The Years in Music – The 1970’s

                A few years ago, I got the idea to make a CD mix for every year starting with 1981 and going up to the current year, with my favorite songs that were released each year. These are mixes that look beyond the top 40 hits you hear everywhere, to the more obscure, underground music. I’ve discovered a lot of new music doing these mixes (new to me anyway), and I just enjoy them so much I have to blog about it and share them with whoever might care to read about it. I’m currently up to 2008. Most of the fun comes from putting these together, really.

I put together a single mix for the decade of the 1970’s to start off my Years in Music series. To be honest, I’ve never been that fond of music from the decade. I’m usually just not into the vibe of it. I don’t know if it’s like that for other people born after the 1970’s. If you actually lived through the 1970’s you’d probably like the music a lot better, but if you weren’t there for it, it’s hard to get into. I can’t appreciate it in the proper context. My favorite music genres were either in the early stages of being invented (like post-punk, New Wave and Goth music), or nonexistent. It was a challenge to fill the entire 80-minute CD without repeating any bands. You’ll notice a good many of the songs are from bands that were big in the 1980’s but happened to be starting out in the 1970’s, such as The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

For the record, I really wouldn’t be able to even fill an entire CD mix with songs from the 1960’s I like. It’s just not my style of music. Fine, The Beatles were important, but I feel mediocre about their music, I don’t love it or hate it, they’re just okay. I appreciate jazz music from the 1920’s through the 1940’s, and will occasionally listen to music even older out of curiosity, but the 1950’s through the 1970’s are hard decades for me to wrap my head around. That’s even true of movies and TV shows from that era, and culture in general (the exceptions being The Twilight Zone, The Honeymooners, and Mad Magazine). It’s the culture of the baby boomer generation. It’s just not my thing. Afros on white people, bell bottoms, yellow smiley faces, I don’t get any of it.

It’s funny how all of these “best music of all time” list shows on VH1, AXS TV or other cable channels often proclaim music from the 60’s and 70’s to be the best music ever written, in all the hundreds of thousands of years of human history, and never talk about music from before or after these two decades. They never mention Mozart or Beethoven, who apparently don't hold a candle to Jimi Hendrix or Fleetwood Mac. Shows like these are generally written and watched mainly by baby boomers, not so coincidentally. Curious, isn’t it? That their generation just so happened to be coming of age during that special time in human history when the music was the best it has ever been. And now music sucks. It’s all nostalgia goggles. Will music of the 1980’s and 1990’s be the best music ever written in another couple decades according to cable TV music networks? Of course, by then their target audience will have died off and the Millennials won’t be watching cable. Cable probably won’t exist anymore by the time I get old enough to think I grew up with the best music in human history. Maybe the lists will be made by some over-the-hill vloggers. Who knows if my son, born last year, will one day feel the same way about the 1990’s and 2000’s that I do about the 60’s and 70’s. It’s possible. But I won’t force him to listen to Nirvana and tell him it’s the greatest music of all time. If I don’t force it on him, maybe he won’t grow to resent it.

My favorite bands of the 1970’s are Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd. I’ll like pretty much any song by those two bands. I’ve been listening to Kraftwerk since I was 12 years old. Both bands are timeless. Black Sabbath is pretty good, not that I listen to it a whole lot, and AC/DC are okay, but the rest of it? There are a couple corny disco songs I like ironically, but beyond that, it’s only certain songs here and there. As with the 1980’s, I think there’s probably a lot more to the music of the 1970’s than you might think when you look at the more underground bands, and away from the classic rock hits you’ve heard a million times on radio stations. I just haven’t done enough digging yet. Anyway, here’s the mix I came up with.

Dschinghis Khan – Moskau

            One of the aforementioned corny disco songs I ironically like. It’s everything you think of when you think of a corny disco song. And it’s in German. This song came back as kind of an internet meme in the late 2000’s, which was when my best friend Kris introduced it to me. Of course, whenever I hear it, I’ll always think of the misheard lyrics version by the YouTube user Buffalax. The video was viral back in 2008 or so. “Moskau, Moskau, come and dance and love the fish, Mr. Disco summoned it, hahahaha.” I know that version practically by heart. I couldn’t tell you what the singer’s actually saying. This to me is the perfect opening track to a 1970’s mix. It’s my first impression of the 1970’s. People dressing weird, doing silly dances and having a good time. 

