English Audio Request

During the 1950s, a sense of uniformity pervaded in the American society. Conformity was common, as young and old alike followed group norms rather than striking out on their own. Though men and women had been forced into new employment patterns during World War II, once the war was over, traditional roles were reaffirmed: men expected to be breadwinners; women, even when they had work, assumed their proper place was at home.
Television contributed to the homogenizing trend by providing young and old with a shared experience reflecting accepted social patterns. However, not all Americans conformed to such cultural norms - a number of the so-called “beat generation” rebelled against conventional values. Stressing spontaneity and spirituality, they asserted intuition over reason, Eastern mysticism over Western institutionalized religion. The “beats” went out of their way to challenge the patterns of respectability and shock the rest of the culture.
Their literary work displayed their sense of freedom. Jack Kerouac typed his best-selling novel On the Road on a 75-meter of roll of paper. Lacking accepted punctuation and paragraph structure, the book glorified the possibilities of free life. Musicians and artists rebelled as well. Tennessee singer Elvis Presley popularized black music in the form of rock and roll, and shocked more staid Americans with his ducktail haircut and undulating hips. In addition, Elvis and other rock and roll singers demonstrated that there was a white audience who cherished black music, thus testifying to the increasing integration of American culture. Painters like Jackson Pollock discarded easels and laid out gigantic canvases on the floor, then applied paint, sand and other materials in wild splashes of colour.
All of these artists and authors, whatever the medium, provided models for the wider and more deeply felt social revolution of the 1990s. The visible signs of the counterculture permeated American society in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hair grew longer and beards became common. Blue jeans and tee shirts took the place of slacks, jackets and ties. Rock and roll grew, proliferated and transformed into many musical variations. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and other British groups took the country by storm. “Hard Rock” grew popular, and songs with a political or social commentary, such as those by singer-writer Bob Dylan, became common. This youth counterculture reached its apogee in August 1969 at Woodstock, a three-day festival in rural New York State attended by almost half-a-million people. The festival mythologized in films and record albums, gave its name to the era –The Woodstock Generation.