On the 1950s and Not Fading Away

This might sound crazy, but I feel like I somehow traveled back in time to the 1950s and returned home safely to 2017 at some point during this year, reaching the conclusion that I like things way better the way they are today.

As a Millennial, I'm not averse to admitting how much cultural appropriation that sentence contains. These days, everything is feeling like a mashup of something else. Originality seems more desirable than ever. 

I sometimes wonder if people won't look back on our generation and perceive us as the ones who had history at our fingertips and could revisit any period if only we weren't so distracted by our computers and phones. We're like the people who visited the moon but couldn't step off the spaceship.

As a child of the 1980s (I was born in 1984), I know as much about the '50s as the following decade, and my parents aren't talking (What was it the flower children always said? "If you remember anything, you weren't there?")

When I say I feel like I traveled back, I don't mean I woke up one morning in a poodle skirt, listened to the Ronettes and hung out with my friends at the drive-in eating hamburgers and drinking milk shakes while honking for curb service, although that does sound pretty fun.

Nor am I referring to President Trump or the rumors that to "Make America Great Again," he meant opening the vault of one of the most misogynistic, racist and materialistic periods in American history and making it now.

What I mean is that in my mind, the 1950s offer an eternal perspective – the midcentury blitz that will always be preserved in people's minds as a time when life moved in stereo, when we didn't just have good but great fun with our friends in fabulous cars on sunset boulevards.

In this sense, the 1950s were retro before they even happened, as much a style or essence as a period in time.

I enjoy hearing stories from people who survived the decade. Lately, my husband has been practicing the Buddy Holly song "Not Fade Away" on electric guitar, and today, I looked up some of the lyrics to the famous song:

"My love a-bigger than a Cadillac

I try to show you and you drive a-me back.

Your love for me a-got to be real

For you to know just how I feel

A love for real not fade away."

I noticed that this is one of the most hopeful and cynical songs I've heard. Not only is Buddy Holly comparing his love to a Cadillac, there's an undertone that the love might not survive, while the Cadillac will. The song is hopeful in that it's about love, but it's also very materialistic.

That's how I imagine the 1950s actually were. They set a standard based on materialism and then challenged people to transcend it by love alone. 

Could that be done?

Yes, but for how long? The '50s lasted only a decade. Not very long in the grand scheme of things, and since I tend to think we measure history not by decades, but by centuries and millennia, the years probably felt much smaller when they were happening.

Why is this?

I think it's because they're tangible through an ever-growing nostalgia – the kind that helps keep drive-in diners like the Bun 'N' Barrel on Austin Highway popular in 2017. It's also a way of commemorating the past while keeping it accessible and current.

The Bun 'N' Barrel has been offering burgers and barbecue to San Antonio patrons since 1950s from its location at 1150 Austin Highway.

Does it really matter what time we're traveling back to – or if we ever actually go on the trip – if we know we can go there anytime?

I think technology has taken this idea a step further. I think we might be witnessing a key moment when we can actually glimpse another time period and decide if we want to venture there. 

Skipping ahead to the '60s – a time when people seemed to try to forget everything they learned 10 years earlier.

From what I've heard (not much,) the '60s counterculture might actually have been as spectacular as people who were there say it was. The free love, walking around barefoot and not caring about showing up to work wearing the previous night were real.

In the '50s, when people said you looked tired, it was a euphemism for "You look like shit." In the '60s, no one cared. You could show up to work with tangled hair and dilated pupils. It didn't matter. You were a living, breathing, organism. You had roots and a history, and every day you were growing, expanding, into an even more organic being.

It's no wonder that when we watch TV shows like "Mad Men" that pay homage to the '50s, they're doused in alcohol. Alcohol is an antiseptic, and the '50s were defined by cleanliness, bright, gleaming surfaces and interior lighting.

People couldn't help getting in touch with their grittier side a decade letter. They wanted to discover what they'd suppressed or forgotten about by aspiring to such rigid ideals.

When I looked up the word "decade," I learned that its Latin root, beyond the Greek meaning "the root of ten," is literally "a falling away," a decay.

I wonder if when Buddy Holly wrote "Not Fade Away," he was heeding the inevitable decline of certain ideals to follow. Is the song an antidote not only to the decadence of the era, but decay itself – the tumult of the '60s and the events of the previous decade that led to them?

In America, we go through many iterations of history. Our values change constantly. We've often seen things in black and white and transcended the racism and vitriol that marks our history, only to revisit it all over again.

Why does this happen? Why revisit a period that we'd supposedly put behind us?

I didn't travel back to the 1950s, but I have my answer. We all want the best of both worlds. We don't want to fade away.

So why am I afraid that now it's going to come at a higher cost?

Featured photo: Oil painting, "Burger in the Clouds," 20 x 32" on canvas. (Photo and painting copyright Undercover San Antonio.)