A Soft Soundtrack of Lowered Expectations: Excerpts from Middling

I put out an occasional newsletter about music, books, work, and getting older. You can subscribe to it in the sidebar. My next issue is coming out next week and I'd love for you to get it. Here's a taste of what happens there: This is from last summer's issue, in which I reflect on the experience of turning fifty.

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I once read an entire book dedicated to the big transition in pop music that took place in 1970, the year of my birth. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the book argues, a playlist of social disruption ceded airtime to a soft soundtrack of lowered expectations. The Beatles broke up, Simon and Garfunkel broke up, Crosby, Stills and Nash broke up. James Taylor moved into the void with his Sweet Baby James, a record that included, among other things, a veiled reference to the collapse of his own sixties-era band (“Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground”) and a cover of “Oh! Susanna,” a Stephen Foster song first made famous by minstrel singers in blackface in the decade before the Civil War. Some progress is not progress.

The book is self-servingly myopic, largely ignoring what was taking place in every genre of pop music (let alone all other music forms) outside of its preselected subjects. But I enjoyed reading it nonetheless, and (melancholic that I am) I find it compelling that the year of my birth could be considered a year of a kind of musical death.

Some spectacular records were released in 1970, including Sweet Baby James (“Oh! Susanna” notwithstanding, it deserves its popularity), Bridge over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel, Moondance by the great Van Morrison, and the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar, not to mention two records from the Beatles (Hey Jude and the immortal Let It Be) and Stevie Wonder’s wonderful Signed, Sealed, and Delivered. You can hear the sixties-fatigue in the title tracks from The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, and in Wonder’s plaintive “Heaven Help Us All.”

We are also, notably, confronted with the harsh reality that even when we grow tired of the hard things in the world, they don’t just go away because we wish it. As CSNY sang about the Kent State shooting that year, “How can you run," they shouted in four-part harmony, "when you know?” Heaven help us all, indeed.