(Credits: Far Out / Album Covers)
Wed 7 January 2026 22:30, UK
There was a moment in the 1960s’ utopian zenith where the post-war kids truly thought they would change the world.
Such certitude was easy enough in the Summer of Love. Seven years into the decade, the liberatory explosion across music, art, and politics had pulled society to a practically new universe from how it started, the era’s kaleidoscopic flourish unrecognisable to even the Boomers when first leaving the embers of rock and roll behind in their youth.
Yet, the dream soon soured. As the 1960s drew to a close, civil unrest grew fiercer, and the law began to come down hard with a heft, quashing the idyll that scared the straights stiff. With the rock and pop charts having entered a new realm of essentiality as the counterculture’s major soundtrack, naturally, one would think such social convulsions would fuel the day’s underground songbook.
There was plenty of folksy and roots revival reportage on the sign of the times, but few dared to truly point out the 1960s’ symbolic death. Whether via lyrical attack or musical unorthodoxy, a handful of mavericks pushed aside any sentimentality with the mythologised decade and soldiered steadfastly with a statement seeking to tear asunder the Woodstock residue shuffling toward irrelevance.
As the 1970s arrived, we take a look at the five songs that spotted the 1960s’ demise long before anyone else had noticed.
Five songs from 1970 that announced the death of the 1960s:
Related Topics