Long 1960s: Pop Music, Counterculture, and Black Awakening

This course explores the political movements of the 1960s alongside the music that inspired and fired them in order to better understand our shared history, American identity, and the present social crisis. Combining historical and cultural studies approaches, we engage with the tumultuous history of the 1960s by looking at the intersection of popular music, freedom songs, and the conditions that led to profound social changes. We explore journalism, film, scholarly, and creative literature to explore what happened, what was said to have happened, and how music informed the unfolding events and currents of the time. We explore the dialectic of politics and music, knowing that songs such as "Go Tell It On the Mountain" and "Motor City Burning" reported on events, responded to events, shaped events, and entertained the masses along the way. The music of the 1960s incorporated Afro-American rhythms, structures, and sounds, contributing to what some scholars and activists consider a Black awakening that continues to influence our social movements today. By exploring the religious and political dimensions of this music, we better understand the social, psychological, and cultural criticisms that arose from the civil rights movement and the counterculture, resulting in changing identities as well as potent resistance to social change. Each week utilizes specific songs as a basis for the lectures and online discussions. Music is studied in the cultural and political contexts in which they were written, sung, recorded, marketed, and sold. This enables us to understand the 1960s as a long historical period, including cultural aspects of World War II, the civil rights movement, the United Farmworkers Huelga, the Vietnam War, and into the Nixon years. Many of the issues that defined the 1960s are being re-litigated, debated, and interpreted in the present. Ultimately, the residue of the sixties is still shaping the current political climate and the cultural worlds we live in.