Must we be nostalgic about the 1950′s? …
…Thus, in the way that people looked and dressed, in the cars that they drove, in the houses that they lived in, and in a myriad of other day-to-day aspects of life, the fifties were egregiously a Golden Age of kitsch.
When we get nostalgic nowadays about the fifties, the tendency is to get misty eyed about the popular culture of the decade, and especially about the popular music. Nonetheless, when listened to with any sort of objectivity, the popular music comes across strongly as yet another of the disasters of the decade. And this judgement holds true for both types of music that were popular in the fifties- for the banal, sweetish sound of Teresa Brewer singing “Till I Waltz Again With You” or of Patti Page warbling “Mockin’ Bird Hill” as well as for the raucous rock-’n'-roll sound of Bill Haley and the Comets beating out “Rock Around The Clock” or of Elvis Presley doing “All Shook Up.” Rock-’n'-roll, bursting onto the scene in 1955, had some vitality and excitement to it, which is why, of course, it became so quickly popular with the teenagers of the fifties, who’d been all but slumping asleep over their phonographs while trying to listen to Perry Como singing “If.”
Still, most critics of rock, like the then known Mike Jahn and Ellen Willis, agreed that rock-’n'-roll music of the fifties is crude, sledge-hammer simple, and unformed when compared with the music it became in the sixties when it was taken up, refined, and transformed.
There is also some nostalgia about television of the fifties, though its difficult to understand why. Of course, the schlock culture of one’s childhood tends to take on a peculiar importance as one grows older, for even the worst of it, from Voodoo comic books to Space Cadet, becomes fondly connected in memory with a youthful time of uncomplicated happiness. That is, watching a 1953 episode of Howdy Doody is as perhaps as evocative of some old timers childhoods these days as Proust’s bite of madeleine was to him. Why should a person of seventy or eighty wax nostalgic over Howdy Doody when the puppet gave them a headache or nightmares in their childhood and youth? Obviously, pervasive influences are at work with the individual caught up in the grip of emotions, nostalgic impulses, where the person is not left to their own devices to tease out the valuable from the mass of dross. ( to be continued)…