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The '60s as the good old days

The New York Times, 12/10/07

Abstract:

If you remember the '60s, as a popular saying goes, you probably weren't there. No matter. Madison Avenue is taking you back with a skein of campaigns celebrating sights and sounds of the decade.

The ads are filled with images like Volkswagon buses festooned with groovy graffiti, daisies and other power flowers, peace signs, pyschedelic drawings in DayGlo colors and hair, long beautiful hair, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen (to quote a lyric from the era).

Music, too, is being used to invoke the 1960s. Commercials on television, radio and the Internet play tunes like "Daydream" by the Lovin' Spoonful (1966), "Gimme Some Lovin'" by the Spencer David Group (1967) and "On the Road Again" by Canned Heat (1968)...

...What is most intriguing about the trend is that the ads present many of the contentious aspects of the '60s — the protests, the hippies, the challenge to authority — in a positive, even romanticized light.

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