Singular Songs of the Seventies, Vol. 1
A genre-spanning selection of semi-obscure musical wonders from the 1970s, curated by a former DJ and including salubrious tracks from around the world. Subscriber-only YouTube playlist included.
{Note: This series features ten singular seventies songs at a time, offered in no particular order but intended to be approximately the length of an LP. Among the genres you will find in this series are rock, pop, folk, soul, funk, reggae, prog, punk, glam, disco, art rock, jazz rock, early electronica and much more. Dates—to the best of my ability—are recording, not release dates.}
Introduction
“Seventies music” has a problem.
The first three (even five) years of the decade are sometimes treated as an extension of “sixties music”—as they’re often referred to as part of the Long Sixties, a notional period spanning from 1963 to 1972—even as most music listeners enamored with the music of the 1960s to the point of listening to such music on satellite radio exclude works from 1974, 1973, 1972, often 1971, and sometimes 1970 from the library of music whose continued airplay and notoriety they endorse and sponsor. This can leave 1970, 1971, 1972, and to a lesser extent 1973 and 1974 in a “limbo” within U.S. music history.
Meanwhile, the last three—sometimes even four—years of the decade are so defined by genres of music many love to hate (e.g., disco) or “proto-” versions of music that was as or even more popular in the early 1980s (e.g., New Wave, rap, and punk) that it’s all too easy for anthologists and even DJs to put music from these years into its own cloister.
What gets lost in this perpetual squeezing from both ends is what I often think of as the quintessential sound(s) of the decade—subgenres that lived and died entirely in the 1970s, with little trace of them before or after. (To be clear, I mean little trace of them in purified form; it must of course be said that these subgenres were influential on much that followed).
So consider, for instance, the so-called “singer-songwriter” subgenre. Or funk. Or the heyday of British folk. Prog rock. Indie punk. Glam rock. Zamrock. Or Krautrock.
There are even iterations of power pop that I would say only existed in the 1970s.
And what about yacht rock? Jazz rock? The unique features of early metal? Classical minimalism? “Art rock.” Afrobeat.
The music critic Robert Christgau once noted that, though 1969 was the final year of the 1960s, the slogan “the sixties are over” is one that “one only began to hear in 1972 or so”—“began,” I emphasize here, because the effect of that thinking was to at once create a Long Sixties that extended into 1972 or even 1973 (a good four years into the seventies) and to crowbar public sense of what the “seventies” meant to music into an ever smaller and smaller window of time. Eventually, I’d submit, the term “seventies music” came to mean, to many, nothing more than songs from 1975, 1976, and 1977.
Even 1978 and 1979 somehow got consumed—though in this case by the 1980s, the decade that saw many artists or bands who got their start in 1978 or 1979 go wide.
I was born in late 1976 and have no independent memories of the 1970s. I dislike disco and am left cold by much early New Wave music. When I entered college in 1994, I discovered The Beatles and began an obsession with the Long Sixties that continues to the current day (and is encapsulated in both the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series here at Retro and my former AM radio show from the late 1990s). So it took me many, many, many years to fully appreciate that the seventies has gotten a bad rap and that I am as guilty as anyone of helping to author it.
Why do I say that?
Because as a longtime lover of sixties music, I tend to take any songs from the first four years of the seventies that I enjoy and think of them as a “carryover” from the sixties. I also, in similar fashion, attach to the music of my youth—“eighties music”—the best songs from 1978 and 1979, not because I heard the songs at the time (I was an infant) but because by the time I began watching MTV in 1985 many of the best songs of that era in American music were from bands clearly rooted in the very late 1970s.
In other words, I was doing my best to strangle out of the term “seventies music” any meaning at all. And as someone who thereafter became not just a DJ but an active music critic, and then after that someone who taught “meme music” and other digital-age musical detritus at the university level, I realize now that I sometimes let my own music-history biases creep into my public-facing content.
With this new Retro series, I hope to make things right.
But in my own way, as ever.
I’m not as interested in seventies music that clearly reached escape velocity from the dustbin of history: Aerosmith, say, or (as a three- or four-hit wonder only), Boston. I grew up on Billy Joel, including his hits from the 1970s, so I’m not worried about how his legacy is faring. The same goes for James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, and Queen.
On the other hand, while I’m intrigued by one-hit wonders, I’m not as invested in just making a catalogue of artists that were good approximately once over the course of a decade.
I have always been, instead, a “hidden gem” sort of guy, as horrifyingly cliché as that term has become not just in music but in other arenas—like video games—since the advent of the internet.
So I started this essay by writing that “seventies music has a problem,” but really, as I think this brief essay has likely established, it’s I who have a problem. And while I’ve no doubt that the very best historians of seventies music don’t have this particular issue I’ve here described, I’m equally certain if I as a former DJ and music critic and cultural studies professor who regularly listens to music published between 1970 and 1973 does indeed have this problem, a good many others do also. So hopefully this series will help remedy it, and even more importantly, introduce you to some fantastic songs you’ve never heard before!
As someone who was in high school from 1970-1974 I can tell you that 2 of the songs on your list (Tighter, Tighter & Ride, Captain Ride) might be obscure now but were in rotation often enough back then that I still know all of the words to both of them and could sing along! None of the others mean anything to me but it was certainly a fun list to listen to. Thank you!