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| Apt overall. You'll see... |
I’ve felt a certain ignorance about the history of American popular music for years, where and with whom the sounds originated, and, no less important, where the currents carried from there. After putting off the inevitable for too long, I started this project to fill in the blanks, first one decade at a time and then, when I hit the sounds and decades I’m familiar with, maybe the time-line compresses to five year cycles, maybe it starts going one artist at a time. That decision will come when the timeline forces it - which I expect will come at a painfully obvious crossroads, say the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.
That’s about 35 years in the future from where this timeline starts - the 1920s. A little historical grounding feels appropriate, something to put the reader in, for lack of a better word, the mood.
Popular culture recalls the 1920s as a happy, carefree time; going the other way, it started with a raging pandemic and the memory of a savage war (aka, the War to End All Wars) and ended with the first, baffling year of Great Depression, which, together, go some way to explaining the hunger to freedom and diversion. It was also a whole damn decade of Prohibition, a time when Americans tried to shelve the sauce, but the take-home lesson from the experiment was that they were (and remain) incurable lushes. Anyone who wanted to find a drink didn’t have to look that hard and for the simplest reason of all: supply follows demand, laws be damned. (Ask anyone who lived through the “just say no” era how little effort it took to find pot - or any drug for that matter.)
The 1920s also saw the birth of mass, and crucially, nationwide consumer culture. Regular people had excess money to spend - and spend they did on all kinds of useful/fun crap, e.g., ready-made clothing, surprisingly affordable cars (as low as $260), modern conveniences for the home like washing machines (which produced idle hands), early birth control (e.g., the diaphragm), going to the movies (just stumbled on an estimate that 3/4 of Americans went to the movies once a week), radios, speakeasies, just going out dancing, generally…and now we’re getting closer to the subject.
That’s about 35 years in the future from where this timeline starts - the 1920s. A little historical grounding feels appropriate, something to put the reader in, for lack of a better word, the mood.
Popular culture recalls the 1920s as a happy, carefree time; going the other way, it started with a raging pandemic and the memory of a savage war (aka, the War to End All Wars) and ended with the first, baffling year of Great Depression, which, together, go some way to explaining the hunger to freedom and diversion. It was also a whole damn decade of Prohibition, a time when Americans tried to shelve the sauce, but the take-home lesson from the experiment was that they were (and remain) incurable lushes. Anyone who wanted to find a drink didn’t have to look that hard and for the simplest reason of all: supply follows demand, laws be damned. (Ask anyone who lived through the “just say no” era how little effort it took to find pot - or any drug for that matter.)
The 1920s also saw the birth of mass, and crucially, nationwide consumer culture. Regular people had excess money to spend - and spend they did on all kinds of useful/fun crap, e.g., ready-made clothing, surprisingly affordable cars (as low as $260), modern conveniences for the home like washing machines (which produced idle hands), early birth control (e.g., the diaphragm), going to the movies (just stumbled on an estimate that 3/4 of Americans went to the movies once a week), radios, speakeasies, just going out dancing, generally…and now we’re getting closer to the subject.
