Youth Counterculture and Its Effects

During the 1960s and 70s, many events had taken place. The country was already several years into the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement had just begun. These occurrences, along with others, would stir the baby-boomer generation to question what they were taught and rebel against the holds society had placed on them. In the world of pop culture, music and film would adapt to the changes by transforming itself into something that would appeal to the young generation. Musicians and artists were now using song lyrics to powerfully convey messages of protest and change, making situations of love and heartbreak, ideas that had always been covered though music, appear less trivial to the events occurring at this time. Hollywood would no longer be hindered by the production code and ultimately take a more brazen approach to film-making. Ultimately, these changes were the result of the counterculture emanating from the era.
Beginning in the latter part of the 1950s, evidence of a developing counterculture could be seen. Using the example of Bill Bernbach in Leroy Ashby’s, With Amusement for All, the advertising executive sought to go outside of the societal norms. Ashby provides “…Bernbach conceded that Volkswagen cars were small and ugly. Here was a shocking departure from familiar advertisements that emphasized American automobiles’ powerful engines, large size, and chrome-covered appeal. Berbach’s VW ads urged people to ‘think small’ and buy a car they could drive cheaply-a kind of ‘anticar’ or cute ‘love bug’”(349). Thus, provided this illustration of social disenchantment, it can also be directly correlated to the counterculture’s subsequent use of the Volkswagen vans that were often painted with messages about love ...

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..., was quite a success on the air, considering that it was perhaps the first of its kind. In addition, Ashby calls attention to this and mentions that the show, “demonstrated the commercial viability of black sitcoms on mainstream television, paving the way for several other series in the 1970s…” (409). Like the film writers and musicians that came before him, he was able to capture the social issues America had been facing and put them into a form of entertainment.
All of these mentioned changes surrounding the 1960s and 70s, presented an ironic situation. On one hand, there was the youth market, a culture that was refusing to conform. On the other hand, it was the entertainment industry that was seeking to conform to the youth’s idealisms. With the given information, it remains quite clear that the pop culture world was transformed by this new counterculture.