- But that's not true. - I’m supposed to say to you:

“You represent everything I don’t understand.”

But so far I understand everything you've said and so far you say you trust me

-I shall not put down a whole group of people because of some of them

-Well, in addition to the age I represent: I represent a bourgeois family man,

I represent an institution like the New York Philharmonic which I am the head of

I represent establishment if you wish in a way I hate that word

and I don't like to think of myself that way but that's something that you would naturally rebel against.

- Yes... - But I don't find you rebelling against me,

I would like to...

This is David Oppenheim for CBS News. What this broadcast is about is the gap,

the aching gap between the two generations;

we of the middle-agers trying to understand, the young ones trying to explain.

Tonight these young ones are pop musicians... on tour

Singing their own songs...

...and just explaining.

-The kids today aren't just going to accept what's laid down for them by the older generation.

-We want to have the adults around, we just don't want them constantly tell us what to do.

-Pop singers get through to millions of people and I really mean millions.

-What kind of people are they? They don't get through to the adults.

- They get through to the kids that are gonna become adults.

- Lot of the kids that are walking around the street with long hair,

Lot of kids that you see from time to time and wretch over

are going to be running your government for you.

Music is the key to all this and so the first part of this broadcast

is a look at the songs themselves; both the notes and the words.

For this phase here's Leonard Bernstein. -For a long time now I've been fascinated

by this strange and compelling scene called pop music.

I say strange because it's unlike any scene I can think of in the history of all music.

It's completely of, by and for the kids.

By kids I mean anyone from 8 years old to 25.

They write the songs, they sing them, own them, record them.

They also buy the records, create the market. They set the fashions in the music, in dress,

in dance, in hairstyle, lingo, social attitudes.

And I say compelling because it shows no sign of abatement;

The fads change, the groups change,

but the songs keep coming increasingly odd, defiant and free.

This music raises lots of questions but right now for openers

here are the two that concern me most: 1. Why do adults resent it so?

and 2: Why do I like it?

CBS News presents in color:

brought to you by

-I came to these songs naturally through my children

but I have a sneaky feeling I would have heard and responded to them anyway.

After all they are part of music which is my world

and a part that is so pervasive as to be almost inescapable.

Many parents do try to escape this music

and even forbid it on the grounds that it is noisy, unintelligible or morally corruptive.

I have neither escaped nor forbidden it, neither as a musician, nor as a father.

I think this music has something terribly important to tell us, adults,

and we would be wise not to behave like ostriches about it.

Besides as I said: I like it.

Of course, what I like is maybe 5% of the whole output which pours over this country

like the two oceans from both coasts, and it's mostly trash.

But that good 5% is so exciting and vital

and may I say significant, that it claims the attention of every thinking person.

Ok, let's get down to some specific songs, to the music itself.

Here's a cheery beat by the Beatles.

Now, that's not just cheery, it's also very unorthodox.

For one thing: it suddenly, if you noticed, leaves out a beat,

so that an ordinary 4 beat measure becomes a 3 beat measure, listen...

You see just 1 sudden bar of 3 among all those fours.

We never used to find that in pop music, it's new.

And then just as suddenly there was that arbitrary change of key.

...a sort of tart, pungent.

Then there was that odd little canon at the end, a sort of round.

What a way to fade out; in a new key, a shifting meter, a sudden new counterpoint.

But that's the Beatles - always unpredictable and a bit more inventive than most.

You know a remarkable song of theirs called "She said, she said"

In that song which goes nicely along in 4, there's again a sneaky switch to 3/4 time

only this time it's not just for one bar, but for a whole passage

Did you get it? If not, listen again, to the Beatles this time.

and we're back again safely in the old 4 beat

Now, the point I want to make is that such oddities as these are not just tricks or show-off devices.

In terms of pop music's basic English, so to speak, they are real inventions.

And it's not only the Beatles who make these inventions.

For instance, there's a group known as "The Left Bank", that has a tune called "Pretty Ballerina".

This tune is built not in the usual major or minor scale,

but in a combination of the Lydian and Mixolydian modes, imagine that !!

Comes out with a sort of Turkish or Greek sound.

Rather unusual, wouldn't you say?

And even so commonplace a number as The Monkeys' recent hit I'm a Believer

has one noteworthy musical twist.

It's going along in the standard gospel shouting tradition

and now suddenly here is the cadence.

What a place to end on: a totally unexpected chord.

Now I know you may say: "Well what's so great about that chord, it's ordinary.

We've had much more sophisticated and adventurous harmonies

in pop music of the 30ies. What about Gershwin?

What about Duke Ellington,"Sophisticated Lady" with those rich chromatic parallel 7th chords."

Yes, but that's the whole point: this pop generation has rejected that old

chromatic sound as too sophisticated, the sound of an older, sleeker generation,

the old-fashioned sound of the cocktail lounge.

This new music is much more primitive in its harmonic language,

relies more on the simple triads,

the basic harmony of folk music.

Never forget that this music employs a highly limited musical vocabulary:

limited harmonically, rhythmically and melodically.

But within that restricted language all these new adventures are simply extraordinary.

Only think of the sheer originality of the Beatles tune

like this one which again uses only the elementary resources of pop music.

