THE SIXTIES.

The sixties began in neat suits and ended with long hair, amplifiers, protest signs and album covers treated as works of art. In less than ten years, the single became an album, the studio an instrument and the pop artist a public voice. Music did not just follow social change. It helped make it audible.

POP BEFORE THE EXPLOSION.

At the beginning of the decade, popular music was largely organized by professional songwriters, arrangers, producers and session musicians. In New York, songwriters around the Brill Building crafted carefully constructed hits. In Los Angeles, Phil Spector developed his monumental Wall of Sound. A song was a compact design in which melody, arrangement and production fit together perfectly.

Girl groups like The Shirelles, The Ronettes and The Crystals gave teenage love its own dramatic language. Their records sounded both young and mature, direct and sophisticated. Behind the voices were often teams that helped define modern pop production.

This factory-like way of working is sometimes contrasted with the later self-contained rock band. That does it a disservice. The early sixties proved just how much artistic innovation was possible within three minutes of pop.

THE SOUND OF YOUNG AMERICA.

In Detroit, Berry Gordy built Motown into a label with a recognizable style and unprecedented cultural significance. Songwriters, producers, choreographers, house band The Funk Brothers and artists worked within a system that could develop hits almost industrially.

The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas and Stevie Wonder brought Black American music to a massive audience. Motown did not want to serve exclusively one community. The label wanted to reach the center of popular culture — and succeeded without giving up the rhythmic core of its music.

At the same time, soul developed in other directions outside Detroit. Stax in Memphis sounded earthier and more direct. Aretha Franklin brought gospel intensity to songs about love, dignity and autonomy. Otis Redding made vulnerability powerful. James Brown shifted the emphasis further and further from harmony to rhythm, thereby laying the foundations for funk and later hip-hop.

BRITAIN SENT THE MUSIC BACK.

British youth had grown up with American blues, rhythm-and-blues, rock-’n-roll and skiffle. Bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals and The Yardbirds made those influences the starting point for a new generation.

When The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, the British Invasion became a mass phenomenon. It was not just about hairstyles and enthusiasm. British groups made the band itself the central creative unit. They wrote their own material more and more and developed a recognizable group identity.

This changed the idea of who made pop music. An artist no longer had to be exclusively a voice for external songwriters. The band could write, arrange, experiment and ultimately use the studio to make music that was barely reproducible on stage.

SONGS ENTERED THE STREET.

Folk already had a long tradition of social observation, but in the sixties it found a new place in popular culture. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and others linked songs to civil rights, war, poverty and political responsibility.

Dylan also changed the language of pop. His lyrics did not have to be linear or simple. They could become literary, ambiguous and surreal. When he embraced electric instruments, folk and rock collided in a way that permanently changed both genres.

Music became closely linked with the American civil rights movement and the protest against the Vietnam War. Not every artist wrote explicit protest songs, but even personal music was heard within a period in which authority, race, sexuality and freedom were being discussed anew.

THE STUDIO BECAME AN INSTRUMENT.

The technological development of the studio made ideas possible that went beyond a band around a few microphones. Multitrack recording, tape editing, artificial reverb, variable tape speed and new electronic sounds gave producers and artists more and more control.

With Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson built an emotional world out of instruments, voices and studio techniques. The Beatles responded with records like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. George Martin and the technicians at Abbey Road no longer treated tape as a neutral medium, but as material that could be cut, reversed, slowed down and recombined.

This shifted the question from “how do we capture a performance?” to “what sound can only exist here?” That is one of the greatest changes in the history of recorded music.

THE ALBUM DEMANDED ATTENTION.

Singles remained important, but the album took on a different status. Artists began to treat the track order, cover, lyrics and production as parts of a single whole. An LP could be more than a collection of hits. It could develop an identity or idea over two sides of a record.

This also changed listening. A single took a few minutes. An album required time, order and repetition. The album cover became a gateway to the artist's world. Music magazines began to review albums as serious works of art.

This development gave rock a new cultural position, but also had a commercial side. Albums were more expensive and yielded more for labels. Artistic ambition and economic value temporarily pulled in the same direction.

PSYCHEDELIA OPENED THE DOOR.

Psychedelic music translated altered states of consciousness into sound. Long improvisations, distorted guitars, drones, tape effects and non-Western instruments broke the usual boundaries of pop and rock.

San Francisco became an important center with Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company. In London, Pink Floyd, Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Beatles moved toward experimentation. At the same time, influences from Indian classical music, electronic composition and avant-garde entered the popular studio.

The result was not one recognizable sound. Psychedelia was rather permission: a song did not have to be short, logical or realistic. The studio could distort space and an album could feel like a journey.

FROM MONTEREY TO WOODSTOCK.

Festivals made visible how large the youth culture had become. Monterey Pop presented a new generation of artists to an international audience in 1967. Woodstock grew in 1969 into the most famous symbol of the counterculture.

The romantic image of peace and community was, however, only part of the story. The same period saw political assassinations, war, race riots and an increasingly harsh confrontation between generations. The music industry also became larger, more professional and more commercial.

At the end of the decade, idealism and reality began to diverge. Altamont, also in 1969, was often seen in retrospect as the dark counterpart to Woodstock. The dream was not over, but it had lost its innocence.

A WORLD BEYOND LONDON AND AMERICA.

The sixties were not exclusively a British-American story. Jamaica developed ska and rocksteady, precursors of reggae. In Brazil, Tropicália blended local traditions with rock, avant-garde and political criticism. French yé-yé, Italian pop and German experimental music formed their own answers to the international youth movement.

The Netherlands also had a strong beat culture. Bands from The Hague and other cities absorbed British and American influences, but built their own circuit of clubs, stages and fans. Pop music became an international language spoken everywhere with local accents.

WHAT THE SIXTIES LEFT BEHIND.

The sixties changed almost every role within popular music. Artists became songwriters. Producers became authors. Albums became works. Studios became instruments. Festivals became temporary societies and songs became carriers of political and personal change.

The decade also left behind a lasting tension. Music could represent freedom, but at the same time became an increasingly large industry. It could break cultural boundaries, but not automatically solve the inequality behind them. It was precisely that combination of idealism, experimentation and commerce that made the sixties so defining.