The Spirit of the Age
Apart from being a track from Hawkwind’s amazing Quark Strangeness and Charm album of 1977, the spirit of the age is a concept representing the mood of a particular slice of history which I’ve always assumed to be expressed and felt ‘in real time.’
The Flower Power movement of the late 1960’s was probably the first time I became aware of the *flavour* of such an intimate personal observation when, approaching my teens, I was in the back of my parent’s car, (a cherry red Ford Anglia), as we drove down through Yeovil town centre.
Suddenly we were no longer moving. Instead, we had to wait while a, seemingly, never ending line of magically dressed people ringing little bells, paraded past the car while shouting and singing messages and songs of love and peace.
Hippies! The Flower Power movement. Messengers from who knows where delivering me, a young lad not yet turned 13, a sensation and a feeling imported all the way from an American 1960’s that had already stamped its spirit all over that vast continent.
—
I didn’t feel the zeitgeist of the early1970’s or 1980’s in the same way I did with those brightly clad, attractive hippies mentioned above simply because I was within both of those later decades, (as a skinhead, a suede-head and later, fashion wise, as a token punk) and living it in real-time but I did recognise, by then, that indeed “The times they are a-changin” and continue to change with each decade, each generation and each newly sworn in political party.
I’m interested to learn how you first blossomed into youth and went on to become a young man or woman making your own way out into the world.
What was the zeitgeist that captured the backdrop that your life would have been framed within or around? What events happening in your young world shaped or made the early version of you? And was there a moment, a person or a famous event that summed up and represented you, the age, the zeitgeist and everything?
For example; For me, A Clockwork Orange, (the movie), summed up the 1970’s, its mood, its flavour and my part in it though, officially, the zeitgeist of the 1970’s was based upon the growth of feminism and the genre of music it gave us.
Anyway. Feel free to share your own thoughts or stories.
About the Author