Earth, Wind & Fire – September

            This was partially included because it’s one of my wife Deborah’s favorite songs. But it does seem emblematic of the 1970’s as well, to me. It seems like such a happy song. Another reason it’s a good song to represent the 1970’s is that falsetto singing. Nobody sings like that anymore. It was a uniquely 1970’s phenomenon. Perhaps the anti-disco backlash of the early 1980’s killed that type of singing and it never recovered, even if disco itself was somewhat rehabilitated by the 1990’s.  Anyway, it’s a nice song. Nothing wrong with it. It’s just not coldwave or industrial or the other genres I like.

Michael Jackson - Don’t Stop ‘Til You get Enough

            Who honestly doesn’t like the music of Michael Jackson? Even if you have misgivings about the man himself, you have to admit his music is catchy. It’s interesting to observe how his music evolved, from this very disco-influenced track, through his pop music of the 1980’s and his under-rated, somewhat darker and angrier music of the 1990’s. It’s kind of a barometer for how popular music itself evolved and changed over that time period. Not to mention how he changed, both physically and mentally. I guess he’s one of the few singers that continued to sing falsetto after the early 1980’s and get away with it. There was a while there where he could make any music he wanted and people would love it.

David Bowie – Sound and Vision

            As I share these Years in Music mixes, you’ll find David Bowie is constantly there in the background, all throughout the 1980’s, 1990’s and 2000’s. He was a fixture in music for such a long time. I’ve mainly liked his 1980’s music best for most of my life, especially the soundtrack to the movie Labyrinth, and paid little attention to his music from before or after the 1980’s until somewhat recently. When he released Blackstar in 2016 and died a couple days later, I bought it, and it gave me a new appreciation for his music, so I’ve listened to more of his music since then. As far as this track in particular goes, I just picked it out of the tracks on his album Low as my favorite of them. It’s all very ahead of its time, almost proto-goth. If you look at the album cover of Low, Bowie could walk into a goth nightclub today looking exactly like that and fit right in. Since I much prefer the music of the 1980’s, you’re going to see quite a few bands on this mix that were ahead of their time.

See? He looks like the lead singer of an industrial band. Or rather, they look like him.

Siouxsie and the Banshees – Playground Twist

            I always thought of this as a 1980’s band, but their first three albums were released in the 1970’s. Siouxsie and the Banshees is required listening for anyone who wants to be called a goth, so of course I’ve listened to them. I can’t really say I like them as much as I feel I should like them, given that they’re one of the founding goth bands, but there are songs here and there I like, such as “Night Shift” and “Spellbound”. This song is a good one too. You have to imagine how completely different this song must have sounded to people of the late-1970’s when disco was what was popular. This must have blown people’s minds in 1977. There’s plenty of music coming out today that sounds like this.

The B-52s - Planet Claire

            Here’s yet another band I often forget is this old. I’ve been listening to this song since I was a kid. My mom was the one who introduced it to me, from a Best of compilation CD we had. The electronic, sci-fi tinged intro that takes up about half the song reminds me of something Kraftwerk would have made. It’s fun trying to imagine what Planet Claire looks like; it apparently has pink air, red trees, and no one dies or has a head. That the air has a color to it is weird enough.

Kraftwerk - The Robots

            Finally, here’s Kraftwerk. The majority of their discography came out in the 1970’s, and I really could have chosen any of their songs, but I decided to go with their most emblematic song. The one which really illustrates what the band was about. Most of their albums are going to turn 50 in the 2020’s, and they still sound ahead of their time. Once their music caught on, it changed the entire music scene. They don’t get the credit they deserve. I should have put the German version on the mix, which I think is just a little bit better than the English one. But, I heard this version first.

Pink Floyd – Welcome to the Machine

            There’s never going to be another Pink Floyd. I chose this song mainly because it sounds nice right after the previous one, but I could have chosen a lot of their songs to be on this mix. To me this song is about a father who has to reveal to their son what a harsh and terrible world this is when they grew up sheltered from it. “Welcome my son, to the machine.” It’s best enjoyed along with the trippy animations of the music video. Listening to music of the 1970’s makes me wonder if every musician back then was on a drug of some sort. Pink Floyd definitely was, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if all of these songs were written while intoxicated.

Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi’s Dead

            This is often stated to be the first goth song, laying the prototype for what would become death rock, later known as goth rock. I don’t really have much to say about it that hasn’t already been said in the last 40+ years, but it was essential to include this song on the mix, even if it is more than nine minutes long. Is Bela Lugosi really dead, or will he be back, just like the vampire he played?

The Cure - A Forest

            A slight cheat, as this was released in 1980, but 1980 was pretty much still the 1970’s, culturally and musically. And anyway, The Cure had performed this live before 1980, according to videos I’ve seen. You can’t go wrong with The Cure. This is one of my favorite songs by The Cure too, just for the atmosphere it creates.

Joy Division – She’s Lost Control

            Ah yes, this is from that album with the squiggly lines that everyone has on their t-shirt. You can even get a t-shirt of a t-shirt with this album cover on it. We’re continuing the early goth theme of the mix with this song, which is another example of a song that doesn’t sound like it was made in the 1970’s, which honestly may be why I like it. Joy Division would later become New Order, among my favorite bands of the 1980’s, after the singer of Joy Division sadly committed suicide. It would have been interesting to see if they would have developed differently had they remained Joy Division.   

Gary Numan – Cars

            For the longest time I could have sworn this song came out in the 1980’s, but nope, it’s from the 1970’s. So it gets to be on this mix. I have to admit I first heard the cover by Fear Factory back in the late 1990’s on alternative rock radio stations before hearing the original. The cover mainly just sounds like a slightly updated version of the same song. But I’ve always liked both versions. Interestingly Gary Numan is still around making music today despite this song being his one hit wonder, which is more than could be said for most of these bands.

Blue Öyster Cult - Don’t Fear the Reaper

            There, I found an O with an umlaut over it and copied and pasted it for the sake of accuracy. I wonder how you’re supposed to pronounce that with the umlaut. “Oeyster”? Extra emphasis on the O? Anyway, from here we’re getting back to more mainstream music of the 70’s. This is a song most people have heard by now. To me this song means coming to terms with death; putting aside your fears and facing death together with your loved one. It strikes me as a good song for the Egyptian God Anubis, a reaper of souls who was only there to help you into the afterlife, not to be feared.

Journey – Lights

            I think Journey hit their stride in the 1980’s really. But I like their earlier stuff well enough. And they have plenty of other good songs besides “Don’t Stop Believing”. I wish more people acknowledged that. I think this is a song for anyone who’s longed to be somewhere else, like a city they grew up in, and these are feelings I have quite often, ever since I moved to Florida. Feelings of homesickness. The song is actually about San Francisco. I don’t really miss San Francisco per se, but I miss nearby Contra Costa County at times. Every time I see San Francisco when I come back to visit, it looks bigger and more expensive. Like they’ll start charging you to breathe the air there soon.

Black Sabbath – Paranoid

            This was a song I first came across while listening to my dad’s old Black Sabbath cassettes, and it is my favorite song from the band. I love the guitar riffs in the intro. I do like to listen to Ozzy Osbourne on occasion. Metal bands owe a debt of gratitude to Black Sabbath. It’s weird to think that this song is from 1970, just a couple short years after the heyday of The Beatles.

Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

            Yes, yes, everyone has heard this song before. Everyone knows all the words to this song. It’s really an unusual song if you place it in the context of when it was made. A rock opera song about a poor man who committed murder and now has to face the consequences of said act. I think the fact that it’s become so mainstream is remarkable. Songs this bizarre aren’t normally seen as marketable by the big record companies; and they had a lot more control over what people listened to back then than they do today. Today someone could make a song in this style and put it up on YouTube somewhere. It probably wouldn’t become popular, but people could find it. Back then it all depended on getting an agent and a contract with a record company and getting your record sold in stores. Perhaps it only became mainstream because the band that made it was already popular. If some unknown band had made this song it would have faded into obscurity. Luckily it did not.

            Anyway, that’s the mix. And will you look at that, I was able to find every single song on Spotify and remake the whole playlist. A sure sign that I wasn’t looking for music that was obscure enough. I’m in a strange way disappointed that all the songs were on Spotify. I’ll have to do better some other time.

Spotify Playlist – The 1970’s Mix

I hope maybe any of the points in my little rant rang true for someone, and maybe this list turns someone on to music they hadn't heard before. I’ve got a few more blog entries planned this month before I move onto 1981 in Music, but that will be the next to come in this series. Stay tuned for that.