Eye of the beholder consignment series#

“Forget that Leave It to Beaver s-!” summed up the Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick, a pivotal player during that long ago summer. It didn’t last, but for those who flocked to the corner of Haight-Ashbury before the whole scene went up in a blaze of drugs, homelessness and exploitation, it was a cultural moment that would soon attain the status of myth.

In semi-chronological order, here are 2017’s most significant anniversaries:ĥ0 years: Old Hollywood, meet New Hollywoodįor every formulaic crowd-pleaser like Camelot and Thoroughly Modern Millie, there was a slew of cinematic button pushers that gleefully tweaked the establishment: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, I Am Curious Yellow.Īfter decades of studio rule, the gloves were off, battle lines drawn and silver screen taboos toppling like dominoes.Īh, the sweet siren call of the gentle, free-lovin’ flower people, with their long hair and LSD tabs, rejecting societal straitjackets for a new paradigm of peaceful coexistence. My own theory, influenced by neither of the above, is that the iconic moments that shape pop culture are parceled out unequally by fate, with the biggest payload dropped 50 years ago when the ’60s generation decimated everything in its path, ensuring that every decade in its wake would reverberate with a faint temporal echo.īut enough philosophizing.

Or that the pundits declaring cultural relevance - at least in old school media - are bespectacled windbags whose reference points stem from the disco era.

To be judicious, it may simply be that it takes a generation or two to properly gauge the cultural impact of something like Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” (1992) - with its signature lyric “I like big butts” - or Fergie’s self-obsessed solo hit “Fergalicious” (2007). If you were born in 1990, you may find the flouting of censorship that brought Hollywood to its knees and ushered in the auteur era of the ’70s takes a back seat to the debut of Keeping Up With the Kardashians four decades later or, perhaps, the final episode of The O.C. If you were born in, say, 1980, a bunch of geezers reminiscing about San Francisco’s Human Be-in 50 years ago - which paved the way for the psychedelia wave that would reshape pop culture - may have less relevance than the fact Britney Spears shaved her head in the middle of a mental collapse in 2007.

Eye of the beholder consignment series#

There are a few more milestones in succeeding decades: U2’s era-defining The Joshua Tree (1987), Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of the Pope (1992), Ellen DeGeneres’s uncloseting as TV’s first gay leading character (1997).īut mostly, it’s the same trajectory of diminishing returns: pandering blockbusters like Dirty Dancing (1987) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), smug TV series like Ally McBeal (1997) and Married With Children (1987), second-generation pop acts like Whitney Houston (1987), Backstreet Boys (1997) and Rick Astley (1987).Īs it turns out, pundits who predicted the “end of history” during the late ’80s glasnost era may have been more prescient than we then believed. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Bonnie and Clyde and Canada’s nation-defining Expo 67.īut the highlights of 1977 - with cinematic avatars like Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever, the TV miniseries Roots and the death of rock’s first superstar, Elvis Presley - gives ’67 competition in the rose-coloured nostalgia category. I expected the phenomenon to repeat this year with the 50th anniversaries of the Summer of Love, Sgt. With competing anniversaries for things like Jiggle TV (1976), the Spice Girls (1996) and Hannah Montana (2006), there was never a question which year would dominate. With everything from the Beach Boys’ boundary-pushing Pet Sounds to Hollywood’s profanity-laced Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? to John Lennon’s claim the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” it was clear the grey flannel ’50s were giving way to a bold new era.