Desert Island Discs only of musicians born in 1941 equals happiness !

The first of the postwar Transitional Generation (often - erroneously - called 'the boomers'), those who were born in 1941 and thus too young to be part of modernity's congratulatory group-think at the end of WWII, are all about 75 years old now.

Their careers are mostly behind them  now - they are either famous or they are not - the time for late bloomers amongst these boomers has passed. So let us then assess their trajectories of fame.

Now every year's new births throws up people who eventually become famous for their careers in every possible field of endeavour.

It is only the portions of each year's new births that become famous in each career field that varies over time.

Those born in 1941 are particularly notable for the extraordinary number that became world famous in popular music (rock, pop, folk, country) rather than in other art forms, academia, science, politics, business, the military etc.

I was a teenager in the mid-1960s and most of these musicians born in 1941 became famous in that era - they wrote, produced, sang and played the sort of music on Discs I won't mind at all being marooned on a Desert Island with.

In earlier or later eras these clearly talented and charming musicians might have chose to become athletes, software entrepreneurs, academic scientists, poets, novelists or war heroes instead.

Popular music focuses more on feelings, emotions, the heart and the body rather than on the intellect of the mind : it is passionately hot and unrestrained not cold, calculating and buttoned down.

Soul = Postmodernity

White or black : these people sang, wrote and played SOUL - with soul, with passion, with gusto.

Jean-Francis Lyotard merely contrasted unbuttoned postmodernity with grey-suited buttoned down modernity : but Otis Redding, Richie Valens, Percy Sledge, Bob Dylan, Joan Boaz, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Animals  et al personified it....