Bee Gees member Maurice Gibbs passed away recently. That’s sad, he was quite young.

This has given rise to some editorial reminisces about the 60s. Collin Levey, in her article for the WSJ, said this:

“The difference is that back in the baby boomers’ youth, there were real edges of the envelope. The issues of sex and drugs and freedom and anger and war were new, and raw–they were also in the lyrics of the songs. ”

Um..Sure. Sex, Drugs, Freedom and Anger were invented by the 60s generation. What geniuses they were.

I remember when I was a pre-teen, and I heard some straight-ahead rock music for the first time. I was so excited! I thought that this was the coolest thing I had ever heard! The guitars, and the energy. I bopped around telling everyone that THIS WAS THE BEST MUSIC EVER MADE.

It wasn’t. I learned that when I grew up a little bit. There was better music out there. I gained some experience, some perspective, and was able to evaluate that music in a broader context.

I’m frustrated with narrow-minded view of history Levey’s article represents. Were the hippies the only ones to experience free love? What about the Poet, Lord Bryon? He was a proponent of free love. And George Elliot, the female writer. She gave up the Victorian ideals of marriage and lived in sin with her soulmate, who happened to be married to someone else. She was shunned for that.

Anger…it had been done before the 60s. Ever hear of the French Revolution? And freedom. I think that Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson did some stuff along that line.

Coleridge wrote his drug-induced poem, Kubla Khan, in 1797. That’s quite some time before Bob Marley.

Things happened in the 60s. If you lived through them, they may be particularly significant to you. But don’t make them more than they were! Have some respect and humility. Every person take their place in history behind some people and ahead of others.