1959 mammals
Been listening at bedtime to some segments of NBC Monitor from around 1959. (This is the only OTR program that I remember from real life; though many of the soap operas and dramas continued through 1965, I never listened to them.)

Hearing Monitor now, it's damned easy to see why 1959 was the end of an era in popular culture. It's easy to see why 'subversive elements' took over quickly after 1959.

Music was Uniform! Regimented! Hard! Sharp! Punched Out To The Edges! Sir!

Cars were Uniform! Regimented! Hard! Sharp! Punched Out To The Edges! Sir!

Extending the trend was impossible. The envelope was stretched to the limits.

What were the subversive elements? They were the opposite, at least initially. Soft, agile, rounded, variable.

In autodom, we typically give credit to VW, but the real subversive was the Rambler American. [Proof: GM thought VW was the threat, and designed Corvair to answer the threat. Wrong! Lost the sales race to Falcon, which was an answer to the Rambler threat.] Was the American new? Nope, it was a 1953 car that George Romney cleverly brought back to life.

In music, there were separate subversives in the classical and pop fields. Again the 'new' replacements returned to an earlier age. In classical, the Hard! Sharp! Punched! era was replaced by delicate precise Baroque, evangelized by conductors like Trevor Pinnock. In pop, Elvis was the central subversive, followed quickly by the Beatles. Elvis's ballads (but not his hips!) continued a 300-year tradition. The Beatles brought back Gilbert & Sullivan.



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Footnote 1: One of the comments under a Youtube clip of Mitch Miller's singalong was "This is the whitest thing on the planet." Usually such comments are egregiously false, but in this case I have to agree. White as in 'chickenshit Ohioan'. Only one modern thing might possibly be whiter than Mitch: Volksmarsch.

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Footnote 2: Though most of pre-1960 radio has permanently vanished, a new version of Monitor has appeared in the last few years. ABC's weekend service called 'Perspective' has all the structure and flavor of Monitor. In fact Perspective is superior to the latter part of Monitor's long run, because Monitor decayed into mostly music, pretty much a national DJ show. Perspective has maintained the original Monitor concept of news, gossip and features. Kudos to ABC!
  ¶ 3:13 AM