From "White Christmas" to Sgt. Pepper: The Conceptual Revolution in Popular Music

Abstract

Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and other songwriters of the Golden Era, the second quarter of the twentieth century, wrote popular songs that treated common topics clearly and simply. During the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney created a new kind of popular music that was personal and often obscure. This shift, which transformed popular music from an experimental into a conceptual art, produced a distinct change in the creative life cycles of songwriters. Golden Era songwriters improved with experience and were generally at their best during their 30s and 40s, whereas since the mid-1960s, popular songwriters have been most imaginative early in their careers and have consistently done their best work during their 20s. The conceptual revolution in popular music occurred at a time when iconoclastic young innovators were making similar transformations in other arts: Jean-Luc Godard and his fellow New Wave directors created a conceptual revolution in film in the early 1960s, just when Andy Wa...