Complacent In The 1950's

After the second world war, many of Europe was completely devastated from all the warfare that had taken place since the beginning of the first world war. Two straight generations participated in a war that killed tens of millions combined, while destroying infrastructure all over the world. By the end of the second war, many were just focused on finally being with their families and recovering what little they had left. So the idea of “change” was most likely coming second to a lot of people. Many families just wanted their old lives back, the ones that were before the wars. That I believe held many people to be complacent at the end of the 1940’s and throughout the 1950’s. However, in the 1960’s and 1970’s a new generation had emerged. One
They were tired being culturally stagnant. They were sick of following the social norm. They were through with seeing the economy move ever so slightly. And so they decided to do something about it. As we have seen multiple times in class, much of the youth were given the label “punk” because of their want to defy social norms and go against the system. All of this is a form of protest, which we have seen many times in the form of new types of entertainment during the times. Protesting was voicing your dissatisfaction to something in society. By doing this publicly, often in different forms of entertainment, it allowed others that felt the same way to have a platform to get behind. It gave people a voice of their won and made them feel accompanied. We’ve seen this in the United States and in the United Kingdom, but that wasn’t the only place where protest music was empowering a
This song came out in 1939, and was continually played in a small café called Café Society for years. Holliday wasn’t even the writer of this song, and in fact it wasn’t even originally written as a song. “Strange Fruit” was at first a poem written by a white Jewish school professor named Abel Meeropel. When Billy Holliday discovered the poem, she changed the title of the poem to Strange Fruit and performed it at the café as her finale. But what was different about her performance of this song was her the style in which she performed it. Essentially, the café stopped working and all eyes were on her. The waiters were halted and the lights were turned off except for a single spotlight on her face. Holliday’s form of protest came through this performance; where she forced the audience to listen to this harsh reality that many tried to escape from. “Strange Fruit” was a protest song aimed towards the civil rights movement that was currently taking place in the United States, particularly focusing on the lynching. Her lyrics, “Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees” give an incredibly powerful image in the listener’s head as to what was taking actually taking place. The song was not meant to dance to, or to listen to for leisure. It was meant to give people an