18 July

Some scholars say World War 2 ended with The Beatles. The early 1960s, when the huge surge of babies born after WW2 were coming of age, as teenagers. The Boomers. A mass of humanity looking for a way to remake the world, through ‘peace and love’ (Ringo Starr’s motto still now, at 85, in every interview). That’s what the counterculture of that time was, the Boomers looking to dismantle the ‘establishment’. It was The Beatles who were the catalysts for that shift. To this day even they probably think it was their brilliant songwriting that caught up millions in a ‘mania’. But they were just the soundtrack to a social movement. 1950s rock n roll culture had made popular music a rallying point for teens, with acts like Elvis, but The Beatles were the tipping point where rock stars became the de facto leaders of this vast mass of teens. Peace, love, anti-establishment, individual development etc. The ingredients of the counterculture. A movement led by its music. Most adults today still look to their favourite musicians as guiding lights in their lives. That’s our culture, now coming to an end. Rock stars long ceased being the pathway for the young to rebel against the old. Now they’re fabulously wealthy members of the same establishment that they once wanted to dismantle. Youth today are less rebellious not because they’re more timid, but because their parents and grandparents joined them, as permanent teenagers. They have nobody to rebel against. The whole idea of the young rebelling against the old was invented by separating the young from the old, into two separate cultures. School and work. Before that youth were just mini-adults, in a single adult culture. Kids went ‘down the mines’. Now we’ve flipped it completely, and there’s only youth culture, independent of age. It replaced the adult culture.