque attention to detail as a way of critiquing English society. When this was taken up by the alchemists of consumerism and cleaned up by removing the violence and drug use as well as anti-social attitudes and sold to middle class youth, Mods lost their social meaning. In response, there was a late 60s tendency among working class youth to take up West Indian music and develop a new form of social critique. This process from the streets, to the boardroom, to the mainstream can be seen too with early rock, the hippie movement and all other forms of popular music in the twentieth century, even Disco.

Popular music cannot be easily summed up as one thing because of its multiple uses determined, in large part, by the consumer. While most popular music of the twentieth century had little political affect on individuals, it did supply people with entertainment of their own choosing. At the same time, the same music functioned for others as a form or sub-culture identification and social critique - decisions made by the user. As background music or musak popular music may have the results suggested by critical schools of thought (see Alan Bloom, "The Closing of the American Mind"). In the hands of others it may become the voice of rebellion or anthems of social change. Popular music is littered with contradictions such as capitalist institutions marketing lyrical content which calls for its own destruction. Supposedly, "red-neck", conservative country music accommodates liberal ideologies found in the music of Garth Brooks and Mary Chapin Carpenter. "Red Wedge" and other left wing political protest music relies on the "establishment" to promote and distribute their message. The National Front, White Power and other ultra-right youth movements have strange affinity to West Indian rhythms and styles in their musical preferences. To best understand twentieth century popular music in a historical context it may be best to understand who is using it and for what purposes within the wider social context.