vintage thirst returning: 20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 5: 1970s

Glam Rock

Largely a British phenomena, glam rock is typically characterized by a deliberate shunning of the peace and love generation's aesthetic, with performers wearing a very artificial style including lots of glitter, makeup, outrageous outfits, and platform boots. They typically cultivated an androgynous, bisexual image and courted lots of spacey futuristic themes in their clothing and lyrics. A really good representation of the aesthetic of this movement can be seen in the movie Velvet Goldmine.

The protean David Bowie and his space-age alter ego Ziggy Stardust is probably the best and most commercially successful in this genre. The album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) is heavily influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange.

David Bowie - Space Oddity

Punk

Punk developed around the mid 1970s in the UK and the US out of the garage band tradition of the 1960s. The previous generation had seen the likes of Jimi Hendrix and virtuosic guitar solos; the aesthetic of punk was against the excesses of mainstream rock music and featured usually stripped down, "no bullshit" instrumentals with few solos. Other characteristics of the style include fast and short songs, hard edged music featuring lots of distorted power chords to create a "buzz saw drone", and shouted lyrics without much variance in pitch and tone usually about politics and social issues.

Production value is typically low because the DIY attitude was prized in this genre. Many musicians produced and distributed themselves through underground channels. The famous three-chord paradigm is kind of a joke, but also typifies the attitude of the movement, which is "Here is a chord, here is another chord, here is a third chord -- now go make a band." Meaning: you may not be a terribly good musician but you can still express yourself through music. The accompanying visual aesthetic was simple: safety pins, leather jacket, ripped shirt, jeans. Later it would become Mohawks and piercings.

The Who is somewhat associated with this movement, more in terms of attitude than anything else. Other influential bands were the Ramones, whose debut album in 1976 was integral to the movement, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols.

Ramones: Blitzkrieg Pop

The Clash: Should I Stay or Should I Go

Sex Pistols: God Save the Queen

New Wave

New Wave is a late 1970s movement that used to be synonymous with punk rock before branching off to become its own category and overtaking punk as the spearhead of the underground English movement. Sometimes punk acts were referred to as New Wave. By the latter half of the decade, New Wave came to be those acts associated with the punk scene that didn't play punk music, in that their music was more lyrically complex or their songs were more polished or they tended to experiment more with a sort of synthpop sound. In America, it was used as a term to describe acts that played CBGB, such as the Talking Heads. Sometimes it is used as a catchall term for new music out of Britain.

Talking Heads - Psycho Killer

From Wikipedia: "According to music journalist Simon Reynolds the music had a twitchy agitated feel to it. New Wave musicians who often played choppy rhythm guitars with fast tempos. Keyboards were common as was stop and start song structures and melodies."

Power Pop became associated also with this movement. See Cheap Trick.

Cheap Trick - Hello There

Later still, "post-punk," which is a darker less pop-influenced kind of punk, came to describe music by Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, and Joy Division. The Cure in particular became very dark and helped influence the goth movement.

The Cure - Boys Don't Cry

Hard Rock

Hard Rock developed out of the blues rock, psychedelic, and garage band tradition and uses the blues pentatonic scale with heavy distorted sounding electrical instrumentation. Jimi Hendrix was one of the first to experiment with guitar effects like distortion and phasing, a tradition that was later taken up by people like Pete Townshend and Dave Davies of the Kinks. Some of the first hard rock albums are Led Zeppelin's first album and The Who's Live at Leeds and Who's Next.

Roll call:

Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin IV, 1971)

The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (Who's Next, 1971)

Alice Cooper - School's Out (1972)

Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (A Night at the Opera, 1975)

Aerosmith - Walk This Way (Toys in the Attic, 1975)

Van Halen - Eruption (Van Halen, 1978)

AC/DC - Highway to Hell (1979)

Country Rock

I don't really have much to say about this category because it's mostly an excuse to include the Eagles and Hotel California (1976). The Eagles are credited with popularizing the Southern California country rock style.

The Eagles - Hotel California (Hell Freezes Over version)

Metal

Metal also formed out of the blues rock/psychedelic rock trend but later on shed much of its blues influence. Metal is characterized by "thick, massive sound, characterized by highly amplified distortion, extended guitar solos, emphatic beats, and overall loudness." The sonic power of the amplified guitar is one of the mainstays of metal music, with the bass guitar also very prominent in making the sound "heavy." Heavy metal drumming requires a lot of endurance and precision because there are usually lots of intricate patterns.

Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin II, 1969)

Black Sabbath - War Pigs (Paranoid, 1970). It is said that Tommy Iommi, the guitarist, had an accident that affected his hand, and he had to tune down his guitar so he could play power chords with easier fretting. That particular sound became iconic.

Judas Priest - Rocka Rolla (1974). This is pre-leather and studs Judas Priest. They are credited with helping metal shed much of its blues influence.

Motorhead - Overkill (1979). This band is credited with being the first group to span the metal/punk divide.

Disco

This is also the era of disco. It was originally a type of dance music for black gays but was picked up by the mainstream by the end of the decade and became the dancehall staple. According to Wikipedia: "Musical influences include funk and soul music. The disco sound has soaring, often reverberated vocals over a steady "four-on-the-floor" beat, an eighth note (quaver) or sixteenth note (semi-quaver) hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat, and a prominent, syncopated electric bass line sometimes consisting of octaves." Four on the floor is just your basic 4/4 steady beat.

The Bee Gees recorded Staying Alive for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in 1977.

By 1979 the disco backlash was well under way as Disco Demolition Night would prove. Tt did give rise to the "dance pop" of the 80s, which uses the disco beat.

Reggae

This type of music, which developed in Jamaica following ska and rocksteady, is characterized by the stress on the offbeat. Obligatory Bob Marley link to follow: