mode modem modus: war and everything after

The traditional styles of post-Ragtime jazz (New Orleans, Dixieland) prevailed, softening somewhat into swing music and the big band sound. The ubiquity of radio and improvements in sound recording led to an increased demand for musical turnover and content. Radio programmes now provided live, warm-sounding music provided by sizable bands now augmented by solo singers who could croon softly into the new microphones. The relative affordability of radio sets created a new form of mainstream entertainment. Crooners Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra opened doors for the likes Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

After the war drew to a close the world began to find its feet again. During World War II The French Resistance had provided one role for those who has begun to form a new set of philosophies in the late 1930s. Now the war was over writers and thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir and Albert Camus (a Resistance member) could really get to work. Not since the 1920s had there been such a rush of new ideas, and many of that decades movers and shakers were still at work. Furthermore, while the century’s previous social divisions had been (broadly speaking) class or race-led, now divisions were beginning to show in terms of the mainstream versus the counter culture. In the 1910s the working classes had neither the time nor the money to question their own existence let alone that of society’s mores or political machinations. However two world wars had created an educated, more secular and politically-empowered class; one that wanted to know more and was not happy to simply exist. This new notion of radical questioning was to have a lasting effect on both music-making and fashion as the two practises would become closely linked.

1941 - the USA enters World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
1942 - the use of penicillin to cure infections begins.
1943 - Jean-Paul Sartre publishes Being and Nothingness. The Lockheed Constellation is the first airliner with a pressurized cabin to enter commercial flight.
1945 - atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II ends.
1948 - British National Health Service established. Pierre Schaeffer coins the term musique concrete. Columbia Records unveil the LP (long player) record. Invention of the transistor.
1949 - RCA Victor unveils the 7-inch single. Simon de Beauvoir publishes The Second Sex (1949)

Simone de Beauvoir

In fashion trends, fine art continued to feed inspiration to textile print design, with abstract expressionism adding further non-objective abstraction to the styles at play and likes of Jackson Pollock, Wassily Kandinsky and the ubiquitous Picasso adding to the canon. However the same social and technological changes that were fuelling new markets and ways of thinking also began to have a previously-unseen impact on what people were wearing in the UK. In the early part of the twentieth century fashion had been a trickle-down process, with silhouettes, fabrics - even ways of behaviour - starting with the upper classes, royalty, film stars and designers of haute couture. Ordinary people wore what was practical and an approximation of what the upper echelons could afford. The Space Race and science fiction inspired a raft of design and film ideas. Film stars like James Dean and Marlon Brando sought to epitomise the essence of teenage rebellion. Swing and big band sounds had melded with faster dance styles (like the Jitterbug), gospel vocalizations and the piano rolls of rhythm and blues and boogie woogie to create a new genre: rock’n’roll. Cultural tribes and youth movements developed, some with their very own dress codes. With jazz and skiffle as their music of choice, Teddy Boys adapted the 1940s zoot suit into the neo-Edwardian drape coat along with the D.A. (duck’s ass/arse) be-quiffed and slicked back hair style. Girls wore Capri pants, circular poodle skirts, off-the-shoulder blouses and drainpipe jeans. For the first time fashion designers began to take wholesale looks from the high street and re-work them as their own. Different again were the Rockabillies (where country music met rock’n’roll) and the Rockers (where rock’n’roll gets faster), all with styles that were different yet similar.

Authority and the status quo had long been under question. Artists, composers, musicians and designers had been advocating new ways of thinking and making since the beginning of the century. However one result of advances in social and technological modernism had presented a new set of rules that were open for contention. Thus the Fifties decade is pivotal in defining the difference between the mainstream - mass consumption, consumerism, prevalent white hegemonies - and the counter culture. The teenage/young adult demographic was also that of the student. Charged by access to literature and new thinking, students and teenagers coalesced into a formidable force.

