Current Research and Writing
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Downtown: Sixties British Pop, Outside In
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| Americans declared that the sudden appearance of artists such as The Beatles,The Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield, and Petula Clark constituted a British invasion; but this phenomenon represented a localized experience of the cultural globalization that swept the world. Indeed a few years before this declaration, the London music press had complained of an American invasion of their musical world. Several vehicles played a role, but the telecommunications and transportation revolutions as evidenced in postwar Britain constitute the main factors. |
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Representing “The Sixties” presents numerous challenges, notably because people experienced the era differently depending on their age, gender, class, ethnicity, location, and nationality, to mention only the most obvious variables. The majority of historians (e.g., Arthur Marwick 1998) agree that one of the dominant features of the period resides in the depth and rate of cultural change. Even Dominic Sandbrook (2005), who emphasizes the continuity of the sixties with the previous decades, observes that individuals believe that that significant changes occurred.
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Downtown explores this cultural landscape by positing that the British pop-blues phenomena of 1956-1970 demonstrates both continuity and change in the cultural context of the technological and social evolution that characterized this milieu. This study—part history and part ethnography—illustrates this argument through examinations of recordings and interviews (both published and original). Notably, this book will apply ideas such as cosmopolitanism and globalization, the social and physical construction of physical and temporal space, public and private space, and other relevant approaches to the study of this significant musical culture.
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| Projected publication 2021. |
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| Academic Detritus | Return to Thompson Homepage |
5 April, 2018
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