An interesting thing about the post-Beatles-On-Ed-Sullivan Sixties (by which I mean February 1964 through mid 1970 or so) is that Elvis really was not much of a cultural presence. I mean, obviously some people about eight to eighteen years older than me would have cared about him, but it was a cinch for someone my age (I turned ten in '64) to not care about him to the point of not bothering even to have an opinion about him. With the TV Special in '68 Elvis began a comeback to cultural prominence, but it wasn't until the early '70s that he was back to being culturally iconic, which he still is (though I'm sure there are lots of people in hip-hop, say, who aren't having strong opinions about him, but I think if someone in hip-hop sampled a popular Elvis tune or wore an Elvis cape or put on Elvis sideburns this would be immediately recognizable even to the ten-year-olds in the audience, whereas I don't think this would have been true in '67)(not that I know much about ten-year-olds in the hip-hop audience).
I think the U.S. is far less culturally fragmented now than when I was growing up, has fewer great divides, but has more cultural subgroups, and it's possible that the older subgroups were more internally monocultural than the new ones are, because, for one reason, people may be more mobile in jumping from subgroup to subgroup and belonging to multiple subgroups. But what I just said in the previous sentence is probably too vague ever to be really testable.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-11-18 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-19 03:22 pm (UTC)An interesting thing about the post-Beatles-On-Ed-Sullivan Sixties (by which I mean February 1964 through mid 1970 or so) is that Elvis really was not much of a cultural presence. I mean, obviously some people about eight to eighteen years older than me would have cared about him, but it was a cinch for someone my age (I turned ten in '64) to not care about him to the point of not bothering even to have an opinion about him. With the TV Special in '68 Elvis began a comeback to cultural prominence, but it wasn't until the early '70s that he was back to being culturally iconic, which he still is (though I'm sure there are lots of people in hip-hop, say, who aren't having strong opinions about him, but I think if someone in hip-hop sampled a popular Elvis tune or wore an Elvis cape or put on Elvis sideburns this would be immediately recognizable even to the ten-year-olds in the audience, whereas I don't think this would have been true in '67)(not that I know much about ten-year-olds in the hip-hop audience).
Elvis was definitely lamé.
I think the U.S. is far less culturally fragmented now than when I was growing up, has fewer great divides, but has more cultural subgroups, and it's possible that the older subgroups were more internally monocultural than the new ones are, because, for one reason, people may be more mobile in jumping from subgroup to subgroup and belonging to multiple subgroups. But what I just said in the previous sentence is probably too vague ever to be really testable.