Well, that could almost be by Schumann, it's so expansive and romantic.

And notice how the range of the melody has been expanded.

Most pop tunes have in the past been restricted to the range of an octave or so

owing to the limitations of pop singers' vocal ranges.

But not so anymore. Our pop generation reaches and spreads itself

grasping at the unattainable. This is one of the things I like most about it:

the straining tenderness of those high, untrained young voices.

That's Bob Dylan. And here's a group called the Association.

and... as always The Beatles

Of course, whereas I may call that a straining after falsetto dreams of glory

you may call it nothing but a breakdown in gender;

that same androgynous phenomenon of the pop scene

that produces boys with long hair and ruffled shirts, and you may be right but back to the music.

What else do I like about it? I like the eclecticism of it:

its freedom to absorb any and all musical styles and elements.

like old blues

or a high Bach trumpet

That's "Penny Lane" - Beatles

or a Harpsichord

or even a string quartet

Curious. Then I like the international and interracial way

it ranges over the world, borrowing from the Ragas of Hindu music.

or borrowing from the sensuality of Arab cafe music..

Rolling Stones

Then I like some of the new sounds, purely as sounds

that are coming out of pop music:

the arresting impact of a consort of amplified guitars.

what a sound

Then I like the astonishing force of those hiked-up baselines

and the outrageously cool utterances of that inhuman electric organ.

Now, don't get me wrong. I said I liked some of those sounds.

There's a good deal I don't like and wouldn't dream of defending.

I don't like volume for its own sake,

or the way the words are often drowned out by drums and amplifiers.

I don't like the amateur quality of some of the writing and the out-of-tune singing.

This music can be coarse, faddish, a victim of its own sameness.

Yet when it's good it's irresistible. After all there are pros and cons to everything,

especially in the popular art. And the cons are well enough publicized,

we're here to examine the pros. And we're in luck because I've managed to

find one song that incorporates so many of these pros that

we can enjoy them all at once. It's a marvelous song called "Society's Child"

written astonishingly enough by a 15-year-old girl named Janis Ian.

This tune is very well-known among the followers of pop music

but you may not have heard it since it's been withheld by most of the radio stations

for reasons unknown to me, although probably having to do with its subject matter,

which is as you'll see somewhat controversial.

But apart from the words

"Society's child" contains many of the musical joys we've talked about.

And some we haven't, like fascinating sounds both natural and electronic

like a strange use of harpsichord and that cool nasty electric organ.

There are astonishing key changes and even tempo changes.

Ambiguous cadences, unequal phrase-links. And we're even luckier to have Janis Ian

herself here to sing it for us. Listen hard to "Society's Child"

It kills me. That sassy retort of the organ at the end.

That voice, those words. That key change.

Oh Janis, how did you ever write such a thing at the age of 15. You're a great creature.

- Thank you - I think that's quite a remarkable job for

a girl of your age and I congratulate you on what I'm sure is

going to be a brilliant career. - Thank you

- Thank you so much for coming to see us. - Thank you for inviting me.

So it would seem that the kids of our pop generation have a lot to say.

Actually what Janis has written is a short social document.

Not a satire, not a protest, just a picture of a social trap.

Of course underneath it is the spirit of protest which underlies so many of these pop songs.

The implication is and strongly that this is not at all the way things ought to be.

Just as the Beatles song "Paperback Writer" implies in its satirical way

all the corruption of our lives. Their anti-hero, the paperback writer

has written a book he's trying to sell and he sings

"it's a thousand words give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two,

I can make it longer if you like the style, I can change it round

but i wanna be a paperback writer" In other words, prostitution:

I'll do anything to sell that book. The implication is clear.

In fact the message in the lyrics of most of these songs is delivered by implication.

This is one of our teenagers' strongest weapons. It amounts almost to a private language.

But this use of implication produces another effect as well:

something bordering on poetry. Many of the lyrics in their oblique allusions

and way-out metaphors are beginning to sound like real poems.

And protected by this armour of poetry

our young lyricists can say just about anything they care to. And they do care.

They care about civil rights, about sexual freedom, about peace.

They talk about alienation, mysticism, drugs

The lyrics of Bob Dylan alone would make a bombshell of a book of social criticism.

You know those ominous lines of his?

"Something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

And you know who mister Jones is, don't you? Us.

And the lyric of "Along comes Mary" I have been informed by its author,

22-year-old Tandyn Almer, is not about a girl named Mary at all,

but about Mary Jane which is a literal translation of marijuana.

And a staggering piece of verse it is.

And Paul Simon of Garfunkel fame says among other things:

“I touch no one and no one touches me, I am a rock, I am an island.”

Formidable stuff, isn't it?

But mostly they talk about love as all songwriters have since time began.

Only this time its either a cool kind of love, or a frankly sexual love,

or and this is most important: universal love,

a mystic oriental concept that is presumably attainable through meditation,

or withdrawal from the establishment, or most readily through drugs.

Now, what does all this mean?

I think it's all part of the historic revolution, one that has been going on for fifty years.

Only now these young people have gotten control over mass medium, the phonograph record

and the music on the records with its noise and its cool messages may make us uneasy.