The kids are all right! And they love the ’60s

The kids are all right! And they love the '60s

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32322322/ns/entertainment-music/

A new generation finds inspiration from the love children of another age

By Tony Sclafani
Aug 10, 2009

Hannah Rarick wears her hair in bangs and favors hoop earnings and
polka dot mini dresses. She reads Teen Set magazine and spins records
by the Monkees and Beatles on her turntable. From this description,
the Ohio resident might seem like your everyday woman from, say,
1967. Not quite. Rarick is a college student who wasn't even born until 1987.

Then there's Devon Clarke Geyer. He not only listens exclusively to
'60s music, he seeks out obscure artists like Vashti Bunyan and Phil
Ochs. The Berklee College of Music sophomore says his most memorable
musical experience was getting to hear the third Velvet Underground
album on vinyl. Geyer is a ripe old 19.

Considering their ages, you'd think Rarick and Geyer might be going
gaga over new acts like Lady Gaga. But today's hot artists only leave
them cold. According to Rarick, current music sounds like "everybody
screaming at each other and talking about beating up their wives or
something to that effect."

With 1960s music, Rarick says, she "feels there was a song for every
situation and every emotion." This is why she and her best friend
André Conover, 26, spend their free time shopping for vintage vinyl
albums and going to concerts by Beatles revival bands and former Monkees.

Geyer, who is also a musician, explains that after growing up on the
Who and Bob Dylan, he developed "a healthy disdain" for the music of
his own generation: "It's not like we have icons like they did in the
1960s with the Beatles. It's kind of like there's this wash of
popular music and we all have just a passing knowledge of it. That's
just never appealed to me."

A retro subculture
You don't need a weatherman to tell you Rarick and Geyer are not on
the radar of mainstream culture. They represent a subculture that
seems to continue with each passing generation ­ young people who
take their cues from the Baby Boomer era.

You see other people their age on Facebook and MySpace who list the
Doors and Jimi Hendrix as their favorite artists. You can hear in it
musicians as diverse as the indie group the Fleet Foxes, who claim
Simon & Garfunkel as a major inspiration, and retro-loving "American
Idol" contestant Brooke White.

"The music of that time has a warmth that doesn't exist in music
today," says White, who is 25 and started listening to older music as
a kid. "Over time, the music became a full-on obsession and to this
day classic old music is what I love to listen to."

Eighteen-year-old San Diego native Zach Tenorio, who also attends
Berklee, says a lot of the up-and-coming musicians at the college
have fixations on '60s artists. "Those were the musicians that
started it all. Hendrix is a one of a kind guitarist and I can tell
you that every single guitarist at Berklee listens to Hendrix ­ even
the jazz guys. I can guarantee that."

As Rarick's fashion sense shows, a flair for all things retro can
extend beyond music. That's the way it is for 15-year-old Morena
Gonzales-Yap, who became enamored of the '60s styles while
researching a fashion project.

"Two major fashion icons are Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn, and they're
both from the 1960s," says the California resident. "If you study the
1940s and '50s, the girls kind of looked the same. But Twiggy was
something different, and she really changed the face of what was
considered beautiful."

Long Beach's Chelsea Knights, 18, enjoys hunting down vintage '60s
dresses at a shopping center called Retro Row. "They have some really
unique pieces," she explains. "If you want to develop a style that's
completely your own, you go to a vintage shop and you can be
completely confident that you're not going to run into anyone else
that looks like you."

Blame the parents?
For a lot of young people, it's their moms and dads that got them
fixated on older music. It's not uncommon for parents to introduce
kids to music; what's uncommon is for kids not to reject that music
and find their own when they become teenagers. With some younger
people today, no such rebellion took place.

Both Geyer and White credit their folks for their musical tastes. So
does Emily Elbert, a 20-year-old Texas folk musician: "My parents
grew up listening to the music of that era, and so did I. I was
always surrounded by it. I really loved it from as long as I can remember."

Tenorio tells a similar story: "In my case, it was my dad. He was a
young lad at that time, and was obsessed with that music. He just
kind of passed it on to me."

Adds White: "We had a jukebox in our backyard, and all we had were my
parents' records in it. So that's just naturally what I listened to
growing up."

Being hooked on the '60s isn't a new thing, notes Columbia University
journalism and sociology professor Todd Gitlin, who authored the book
"The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage." He's seen this trend
among college students since the 1970s and notes that other decades
don't inspire the same interest.

"There are a lot of fancy explanations that you can pile up, but in
the end you have to say it's something about the music itself,"
Gitlin says. "It's (also) about the culture. It had the meaning that
your life could be more exuberant, more pleasurable, and more wild
than it is. So it goes along with a sense of possibility.

"A sense of possibility is never lost," Gitlin continues. "And since
people are looking for some kind of expression of that sort of
sensibility, they have it in the '60s."

Gitlin also says he doesn't believe the theory that the dominance of
the Baby Boomer era has led to that music overshadowing music of
other generations: "Nobody is forcing anyone to listen to this stuff.
It has to be something intrinsic."

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