Introduction | Modernism 1900-1950
Popular culture 1900-1950 | High culture 1950-2000
Pop culture 1950-2000 | Culture and technology
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Pop culture 1950-2000

American pop culture had a mystique that made its freshness, vitality and optimism immensely seductive to Europe, Latin America and Japan in the postwar era. Much of the rest of the world was also reshaped by a culture that was carried by consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, Disney, Levis and McDonald's as much as by songs and films. Its power was as much in its promise of democracy as in its intrinsic worth; its reality involved consumption and imitation.

And pop culture was where the energy was.

Music

From the mid-1950s, when Elvis Presley, the king of rock 'n' roll, first made an international impact, pop music became a powerful force that changed modern life for all the generations born during and after this era.

At first, American performers such as Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers led the way. Then, when British groups such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones took up the American art form, they added sweeter lyrics, quirkier ideas and, eventually, explicitly political statements to create a rock music that, throughout the 1960s, was progressive and widely influential. In 1964, Beatlemania – explosions of hysteria in huge crowds of young women – spread around the whole world.

As the 1960s continued, bands on both sides of the Atlantic – such as The Byrds, Beach Boys, The Who, The Kinks – influenced each other in friendly competition. Rock spawned a gigantic range of larger-than-life personalities such as John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and later icons such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Freddie Mercury (of Queen) and the Spice Girls. Notable bands included Cream, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and, later, U2, as well as cult groups such as the Velvet Underground and the Ramones.

Make love not war – John and Yoko: March 1969

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Pop music had its own dynamic. Forms other than rock 'n' roll – such as rhythm and blues, gospel, soul, country and western, Motown and reggae – competed with and became assimilated in the mainstream. Alternatively, certain types of music made radical breaks with convention, as with the punk rock movement, which began in 1976 with groups such as the Sex Pistols, The Stranglers and Siouxie and the Banshees.

Other trends – disco music, the New Romantics of the 1980s, techno, rap, grunge and romantic soloists – testify to the huge variety and versatility of this music, and to the public's massive appetite for different kinds of sounds.

Youth culture

In fact, pop culture was not just a question of listening to music. In many ways, it was a whole way of life, a youth culture that included distinctive fashions, hairstyles, behaviour and ways of speaking. The stress was on novelty and being cool, on hedonism and individuality, on self-fulfilment and consumerism.

Social conventions were rejected, sometimes violently, and new forms of experience – such as communes, happenings and love-ins – were attempted. Experimenting with drugs became a central activity of hippies between about 1967 and 1976, and then entered mainstream culture. Similarly, sexual experimentation broke down taboos and freed young people from some of the stricter behaviours of their parents, creating a generation gap.

All in all, the rather staid and conformist world of the first half of the century was violently fractured by the impact of the 1960s, the decade in which cults and groups of people suddenly created a whole variety of different looks. It was the cultural equivalent of the growth of political liberation.

Flower Power – New York 'love-in': 1969

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But the 'flower power' of the 'summer of love' of 1967 quickly turned sour, as politics – primarily demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and against civil rights inequalities among black people – took on a less idealistic and more cynical aura. After the student revolt in Paris in 1968, followed shortly by the brutal suppression of anti-war protesters outside the Democratic convention in Chicago, suddenly everything seemed much more serious. The 60 or so gun shots that rang out in May 1970, when four students protesting the Vietnam war were shot dead at Kent State University in Ohio, can be seen as flower power's death knell.

Celebrity culture

The astounding success and popularity of pop stars gave a boost to celebrity culture. The media invention of 'Swinging London' in 1964 hyped the hedonism and pleasure of the new milieus in which fashionable performing groups and their friends mixed. The exploits of these stars, and of their hangers-on, became part of mass culture. Film stars were also objects of fascination. Even in the 1950s, images such as that of Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) were widely influential.

In most Western countries, the obsession with stars spawned a tabloid press (and numerous magazines) that featured more celebrity gossip than hard news. As well as pop and film stars, sports personalities, media pundits and commentators of all kinds contributed to an information overload that, by the 1990s, threatened to swamp the world.

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