A great spiritual confusion arrived during the 1960s and in many ways it came most powerfully through music -- especially rock music, which helped cause monumental societal, moral, and even spiritual change.
In a way that often seems hard to peg, a revolution occurred. There was suddenly long hair. There were t-shirts. There were jeans. There was liberation -- from everything conventional, and from tradition. It was the onset of anti-traditionalism. There was freedom to dress any way. There was freedom to flee religion. There was freedom to use drugs (which replaced the spiritual "high"). There was "free" sex. There were often good intentions spurred by excesses in society but there was also the spirit of rebellion during an intriguing and in many ways dark period that was to deeply alter the moral landscape.
None of this is to impugn the goodness of those who enjoyed such music, nor all of those who produced it. Like most things in life, it was a "mixed bag." Dark was with light.
But dark much of it was, if we want to be honest about it. What was it about the music? How did it have such a hold? Why was it that there was such an "explosion" of rock-and-rollers during that decade?
The best place to look, it would seem, is the most prominent group of that era, and here indeed are keys to the mysterious forces at work (and still in play) in our culture -- as well as insights into the spiritual struggles that beset not only musicians, but all of us as individuals.
I speak here of a book called The Gospel According to the Beatles -- which carefully sets forth what many of us (I include myself as a former Beatle fan) suspected: at the base of the music was often an occult or at least an agnostic force that rose from music -- some of it, at least -- like a genie from a bottle, the cork for which was lost long ago, as the genie, in other guises, still roams.
They were four young men with a traditional Christian background who like so many of us strayed from it and brought the culture with them as those forces -- which we can identify as "magical" (recall the hysteria, the screaming, the raucous concert halls, the fainting women) -- took hold in a monumental way.
"In 1967 the film historian Gene Youngblood argued that, 'The allure, the excitement, the glory of Beatle music is the suspicion that the Beatles might just succeed where magicians of the past have failed,'" points out the author, Steve Turner. "Two years later rock critic Dave Marsh, writing in the pages of the rock monthly Creem, concluded that everything before the Beatles now seemed indistinct and unimportant to him. I Want to Hold Your Hand may not seem significant, but to people my age that is a line of demarcation between history and life as we know it.' The poet Allen Ginsberg concluded in 1984: 'The Beatles changed American consciousness.'"
That they did. But in point of fact they were part of a larger spirit that had been moving for years (starting at least as far back as "beatniks," and probably back to the Roaring Twenties), but one that reached a crescendo in the Sixties -- and largely through the Beatles, who caused an hysteria that was greater even than that spawned by Elvis Presley and explainable only when one entered the realm of the spiritual.
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