Is Jazz, Popular and Commercial Music Inextricably Linked to Questions of Generation?

Essay by kestrelxoxUniversity, Bachelor'sD+, December 2005

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- coevals: all the people living at the same time or of approximately the same age

- group of genetically related organisms constituting a single step in the line of descent

- the normal time between successive generations; "they had to wait a generation for that prejudice to fade"

- the act of producing offspring or multiplying by such production

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Every generation in pop, commercial and jazz music have cherished music, but is the music they create linked only to each one? During these decades, came a new social group, the 'teenager'. The age group was created in the fifties due to the emergence of colleges and universities. This prolonged the interval, during which a child had to transform into an adult. These students were given a place where they could meet other young people in their own generation and share ideas and common interests. This created a completely new market for music, as beforehand; the only market with disposable income had been for adults.

The youth culture embraced many aspects of commercialism and fashion often rebelling against the ways of the previous generation. The concept of youth became more and more of a commodity creating an image of the young adult or teenager being the peak of many people's lives. This was reflected heavily in music with many young pop stars emerging and often fading to obscurity or dying before the age of thirty.

There are many examples of songs that are specific to generation, rock and roll songs from the fifties, psychedelic music from the sixties, punk rock from the seventies and new romantics from the eighties. Most generations can identify with at least one of these movements, as an important use of music throughout the decades is to give the people their own voice and a...