Hardest thing to understand
Feb. 10th, 2014 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissaSo the hardest thing for me to understand about the Beatles’ arrival 50 years ago, from a firmly post-Beatles lifetime, is not any of this stuff, because whatever, critics don’t get things all the time, and particularly adult critics don’t get teen culture all the time. “Adult critics don’t get teen culture” is right up there with “something something teens sex oh noes” for stories they could recycle endlessly to keep newspapers running forever without having to think about it.
No, what I don’t get is: people thought their hair was long. Go look at the pictures, they’re all over major news outlets. That is what people in February of 1964 thought was “long hair” on men. That. It’s like, maybe a couple inches longer than Ed Sullivan’s hair? It was cut with a scissors instead of a clipper? Therefore “long hair”?
This was a world that had seen ten million portraits of Jesus as a white dude with shoulder-length hair. This world had seen the Founding Fathers, the Cavaliers, Confucians, Little Lord Fauntleroy. And circa 1964 Beatles hair was long?
The thing that is so profoundly weird about the 1950s and 1960s in America, fashion-wise, is that there was this historically bizarre confluence of affluence, female skill with needlework, and expectation of conformity. That exploded after–yes, there’s “this year’s style,” “this year’s colors,” we may grumble if we have a hard time finding shirts as long as we want or pants as narrow, but the range of choice is stunning, and the amount that’s accepted–sometimes accepted as mildly dumpy or unfashionable, but accepted all the same–once you’ve left the world of high fashion is staggering. Before that period, mass communication and mass affluence just had not reached that peak where very many people had more than a few things to wear.
So the Beatles showed up and everyone apparently went, “GASP LONG HAIR THOSE SHAGGY SHAGGY MEN MY GOLLY THE SCANDAL.” And it’s not that I find it hard to understand why having long hair was scandalous, although a bit of that too. It’s that they did not have long hair. It’s that I find it so hard to grasp a world where the range of permissible was that tiny.
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Date: 2014-02-10 06:49 pm (UTC)(I am perhaps more finely tuned to that particular distinction, because that's the level of shaggy that my hair gets when I feel about a month overdue for a haircut. But even so! That's only a few weeks!)
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Date: 2014-02-10 06:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-11 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 07:58 pm (UTC)But we've all forgotten how hardcore the drive for absolute conformity was in those days. An A student could be kicked out of school if he didn't have white sidewalls. Not that most boys would dare have hair longish on the sides because THAT WAS GIRRRLY.
We all dressed exactly alike, and if anyone strayed, the hyper vigilant school authorities (and your peers) would come down on you like a ton of bricks.
So the Beatles were startling because they had really, really long hair (comparatively) and even more startling, they didn't wear a sport jacket and ties! Shock! Decadence! Order and civilization were FALLLLLINGGGGGG!
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Date: 2014-02-10 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 08:49 pm (UTC)High school class of '62, we had closets full of different dresses. It was just that you couldn't wear them all the same year, unless you changed the hemline. So mostly, you just kept the wrong hemlined ones in the closet till another year, when that length would come round again.
Then there was a year of mini-skirts as the strict standard. Then next year the markets tried to drop the skirts down below the knee, like WWII. Couldn't lengthen the mini-skirt. The WWII length skirts had all been shortened and fiddled with too many times, they wouldn't go that long either.
So we all rebelled. We got hippie back to the land long comfortable elastic waist skirts, at all different lengths. Stopped wearing bras too. They had to make new window mannequins with nipples.
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Date: 2014-02-10 09:26 pm (UTC)She worked for a school, and had to supervise the playground as part of her duties. During that winter, if female school employees showed up in pants (as one might be tempted to do because it was cold out), they would be sent home. But a teeny miniskirt? No problem.
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Date: 2014-02-10 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 11:35 pm (UTC)But this does remind me of how my elderly aunt and other folks from my grandparents' generation hated beards (including mine), because everyone in their youth was clean-shaven...despite the fact that everyone in their grandparents' generation had beards down to their chests.
This also reminds me that my father, who was a teenager in the 1950s, thinks to this day that the Beatles ruined music.
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Date: 2014-02-10 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-11 06:16 am (UTC)(In case you need more to dislike him for, C.S. Lewis has a bit in the Screwtape Letters about how men growing their hair long and women cutting their hair short is one of the elder demon's projects, as I recall. I suspect hair about the Beatles' length is what he's referring to.)
That sense, that the range of the permissible is so small, is all part of why I left that place, and why I'm happier to have done so.
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Date: 2014-02-13 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 03:56 am (UTC)I do find some bits about male grooming (beards, or lack thereof) in Screwtape, but they're not about hair specifically. Much more about female ideals of beauty, not entirely surprisingly. (The book I read was a library copy, and I'm having dubious luck turning things up on Amazon's "search inside this book" feature.)
So, uh. Yeah, that C.S. Lewis. But maybe not that sentiment exactly in Screwtape.
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Date: 2014-02-11 01:03 pm (UTC)I was thinking about it when I re-read a John Wyndham time travel story a little while ago -- in the story a woman time travels and meets her future self about seven years on, and there is this thing with fashion where before she realises she's in the future she walks down the street and has a horrible realisation that last year's skirt that she put on thinking it was OK is now awful and unacceptable and frumpy and she was wrong and is now mortified and dashes into a clothes shop, and then when she is back in the past wearing her future skirt, she thinks how awful the skirt she bought in the future was and dashes in to the same clothes shop... and I suddenly thought that when I read this in 1980 it made perfect emotional sense to me, and now it is something from another world, as much as Gissing's thing with the man who embezzled money because his hat blew off and he couldn't be seen without a hat.
These days there is fashion, yes, but it is so much better. So very very very much better. I love living in the future. I plan to do a lot more of it!
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Date: 2014-02-12 07:32 pm (UTC)K.
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Date: 2014-02-12 08:33 pm (UTC)