Jazz music had splintered into other genres but it had also taken a few steps forward of its own. And there can be no better style to both describe and sum up the avant garde than free jazz. Very much a child of early-century compositional atonality, Dadasim, Surrealism and Cubism, free jazz questions just about every rule in music. Improvised, spurning following written scores, ignoring established time codes and meters, without structure, of no determined length or adherence to theme. This was sound at its most primitive and a perfect soundtrack to Parisian-based (and now quickly spreading) existentialist thinking. Speaking of Paris, 1951 had seen Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and Jacques Poullin form the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète. Based in RTF buildings the studio played host to the decade’s most experimental musicians and sound artists including Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis and witnessed Schaeffer and Henry’s own investiagtions into the possibilities of sound outside musical norms.

Meanwhile America was undergoing a similar change in regard for convention. A group of friends took to meeting in Greenwich Village, New York to discuss and debate ideas, literature and theories, among them writers Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy and Allen Ginsberg. There’s some discussion as to the etymology of the term Beat Generation (or Beat Poets). One explanation is that the word ‘beat’ means beaten down, exhausted or repressed. Another suggestion is that it alludes to musical syncopation. Either way, the group advocated a similar questioning of convention - and existence - as the European existentialists and the free jazz advocates. Furthermore, a line can be traced back to the first twenty years of the century and the development of collage and assemblage. Similar to the Dadaists, Beat circle member Brion Gysin came across the cut-up technique that relied on creating new content from randomly cut book and newspaper pages. Meanwhile experimental musician John Cage was perfecting his own Chance Operations in which he would use a translation of the I Ching ancient divination text to dictate the outcome and processes of his own compositions. All of these chance techniques (and more) are used in sound and music composition today.

It’s only natural that the followers of the thinkers, musicians and artists noted had a style of their own. And the cliché does apply - they wore black. Black eyeliner, black turtle-neck sweaters, black jeans and black leather jackets.

1950 - Diners Club in America introduce the first credit card.
1953 - Elvis Presley records My Happiness for Sun Records as a self-financed demo.
1954 - invention of the first transistor radio. George C. Devol Jr patented Unimate the first industrial robot.
1955 - Rosa Parks arrested after refusing to give up her bus seat in for a white passenger in Albama, America.
1956 - Jackson Pollock dies in a car crash. The world’s first nuclear power plant opens at Calder Hall in England. The first practical video tape recorder and player unveiled in America. Elvis Presley performs Heartbreak Hotel on Ed Sullivan’s TV show. The film Rock Around the Clock was released in America and the UK. British artist Richard Hamilton exhibits his collage Just What Is It that Makes Today's Home So Different and So Appealing? for the first time.
1957 - Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl draws an obscenity case. The Soviet Union launches Sputnik I, the first ever satellite.
1958 - AT&T unveils the first computer modem. Jack Kerouac publishes his On the Road novel. Jack Kilby invents the integrated circuit - aka the microchip. The Soviet Union launches the first lunar probes.

By now music and street style were intrinsically linked. Fans of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones dressed like their idols. A new, harder-edged rock music had its devotees dressed in leather and riding motorbikes. Mods wearing Italian-style suits and army surplus parkas spent their Bank Holidays scrapping with rockers and/or Teddy boys on seafronts and high streets. The ready availability of drugs had further affiliations: LSD and marijuana accompanied the rise of psychedelia and hippie culture. Pharmaceutical and prescription drugs, barbiturates, amphetamines and dextroamphetamine meant moods were elevated and people could dance for longer. Up and down the country, boutiques and department stores offered fashionable clothing – often now made from man-made fibres - at affordable prices. Towards the end of the decade attention turned to more exotic prints and fabrics as cheaper flights means more time spent abroad.

