So Many Musical Geniuses Died in 2016. What Built the Golden Age They Thrived In?

The 1960s through the 1980s are seen as music's golden age. Where did it come from, and why did it fade?

"2016 was destined to become the saddest year in music history."

That was a headline on The Huffington Post's website. The piece ran in April, and by then the music world had already lost David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Merle Haggard and Prince.

"It's only April, and 2016 may not be the saddest year in music history, but it's at least one of the saddest," the report said.

In the months that followed, one musician after another left the stage: Leonard Cohen, Leon Russell, Greg Lake, George Michael...

By the time 2016 became history, Wikipedia's entry on rock musicians who died that year listed nearly 190 names — close to the total for the previous two years combined.

Sadder still, a large share of them were the masters who had been active from the 1960s through the 1980s, the people who built music's golden age. It may sound cruel to say so, but on an average life expectancy of 80, their time was probably up anyway. Musicians, it seemed, had entered an age of collective farewell.

Mourning these masters, we inevitably look back at the abundance they built together. The 1960s through the 1980s are seen as music's golden age partly because music itself was so varied — able to draw nourishment from reality and grow into a force that could change the world — and partly because musicians held to a spirit of ceaseless exploration.

But that isn't the whole story. Going back over this history, trying to work out how the golden age arrived and how it faded, we found a string of other factors at work. In short, that dazzling, disorderly golden age is hard to reproduce. It may turn out to be a one-off.

We miss it badly.

Television made mass culture possible — the prelude to the golden age

Television spread fast across the United States after the war. By 1960, it had reached 90% of American households. It let the baby boomers form their character through shared experience, producing America's "first unified national culture."

In 1960, the Kennedy-Nixon debate was the first presidential debate broadcast live on American television; because of that broadcast, a candidate's looks became as important as his arguments and his ideas. In 1968, the famous CBS war correspondent Walter Cronkite attacked American involvement in Vietnam on television, in front of the whole country, and did more than anyone to turn opinion against the war. In 1969, 94% of American viewers who owned a set watched Neil Armstrong's small step on the moon from their screens, and enthusiasm for spaceflight reached a high it had never seen before.

Because of television, music and musicians found a place in national popular culture too. Musicians were no longer bound by geography; they became figures who could reach a whole country, even a whole world.

On February 9, 1964, 34% of Americans — more than 73 million viewers — watched the Beatles' first appearance on the talk show The Ed Sullivan Show after landing in the United States. That episode is still one of the highest-rated in the show's history.

The British band was already hugely popular on the other side of the Atlantic. But if television hadn't let audiences take in the members' words, manner and stage presence in three dimensions, the phrase that entered history — "Beatlemania" — might never have been coined.

The music critic Robert Christgau described what that episode did for the Beatles: "That first appearance [on television] turned what might have been a flash in the pan into a huge wave."

After the show, the Beatles played their first American concerts, in Washington, D.C., and New York, drawing a combined audience of about 10,000.

On February 16 they were back on The Ed Sullivan Show, again pulling more than 70 million viewers.

There were surely musicians before the Beatles who reached the same artistic heights. But with no medium able to carry them whole and carry them far, they never stirred waves to match their art.

It may have been an accident, but television meant music was no longer only notes: the voice behind the work was pushed to the front as a face. The musician's side as a person registered with an audience as it never had before.

That the English phrase "rock star" now stands for the leading figure in any field is largely television's doing.

A rich, varied world of ideas gave music its best soil

The title song of Bob Dylan's 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin' has these lines: Come senators, congressmen / Please heed the call / Don't stand in the doorway / Don't block up the hall.

In 1963, segregation was still widespread in the United States. The governor of Alabama stood in a schoolhouse doorway to keep two Black students from enrolling. Dylan wrote the song after that incident, the "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door," as an answer to it.

