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There's a meme (sorry, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pompe; do you have an alternative name?) running around involving looking up the top 100 songs for the year you graduated from high school. I've taken a look at the list, and I don't really want to carry out the details, but I do have a few comments.
The seventies have something of a bad reputation musically, especially among fogies of my generation, but I'm not entirely sure how much it's deserved. The early seventies produced quite a bit of good music. There were holdovers from the sixties still doing good work, like Simon & Garfunkel and Carole King, and a number of new groups also did well - the Eagles, America, Three Dog Night, Chicago... By the middle of the decade, the slough of disco began to emerge, but even then there were people like Elton John and - late in the decade - Sheena Easton. (Do I need to specify that all aesthetic judgements in this post are mine alone, and that I realize that mileage varies?)
It was in the early seventies that I began to pay attention to popular music. Nonetheless, my taste seems to have been formed more by the sixties; I still regard Motown as one of the pinnacles of USAn popular music. Looking at the list of songs, then, I note the following.
Anyway. My knowledge of sixties music is fairly extensive, and I thought I was almost as well-versed in the seventies; but it appears that I was mistaken.
pompe; do you have an alternative name?) running around involving looking up the top 100 songs for the year you graduated from high school. I've taken a look at the list, and I don't really want to carry out the details, but I do have a few comments.The seventies have something of a bad reputation musically, especially among fogies of my generation, but I'm not entirely sure how much it's deserved. The early seventies produced quite a bit of good music. There were holdovers from the sixties still doing good work, like Simon & Garfunkel and Carole King, and a number of new groups also did well - the Eagles, America, Three Dog Night, Chicago... By the middle of the decade, the slough of disco began to emerge, but even then there were people like Elton John and - late in the decade - Sheena Easton. (Do I need to specify that all aesthetic judgements in this post are mine alone, and that I realize that mileage varies?)
It was in the early seventies that I began to pay attention to popular music. Nonetheless, my taste seems to have been formed more by the sixties; I still regard Motown as one of the pinnacles of USAn popular music. Looking at the list of songs, then, I note the following.
- Of the top 100 songs of 1975, there are only ten or eleven in my collection - two each by Elton John, the Eagles, and America, and one each by the Doobie Brothers, Barry White, Gladys Knight, Joe Cocker (maybe), and Al Green. Several of these - "Sister Golden Hair", "One of These Nights", "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" - I particularly like.
- There aren't very many other songs on the list that I'd really be interested in adding to my collection. There's some artsy stuff - Phoebe Snow's "Poetry Man", Janis Ian's "At Seventeen", Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" - that might be worth it (although those singers tend to be depressing). I rather like "The Hustle" (sue me); I don't have Elton's version of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds"; and, for some reason, "Please Mr Please" was going through my head a couple of days ago (before I looked up this list). There are a couple of songs by Linda Ronstadt that I wouldn't mind having, but I prefer her earlier work - Blue Bayou and, even more, the stuff she did with the Stone Poneys. Maybe Bachman-Turner Overdrive deserves a look...
- There are a number of songs and singers that I liked at the time, but cringe at the memory today: Neil Sedaka, Barry Manilow, Olivia Newton-John (the previous paragraph notwithstanding), Michael Murphy's "Wildfire". But I've never liked James Taylor (with the single exception of "Fire and Rain"), and don't get me started on KC and the Sunshine Band.
- Beyond that, there are startlingly many songs that I simply don't recognize. Some, perhaps, I would know if I heard them; others are by singers whom I simply avoided, like Alice Cooper and Queen. (In retrospect, I realize that both of those actually did some very good work, but something about them still repels me.)
Anyway. My knowledge of sixties music is fairly extensive, and I thought I was almost as well-versed in the seventies; but it appears that I was mistaken.