1960 - La Monte Young moves to New York. First use of the combined oral contraceptive pill in America.
1961 - Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited earth aboard Vostok 1. Beginnings of the Fluxus art movement.
1962 - the first Telstar satellite launched relaying television pictures and telephone calls. The compact audio cassette is invented. Andy Warhol holds his first solo exhibition.
1963 - American president J.F. Kennedy assassinated.
1964 - BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) computer language invented. Robert Moog creates the first voltage-controlled subtractive synthesizer with a keyboard as a controller. Xerox Corporation patent the first commercialized fax machine. Pirate radio station Radio Caroline begins broadcasting off the coast of Great Britain.
1965 - Malcolm X joins the American Civil Rights Movement. The compact disc is invented by James Russell.
1966 - formation of the Black Panther Party. First patent application for fibre optics.
1967 - Ace Tone start selling the FR-1 Rhythm Ace, the first commercially-available drum machine. The Velvet Underground release their The Velvet Underground & Nico album. The second British Broadcasting Channel (BBC2) begins broadcasting its first colour pictures.
1968 - assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
1969 - the moon landing.

Andy Warhol display in the Bonwit Teller department store window in 1961

There’s no clear date to the formation of the Fluxus movement. Suffice to say it started sometime in the 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s and beyond. If it helps, George Maciunas put together a manifesto of sorts in 1963. What is crucial is the movement’s impact on how art and music was conveyed. Fluxus was about total art with no boundaries between disciplines. What’s more, their stated invocation of conceptual art - where the idea was as important as the realisation - brought exciting possibilities to the creative process. Yoko Ono was an early Fluxus artist and the group followed closely John Cage’s unanticipated outcome approach to creating work. Furthermore the group expressed an anti-elitism in their ethos, that the arts should be in the hands of the masses and accessible to all.

The Fluxus Movement’s anti-establishment, quasi-anarchic outlook chimed well with discontent and the kind of rebellious, questioning outlook that had been fermenting since the 1950s. In the late 1960s, King Mob - a group of art provocateurs that were inspired by the Situationist movement - helped distil this outlook and came to the attention of Malcolm McLaren, amongst others. History has shown that McLaren used the prevailing social moods to his advantage, although his partnerships - with clothes designer Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols - certainly helped spread a kind of commodified look and sound of the punk rock movement. A legacy of Fluxus, Dada and 1960s-spawned disaffection, punk was a way of life that dragging anti-fashion, anti-art and anti-music in its wake. With an outlook inspired by The Velvet Underground, American poet/songwriter Richard Hell had started ripping his clothes and skewering them with safety pins in around 1975, the same time that he wrote his seminal anti-society track Blank Generation. Punk rock was about dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with the status quo, with politics, with the government, parents, education…

Parallel to the dissonance of punk, there were other changes in music and style that took their cues from the general malaise. Reading Sartre, Kafka and Nietzsche, some wearing Camus trench coats and sunglasses (even indoors) and with possible associations with art colleges. This was the new wave and it encompassed a counter culture that was somewhat more staid than punk rock. 1977 was the year of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks album but it was also the year that America’s Talking Heads released their debut album 77 and the UK’s Throbbing Gristle released their debut set, The Second Annual Report. The twenty-century new wave (sometimes referred to as No Wave in America) pursued threads started by the Existentialists in the 1940s and 1950s. Protagonists created sounds and music that communicated moods that were often sombre and reflective as well as disaffected. They improvised the use of objects alongside traditional instruments and - as Schaeffer etc. in years before - cut and spliced recorded sound to create new textures. This was the Blank Generation and their do-it-yourself approach meant a further democratization of art, music and design.

1970 - Germaine Greer publishes The Female Eunuch. The floppy disk invented. Kraftwerk album Kraftwerk released.
1971 - LCD display invented.
1972 - Intel introduces its first 8-bit microprocessor. Video cassettes available for domestic use. First programmable word processor with a video screen.
1973 - Motorola demonstrate the first handheld mobile phone.
1975 - Vietnam War ends. The British government passes the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Equal Opportunities Commission is formed.
1976 - first sampling synthesizer was made commercially available.
1977 - Harvey Bernard Milk, the first openly gay American public official - elected to local office. Throbbing Gristle release debut album Second Annual Report.
1979 - first Walkman marketed in Japan. Conservative party leader Margaret Thatcher becomes the first female British Prime Minister. The Sugarhill Gang release the Rapper’s Delight single.