In Medias Res: Let Us Praise the 1970s

Friday, January 17, 2014

Let Us Praise the 1970s

Withywindle started it, and now David is playing along, so I can too. After all, haven't I documented at great length how pop music came alive for me in the 1970s, through the power of radio? So I happily take up David's challenge, and herewith present 10 reasons why I agree with Withy's post title: the 1970s were, indisputably, the apogee of American pop music:

1) James Taylor, "Anywhere Live Heaven" (1970): I didn't discover this song until the 1990s--but then, with a few (but important!) exceptions, I didn't really understand and appreciate the 70s until more than a decade after I'd lived through them.

2. Ringo Starr, "It Don't Come Easy" (1971): If you're the least talented of the Beatles, you're still more talented than most musicians on God's green earth (of course, if you have George Harrison playing lead guitar and Bad Finger providing your background vocals, that doesn't hurt either).

3. Chicago, "Saturday in the Park" (1972): A great track by what was, in those early years, the greatest mellow-white-guy funk band of all time.

4. Stevie Wonder, "Living for the City" (1973): "Her brother's smart / he's got more sense than many / His patience's long but soon he won't have any / To find a job is like a haystack needle / Cause where he lives they don't use colored people"--simply comparable stuff.

5. Paul McCartney and Wings, "Band on the Run" (1974): The second appearance (and not the last!) of a former Beatle on this list, and one I'm absolutely unapologetic about. Wings wasn't a great band, but when Paul was on (and he certainly was here, channeling as he was the spirit of the Fab Four), he was really on.

6. David Bowie, "Fame" (1975): Bowie was finished with his latest album, and was hanging out in New York City, waiting for other details to be resolved, when he and John Lennon got together. A one-day jam session resulted in this angry beauty.

7. Heart, "Magic Man" (1976): In my view, the most critically underrated heavy metal band of all time. Could sexism have something to do with that? Gosh, I wonder.

8. Player, "Baby Come Back" (1977): I was actually singing along with this some out loud as I drove home from an appointment last night. No joke.

9. Al Stewart, "Time Passages" (1978): Quite possibly my favorite pop song of all time. My first favorite at least, that's for certain.

10. Electric Light Orchestra, "Don't Bring Me Down" (1979): Dancing to this out in the middle of playground in sixth grade while singing this song to myself in my head did little for my popularity, but I'm sure it built character.

And just for the heck of it...

11. George Benson, "Give Me the Night" (1980): A fitting benediction to a great decade.

And who haven't I found room for here, all of whom deserved inclusion? Only: The Bee Gees; Cat Stevens; The Commodores; Creedence Clearwater Revival; The Doobie Brothers; Earth, Wind, and Fire; Elton John; Genesis; John Denver; Kool & the Gang; Led Zeppelin; Neil Diamond; Paul Simon; The Police; Queen; The Rolling Stones; Tree Dog Night; War; The Who; and many, many, many more. Pop music's apogee? You bet it was.

4 comments:

The Modesto Kid said...: The '70s have got nothing on either the '20s or the '30s.; Friday, January 17, 2014
The Modesto Kid said...: Plus how could you leave out "Funkytown"?; Friday, January 17, 2014
Russell Arben Fox said...: Modesto: 1) I suppose I'd have to agree with you about the glory days of jazz and Tin Pan Alley; let's say, then, that the 1970s were the apogee of postwar American popular music. 2) What do you mean, "how could I leave out 'Funkytown'?" Dude, look at all I left out! "Beast of Burden," "My Sweet Lord," "Brown Sugar," "Maggie May," "Crocodile Rock," "I Shot the Sheriff," "Dancing Queen," "Sundown," "Black Dog," "Sister Golden Hair"....the list goes on and on. The decade was a plethora of riches, I tell you.; Friday, January 17, 2014
Withywindle said...: Just finished listening to all of these; thank you!; Friday, January 17, 2014

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"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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Friday, January 17, 2014

Let Us Praise the 1970s

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