Deconstructing The ‘70s
What Gets Pushed to the Side?
A while back, listening to Panora Radio, I had a musical revelation of sorts. I don’t listen to much music online—I find most of it a pain. All my MP3 files have been ripped from my album collection or borrowed from my sister (I only bought my first MP3 player in 2008). … So I don’t go to the internet for music unless it’s to order CDs from Amazon. But I did run across this Pandora site … managed to distract me for most of the day.
To start out, Pandora simply wanted to know what song or artist I wanted to hear. I plugged in—just because I happened to be curious about the group—the Residents. From there, the Pandora program started randomly selecting other tracks from other bands that were just as strange/ experimental as the Residents. The program also allowed me to add more bands to the playlist. There was Faust, Amon Duul II, the Bonzo Dog Band, Mahogany Rush, David Bowie (from his Eno collaborations), and Pink Floyd. There was also a lot of intriguing stuff that I’ll leave out right now because it had nothing to do with the ’70s.
What was (and is) strange to me is that even within the confines of the classic rock I grew up with, and, for much of my life, have continued to listen to, it surprises me—even without considering punk and new wave after ’76—how much stuff never made it onto classic rock playlists. And even when it did (as with Pink Floyd), the material that was played was limited to a handful of the same tracks. It shouldn’t seem surprising then, that many classic rock fans, weaned on the most conservative playlists, would have—in 1978—perferred Dire Straits to Pere Ubu.
