Tuesday, September 2, 2014

It's something how certain performers from the 1960s and 1970s still continue to remain popular in the collective psyche.

Collective memory cherry-picks select groups and singers to continue their "dominion" in the pop and rock music sphere alongside the latter-day and present-day performers while either disavowing their original contemporaries or relegating them to either a secondary status or to a different nostalgia format.

Take, for example, groups like The Who, or The Doors, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, or Neil Young, or Bob Dylan, or Jimi Hendrix, or Janis Joplin, who are still revered to this day.

Back in the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, even if you weren't gravitating toward the psychedelic or "progressive rock", or strictly buying albums ...even if you were still buying 45s you'd STILL hear the single hits by the likes of Cream or The Doors alongside The 5th Dimension, or Wilson Pickett, or Spanky and Our Gang, or The Royal Guardsmen, or The Grassroots.
Tommy James and the Shondells and The Bee Gees were getting played on the same stations as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, the same stations also playing The Cowsills and Petula Clark, and The Who, and Aretha Franklin, and the "Motown Sound",  and Simon and Garfunkel, and The Mamas and the Papas, and The Lovin' Spoonful, and The (Young) Rascals, and Sam and Dave, and The Turtles, and Sandy Posey.

Having grown up in the mid-to-late-'60s and early-'70s myself I wish to retain MY share of the "claim" on the likes of The Doors, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, The Who, and Cream, and others of their ilk alongside the likes of Neil Diamond, Bobby Goldsboro, The Fifth Dimension, other "British Invasion" performers: The Seekers, The Searchers, Petula Clark, The Zombies, The Hollies, Herman's Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, Dusty Springfield, and so forth.
And the '70s being: The Carpenters, Elton John, The Stylistics, Sly and the Family Stone, Gilbert O'Sullivan, Jethro Tull, Grand Funk Railroad, The Jackson Five (yes, I'm also retaining a "claim" on early Michael Jackson material), The Eagles, Helen Reddy, Cat Stevens, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, The Staple Singers, James Taylor, Alice Cooper, Lobo ...you get the general picture.

So it's like ...The Monkees followed by Jimi Hendrix?  Or The Doors followed by The Association?
...Why not?
I deserve to co-claim the commercial music I grew up with and have long loved.

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