The song is treated as the prototype of the protest song, and it wasn't the only track on The Times They Are A-Changin' taken from the politics of the moment. Through music, Dylan joined the civil rights movement then at its height, and became a political spokesman — even the voice of a generation. He described the link between the civil rights movement and the 1960s folk revival this way: "The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time."

Civil rights and folk were plainly not the only alliance the 1960s produced. Every idea born and flourishing in that unsettled decade — opposition to the war, civil rights, environmentalism, the hippies, sexual liberation — widened the thinking behind nearly every kind of music being made. Country was no longer just a picture of rural scenery, rock found a source of turbulence, and punk began to take shape in the tide of rebellion.

The discontent with the present and the hunger for freedom and peace that ran through the music became a footnote to an era. More important, the part music played in that era showed people another possibility: music was no longer confined to art, but had become a public matter for a whole society.

In 1969, the Woodstock festival, billed as "3 Days of Peace & Music," drew 400,000 people. There the folk queen Joan Baez, six months pregnant, sang "We Shall Overcome," urging Black Americans to fight for their freedom; Country Joe McDonald let loose the sardonic anti-war "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag"; and John Sebastian offered "Young Generation" as a gift to the new generation in front of him. That summer at Woodstock became a landmark twice over — in the history of music and for the counterculture generation.

Acting on those ideals in an unsettled era brought plenty of setbacks and plenty of disillusion. But people saw more clearly than ever before that music could change society.

Those who came after kept that belief — David Bowie's and Prince's daring, androgynous images and musical styles were both cases of artists who wanted to be citizens in their capacity as musicians.

Technology and a complete industry chain pushed music out across the country

After the Second World War, the recording technologies built around music matured. Recording extended music beyond the live performance, and each improvement in it raised music's aesthetics.

Multitrack recording, a milestone still in use today, arrived in the mid-1950s. It gave music layers, an experience even a live show could not match at the time. The Beach Boys used a huge array of instruments on the single "Good Vibrations," working the art of multitracking into something that felt symphonic.

At the same time, PVC vinyl replaced brittle shellac in the early 1950s and took over the market. Before long the 45-rpm single became the dominant sales format. It fit what young people wanted: to keep up with the trends without much money to spend.

A single meant two songs packaged on one disc. It had an A-side and a B-side: the A-side usually carried the chart song, the one most likely to become a hit and get picked up by radio, while the B-side was the weaker draw.

The sudden arrival of the vinyl single lifted the small record companies. Independent labels — indies — generally means small labels operating outside the giants, at least when it comes to signing artists and making the work. "Independent" describes more than an economic structure; it describes an attitude.

Loose structures made these small labels good at bringing out new work. They were catholic in taste, too, taking in blues, gospel, rock, modern jazz, country and more. More important, most of the people working at them had come out of music production and could hear what was good, which kept the indies' output driven by content.

From 1948 to 1954, the golden age of the independent label, roughly 1,000 new labels sprang up around the country. Between artists and independent labels a healthy relationship formed, one that favored the art.

Sun Records shows neatly how technology and companies together fed music's flowering across the country. Sam Phillips founded the independent label in 1952. He could handle record production, sound engineering and other jobs that sat close to the music itself.

That ear let the label find Elvis Presley, one of the greatest musicians in history. "That's All Right, Mama," taken as the starting point of Elvis's career, was cut at Sun with Phillips producing. He brought slap-back delay to the track, a technique that used an echo unit to repeat the melody a beat late, creating an echo. Sun used it widely on the rockabilly records it released afterward.

But the good times didn't last: commerce absorbed music, and music turned mediocre

The music market that had bloomed soon changed shape, as one wave of mergers followed another.

Many things drove the consolidation — the rise of the CD in the 1980s, for one, which cost about ten times as much to make as vinyl, a bill many small labels could not pay. Seen more broadly, though, the growing concentration of the culture industry was itself a feature of late capitalism, and record companies were swept into the merger tide along with everything else.

