Simon and Garfunkel wrote so many songs I can identify with. The older I get, the more I reflect back on the music of my youth and how the lyrics described contemporary events and moods of the 60's and 70's. There are so many songwriters from that time period that were good at social commentary. Maybe I've just lost touch with modern culture, but it seems to me that we've lost that element of artistic expression in today's popular amusic. Perhaps it's my lack of understanding rap and hip hop, though. I suspect there is a lot of commentary in those forms if one could get past the misogynistic and foul-mouthed loudness.
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my favorite poets of the 60s & 70s used music and lyrics as a contemplative tool asking their audience to 'think' -- not blindly accept the world as it was.
"sign, sign, everywhere a sign
blockin' out the scenery,
breakin' my mind
Do this ... don't do that ... can't you read the sign?
My generation's music asked us to imagine a different world -- a better world or the future.
"Old friends, old friends
sat on their parkbench like bookends
A newspaper blowin' through the grass
Falls on the round toes of the high shoes of the old friends "
And the music of my youth asked me to ask the question of myself 'what do you want to be'
I can still feel how powerful "It's a Beautiful Day" had on me with "Girl With No Eyes" ...'Doesn't eveybody know, everybody know,love takes a lifetime'
Following today's music, I don't hear anything that asks their audience to think or imagine...rather sad isn't it?
Yes, indeed, it is.
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