I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but the answer is (probably) yes - the 1960s was a period of cultural ferment, and everybody knew it. And the cultural ferment was distinctively based around struggles between generations, with older generations struggling to understand the priorities of the enormous amounts of people born after the end of World War II - the baby boomers, in other words (some millennials may find a certain amount of irony here).

And honestly, the baby boomers were famous for being inward-looking, self-focused, and convinced they were changing the world, to the extent that the self-righteous aging hippie is a cliche that the likes of The Simpsons regularly poke fun at. The more counter-culturally motivated members of that generation were absolutely self-aware of what was happening at the time. Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A-Changin' was more or less a generational anthem. After all, the 1960s was the era of ephemeral art events somewhat self-consciously called Happenings (see The Supremes' 'The Happening') - it was an era when not only things were happening, but happenings were things.

The baby boomers had a very different cultural outlook to previous generations, for a variety of reasons, and they chose pop music as their prime avenue of self-expression. Where other forms of mass media saw themselves as primarily appealing to a mainstream audience (an older, more staid demographic), pop music moved relatively quickly. And even the larger more staid music corporations who initially resisted rock’n’roll were aware by the mid-1960s that they needed to aim at a younger demographic to survive. Case in point: Frank Sinatra's Reprise Records started in 1960 with the aim of putting out adult-oriented popular music in the vein of Sinatra; by 1968, they were putting out Jimi Hendrix. Given the huge numbers of baby boomers and their interest in music, a relatively unusual situation occurred where music which comsciously reflected the ideals of a (white American/British) generation ended up towards the top of the charts, simply because there was enough of a baby boomer demographic to push such music to the top of the charts. As a result of this demographic, there absolutely were lyrics all over pop music that were based around this cultural revolution, its side-effects, and the people who lived in that cool, hippie milieu. People were very much aware that there was a cultural revolution in the 1960s, whether they were active participants (a reasonably small amount of the baby boomers, when all is said and done, even if they all claim to have been at Haight-Ashbury or Woodstock), more passive consumers inhaling the Zeitgeist (or not inhaling, like Bill Clinton), indifferent, or actively opposed.

Perhaps the most iconic lyric of the sixties cultural revolution in some ways is Bob Dylan sneering at a journalist, You're very well-read, it's well known: but something is happening, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?, in his 1965 track 'Ballad Of A Thin Man'. And that wasn't the only lyric of sheer contempt for someone who just did not get it on 'Ballad Of A Thin Man': 'you try so hard but you don't understand what you will say when you get home', or 'there outta be a law against you comin' around, you should be made to wear earphones'. Dylan here is asserting a Dionysian view of the world - Mr Jones might be well-read but he cannot think his way into understanding the new world of the young people, as much as he might try, because he cannot feel it.

Leonard Bernstein, the American composer and public musical intellectual of the 1960s, publically named the Beatles' 'She's Leaving Home' as one of the great songs of the 20th century, and his reason for doing so was bound up in the culture clash between the older and younger generations, and the way that McCartney and Lennon's lyrics empathetically contrasted the hopes and desires of their protagonist with the sadness of her parents. 'She's Leaving Home' was written based on a Daily Mirror* newspaper article about Melanie Coe, a 17-year-old who vanished because she wanted to live a freer life (there's a recent feature about Coe and her life in Rolling Stone). Elsewhere on the same album - the biggest of the 1960s - they sing lines like ‘I’d love to turn you on’ (in ‘A Day In The Life’; turn you on’ being drug slang in this context rather than sexual), ’I get high with a little help from my friends’, and have clearly drug-influenced song titles like ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ (which might not be a reference to LSD but which would sound utterly different without LSD). The next year, the Beatles would release as a single a song called ’Revolution’.

The effect of the 1960s cultural revolution is all over 1960s pop, to the point of being one massive cliche. Lyrics inspired by the drug counterculture - you mention 'Light My Fire' - were de rigueur; even The Monkees - an American band famous for being manufactured for a television show - released an album and movie in 1967 called Head (with a 'head' being someone in the drug subculture in 60s slang - and the biggest song from that soundtrack being the fairly psychedelic 'Porpoise Song').

Other hits that are heavily redolent with coded drug slang or references to the 1960s counterculture and the hippie revolution in some way include everything from Donovan's 'Sunshine Superman' (a #1 on the Billboard charts in 1966) and 'Mellow Yellow' (a #2 in 1966), 'Eight Miles High' by The Byrds (a #14 in 1966), 'White Rabbit' by Jefferson Airplane (a #8 in 1966), 'Good Vibrations' by the Beach Boys (a #1 in 1966), 'I Can See For Miles' by The Who (a #9 in 1967), 'Over Under Sideways Down' by The Yardbirds (a #13 in 1966), 'Incense And Peppermints' by The Strawberry Alarm Clock (a #1 in 1967), 'Psychotic Reaction' by Count Five (a #5 in 1966), 'I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night' by the Electric Prunes (a #11 in 1967), 'For What It's Worth' by Buffalo Springfield (a #7 in 1967), 'Time Of The Season' by The Zombies (a #3 in 1969), 'The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)' by Simon & Garfunkel (a cover of which by Harpers Bizarre got to #13 in 1967), 'Some Velvet Morning' by Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood (a #26 in 1968), 'San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)' by Scott McKenzie (a #4 in 1967)...and that's just the songs I can think of off the top of my head which got into the US charts - the list could be much longer. And that's not including any songs by The Beatles, Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones - or The Doors or Jimi Hendrix, or the Grateful Dead or...

Perhaps the most obvious way to know that people were very much aware of the changes in society might be the controversy over the track 'Okie From Muskogee' by Merle Haggard, a country artist. Haggard profiled a rural culture that set itself apart from the hippies:

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee

We don't take our trips on LSD

We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street

We like livin' right, and bein' free

We don't make a party out of lovin'

We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo

We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy

Like the hippies out in San Francisco do

Richard Nixon heard the song and sent Haggard a letter of appreciation. The folk/country artist Kris Kristofferson satirised such attitudes in his 'Blame It On The Stones':

Mister Marvin Middle Class is really in a stew

Wondering’ what the younger generation’s coming to

And the taste of his martini doesn’t please his bitter tongue

Blame it on the Rolling Stones.

Blame it on the Stones; blame it on the Stones

You’ll feel so much better, knowing you don’t stand alone

Join the accusation; save the bleeding nation

Get it off your shoulders; blame it on the Stones.

The Rolling Stones, too, were more than aware of the cultural revolution occurring; take ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, which satirises the hypocrisy of a housewife dosed up on valium complaining about the drug use of ‘kids’:

”Kids are different today”

I hear ev’ry mother say

Mother needs something today to calm her down

And though she’s not really ill

There’s a little yellow pill

She goes running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper

And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day

Or take ‘Street Fighting Man’, where Jagger complains - with a hefty dose of self-awareness - that he’d be down for violent revolution, but that honestly, well, London seems too sleepy and staid for anything cool to actually happen.

Baby boomers, eh?