The 1970s Revisited ...

There’s been a whole lotta love for the Seventies going on over at Pitchfork in recent weeks. That website is nothing if not methodical and comprehensive in its approach to these sorts of things. In pop culture terms, on a personal level, I’ve never really embraced the Seventies in quite the same way I have say, the Eighties, or subsequent decades. I’m not sure why that is … they say your school years are supposed to be the best and most memorable, but I seem to have blanked out large chunks for one reason or another. In a lot of respects, 1980 was always very much a ground zero point for yours truly – that year being the one my awareness of music and the arts was dramatically heightened by an extended period living in the UK (at age 16), and it was also the year I left high school. I think those things were catalysts for me realising that a much bigger world than the one I'd known, really did actually exist. And while I'd always been very aware of what was going on around me prior to that – the immediate post-Beatles world, glam, disco, punk, the arrival of colour television (things were slow moving in my house), diligently and systematically tape-recording the weekly top 10 "hits" off the radio, buying comics/magazines, the death of Elvis (!) etc – I suppose I’ve always been dismissive of the decade as a whole, finding it rather cringe-worthy when compared to the way more “cool” and “happening” Eighties. Many would argue the opposite applies, and Pitchfork’s coverage presents a rather compelling case in favour of that argument. I’ve found the recent coverage fascinating, so I thought I’d share some of Pitchfork’s work here:

Pitchfork’s 200 best songs of the 1970s

Pitchfork’s 25 best music videos of the 1970s

Punk, disco, and silly love songs – Remembering 1976

Music technology of the 1970s – a timeline