Sir Mick Jagger, John Lennon and other famous musicians were more concerned with cashing in on the Swinging Sixties than being the spokesmen of their generation
Lennon, Jagger bothered more about money than youth culture
LONDON: Sir Mick Jagger, John Lennon and other famous musicians were more concerned with cashing in on the Swinging Sixties than being the spokesmen of their generation, according to a Cambridge University historian. They simply wanted to sell records and did not care about being rebellious youth leaders, Dr David Fowler has claimed in a new book about youth culture.
Fowler said: “The 1960s are often viewed as the point at which youth culture in this country exploded, but they were the years in which the idea began to fall apart. People forget that real youth movements are about a lot more than spending and consumerism – they are a way of life.”
He added: “Groups like The Beatles were basically capitalists interested in enriching themselves through the music industry. They did about as much to represent the interests of the nation’s young people as The Spice Girls did in the 1990s." Most 18 to 25-year-olds could not access the “Swinging London” portrayed in films of the era, that was reserved for an elite of rock stars and actors like Sir Michael Caine, he argued. The Rolling Stones bought country houses, while Sir Mick told an interviewer who asked if he regarded himself as a spokesman for his generation that he saw himself only as a musician.
Fowler said truly subversive youth movements actually reached their peak in the inter-war years. His research for his book Youth Culture In Modern Britain concentrated on Rolf Gardiner, a languages student at St John’s College in Cambridge from 1921 to 1924.
He championed a “cult of youth", espousing “back to nature” values that were truly different from his parents’ generation, said Dr Fowler. By 1939 networks of like-minded youth groups had spread across country borders and class boundaries, he said.
But a state of “collective amnesia” about earlier decades meant the original youth movements were forgotten, he said, and the Sixties wrongly taken to be the time when youth culture began.
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