You say you want a revolution?: popular music and revolt in France, The United States, and Britain during the late 1960s

It is almost impossible to understand the youth protest movements of the 1960s without some appreciation of the importance of that decade¿s po­pular music. This music and ideas of personal and political liberation and self-expression were close­ly linked. This article analyses the role of popular music (rock music) in the 1960s¿counterculture. It is not an exercise in musicology or sociology, though it may inadvertently tread on the toes of those disciplines. It adopts an explicitly compara­tive historical approach to the phenomenon, uti­lising case studies of three contrasting societies ¿ two in Western Europe, plus the United states. The argument here is that despite that this music challenged many social convention and helped to ¿emancipate¿ its consumers, its uses and role in the USA, Britain, and France were frequently dissi­milar. Often, these were determined by differing national circumstances and traditions. The piece disputes also the notion of a united and radical counterculture and attempts to illuminate the na­ture of youth rebellion in each of the countries that it examines. This paper seeks to suggest that the 1960s¿ youth-based movements for social change were frequently responding to local or parochial problems in their protests. 1968 is taken as the main focus here, partly because it permits an exa­mination of the intense Parisian revolt that broke out in that year, but also because it is frequently conceptualised as the decade¿s hinge. 1968 is the year when the optimistic mind-set of the preceding five or so years started to give way to frustration and disillusionment