1965: Music's greatest year ever?
Here in the media-saturated 2010s, we get to relive the events of the momentous 1960s in an inexorable year-by-year march.
Last year, the Beatles re-invaded America. Next year, 50th-anniversary journalism will see to it that the miniskirt and Star Trek are born again. In 2017, we'll be tripping on a Summer of Love rehash.
This year, there's a lot on our plate - 1965 was a turning point in American history. As depicted in Ava DuVernay's Selma, it was the year the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights march to Montgomery, Ala., spurred Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Voting Rights Act into law.
In Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein showed how it was also the year that reaction to the Watts riots in Los Angeles helped create the culture-war divide that still defines American political discourse.
And as socio-political tumult grew, pop music stretched itself in response. With rock and roll then a decade old - the Elvis Presley youthquake detonated in 1955 - the music was growing more sophisticated in its rebelliousness.
Was it the greatest single year in the history of pop music? It's hard to argue with James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," and Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone."
By: Dan DeLuca
Source: Philly.com
