Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [130]
The generations who had become adults before the war could compare their postwar lives to those of their parents, or their own pre-war expectations. It was not so easy for them to see, especially when already facing the unchanging imperatives of bringing up a family, that their situation in the new ‘affluent society’ of the West was different in kind as well as in degree from the past. After all, the permanent household chores were not fundamentally changed but only made easier by new technology. Once married, earning a living, looking after children, house and garden, the washing and washing-up still filled most of a couple’s time and thinking. Only the young and mobile could recognize, and utilize, all the possibilities of a society that for the first time gave them enough money to buy what they wanted, enough time to do what they wanted, or that made them independent of the family in other ways. Youth was the name of the secret ingredient that revolutionized consumer society, and western culture. This is dramatically evident in the rise of rock and roll, a music which depends almost exclusively on customers in their teens or early twenties, or those once converted to this music at that age. US record sales grew from $277 million in 1955, the birth-year of rock and roll, to more than $2,000 million in 1973, of which 75–80 per cent represented rock music and similar sounds.
I certainly do not belong to the rock generation. Nevertheless, I was lucky enough to be present at, and to recognize, the birth of that generation in Britain. For, as it happens, in this country a form of jazz created a bridge between the older forms of youthful pop music and the rock revolution. From 1955, when my King’s Fellowship ran out and I returned to live permanently in London, it happened that I found myself professionally involved in the affairs of jazz. Since I now faced paying rent in London, having lived gratis in a Cambridge college, I thought of a way of earning some extra income. It was about this time that the London cultural establishment, stung by the challenge of the so-called ‘angry young men’ of the 1950s, thought it advisable to pay attention to jazz, for which they advertised their passion. The Observer had hired one of them, Kingsley Amis, as a jazz critic. He was already on the way from left-wing youth to conservative old age, but still quite far from the role of reactionary club-bar buffer into which he was later to settle. Having felt inferior to erudite jazz experts since the early 1930s, I knew very well that I was quite unqualified to be one, but it seemed to me that I understood at least as much about the subject as Kingsley Amis and had been familiar with it much longer. I therefore suggested to Norman Mackenzie, an ex-comrade from LSE days, then working on the New Statesman and Nation, that they also needed a jazz critic. The journal was in its glory days under its great editor Kingsley Martin, who neither knew nor cared about jazz, but could see that one had to keep up with this new cultural fashion, at least by a monthly column. He explained to me that in writing for the paper I should bear in mind its ideal typical reader, a male civil servant in his forties, and handed me over to the then commander of the cultural half of the mag, the admirable Janet Adam Smith, who knew almost everything about literature and mountain climbing, and a very great deal about the rest of the arts, but not about jazz. Because I wanted to keep the personalities of the university teacher and the jazz critic apart, for the next ten years or so I wrote under the pseudonym Francis Newton, after Frankie Newton, one of the few jazz-players known to have been a communist, an excellent but not superstar trumpeter who played with Billie Holiday