A Concertized Thing An abyss of counter-revolutionary decadence and disaffected apathy marked the post-1968 political and social scenes in the USA, and throughout the west. This was the inevitable burnout following a decade of concerted militancy and civil disobedience that ended in assassinations and mounds of then-classified of FBI files. At least that’s how it’s framed to make history seem tidy and patterned. In an alternate interpretation, black music, especially the mode called “bebop,” which thrived throughout the 1960s, moved space and time to exist, and the shifts in rhythm and tempo that the music demanded made a revolutionary consciousness possible in people who had no access to that frequency under the previous acoustic reality, which was safer, often maudlin, and not evocative of rebellion and change.
Charles Mingus, 1968
Charles Mingus, 1968
Charles Mingus, 1968
A Concertized Thing An abyss of counter-revolutionary decadence and disaffected apathy marked the post-1968 political and social scenes in the USA, and throughout the west. This was the inevitable burnout following a decade of concerted militancy and civil disobedience that ended in assassinations and mounds of then-classified of FBI files. At least that’s how it’s framed to make history seem tidy and patterned. In an alternate interpretation, black music, especially the mode called “bebop,” which thrived throughout the 1960s, moved space and time to exist, and the shifts in rhythm and tempo that the music demanded made a revolutionary consciousness possible in people who had no access to that frequency under the previous acoustic reality, which was safer, often maudlin, and not evocative of rebellion and change.