The big record companies began to consolidate the industry and became the giants that set the market's tone. By 1988, six labels ran it: Warner, EMI, Bertelsmann, Universal, Sony and PolyGram.

Chasing maximum profit, the majors hunted for any shortcut to quick success. MTV rose at exactly that moment, and they saw their opening.

By the late 1980s, MTV reached nearly 20 million American households. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, 85% watched regularly. By the 1990s it had 2.8 million paying subscribers and was adding 1 million to 3 million a year.

MTV became the most effective way to launch a new artist and manufacture a star. Deliver visual impact in a video and you had a good chance of getting rich and famous fast. Commercial success in music now meant spending heavily on the video: by 1991, 80% of the songs on the Billboard Hot 100 came with one.

Record companies worked the shortcut hard, and the videos grew alike. The form was called Music Video, but Music had become the servant of Video — whether a song suited a video replaced quality as the test of it. Music began to turn mediocre. By the 1990s, MTV's own executives were complaining that the form had lost its freshness, and that the clips submitted to them were often naive to the point of ignorance.

Musicians held less and less control over their own work, and could pay for holding to their own ideas. George Michael, who wanted to make more grown-up records, refused to promote Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 with a video and refused to shoot the ones his label designed. He and Sony Music fell out and ended up in court. At one point George Michael went six years without releasing an album.

The consolidation didn't stop there. By 2004 the industry's giants were down to four: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI.

Independent labels kept their attention on making the work. The giants paid more attention to selling it, and their structures and priorities stood at the opposite pole from the small labels': more and more lawyers and accountants joined the payroll, and the music inside these companies was diluted.

"The record business now belongs to the corporations," said the music manager Michael Williams. "Half of the four major labels are run by people who came up as accountants. These people don't understand music. They think it's a game about numbers, but music has always gone by feeling. I don't think things get better for music until these people come back to 'I want to go by feeling again, instead of putting so much weight on the data.' But that's hard now."

Meanwhile the population changed, the share of young people fell, and the voice of exploration faded

The baby boom left young people everywhere in the 1960s and '70s. By the 1980s, their share of the population was falling.

In 1960, Americans aged 10 to 24 made up 23% of the population. That group passed a quarter of the country in both 1970 and 1980 — 28% and 26.8% — but by 1989 it had dropped to 21.5%. The median age of U.S. residents was 29.5 in 1960 and 28.1 in 1970; from 1980 on, it never fell below 30 again.

The restless young settled down, married and took jobs, and their lives changed. Most became the thing they had once rebelled against, chasing a quiet, secure life. The rise of the middle class, with no fresh rebellious blood coming in behind it, made a polished, careful, self-protective set of values the mainstream.

Music lost an important part of its spirit. Sincere work made slowly grew rarer, and music no longer held up over time. Fewer people were making music seriously, while the itch to sign with a major and become a star overnight ran wild.

So the golden age, full of dazzling and various work, drew further and further away, and the curtain finally came down.

The masters shone without help from the glow of the years — but fewer and fewer people were paying attention

Put the builders of that golden age side by side and you find a great deal in common: high artistry; inspiration drawn from every part of life; a hold on their original purpose through a changing era; a curious mind about anything new and the knack of picking it up fast; work that they never put down, even in the last stage of life.

They kept working quietly, but their influence seemed to drain away with time and never come back. Only when death arrived did it leap up again.

In 2016, a few days after news of a master's death, a second piece of news would often follow — how far attention to him had surged. One day after David Bowie died, his Spotify streams jumped 2,700%; Blackstar, released two days before his death, went to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart in its first week. Three days after Prince died, his album sales rose 420-fold. One day after George Michael died, his Spotify streams rose 3,158%.

These men were creating at the end of their lives at no lower a level than in their most famous years — the last albums by David Bowie and Leonard Cohen both made the top ten of Rolling Stone's 50 best albums of 2016.

But if they had not left this world, how much of a stir would they, and this fine work, have caused?

In the end, the times had changed.

Cover image via Flickr