“Haven’t You Heard” is a formally perfect expression of disco. This can make it feel like an early skeleton of house music, which is appropriate-it was a touchstone of Larry Levan’s sets at the Paradise Garage, and was eventually reborn as gospel house in Kirk Franklin’s 2005 single “Looking for You.” On “Haven’t You Heard,” the piano is an anchor for the song. See also: Lene Lovich: “ Lucky Number” / Amanda Lear: “ Follow Me”Įven as her sensibilities shifted from jazz to fusion to R&B and disco, Patrice Rushen focused on her keyboards while everything else swirled around them. Listen: Marianne Faithfull: “Broken English” “Broken English” is the portrait of a true survivor, starting a new era on her terms, alone. “What are you fighting for?/It’s not my security.” It’s a terse, battle-scarred declaration of autonomy with hairpin melodic turns, early in its embrace of dance music’s dark possibilities. “Could have come through anytime/Cold lonely, puritan,” she intones harshly, gliding into a bloodless snarl that would make Johnny Rotten flinch. The chilling title track is a prophetic merging of punk and dance, with lyrics that plumb the depths of her losses. Broken English, her first rock record in 12 years, was the comeback triumph no one expected, not least in how gritty it was. Marianne Faithfull was most famous in the ’60s as the blonde, boho moll of the Rolling Stones frontman, whose career was twined to his and widely assumed dependent on his gifts: her version of the Stones’ “As Tears Go By” was a hit in England her near-fatal heroin overdose became “Wild Horses,” and her literary interests begat “Sympathy for the Devil ” she co-wrote “Sister Morphine.” But Jagger was also something of Faithfull’s muse, inspiring many entries in her prodigious Decca Records output of the late 1960s.īy the end of the 1970s, a decade in which she’d weathered drug abuse and homelessness (and long ended her high-profile love), Faithfull refused to be diminished for one more day. If that’s how Mick Jagger wanted to spend his days, more power to him. There’s no shame in being a muse-preening in silk robes on the couch, tousled hair parting to reveal full lips pouting around a cigarette, tossing off bon mots of aching elegance that nestle into the subconscious and reappear as pop hits. Listen to the best songs of the 1970s on Apple Music and Spotify. As culture moved in every direction at once, there were more great songs than anyone could count.Īs voted by our full time staff and contributors, these are Pitchfork's 200 best songs of the 1970s. Records from Jamaica were making their way to the UK and, eventually, the U.S., changing sounds and urging a new kind of political consciousness. Punk, the first serious backlash against the rock mainstream, came into its own. Soul and funk were reaching new levels of artistry. Rock music emerged from the ’60s as to go-to choice of white youth culture. Disco, an entire cultural movement fueled by a genre of music-with massive impact on fashion, film, TV and advertising-was utterly ubiquitous. The children of the baby boom were coming into their late twenties and thirties-young enough to still be serious music consumers, but old enough to have their own generation of children who were starting to buy music.Īnd then there was the music itself. Analog recording technology was at its zenith, FM radio was ascendant, and the AM dial still focused on music. Home stereos were a standard part of middle-class culture. Labels were flush with cash, sales of LPs and singles were brisk, and record stores were everywhere. As the used vinyl bins of the world are still telling us, records were the thing. There were, of course, fewer kinds of media competing for the average consumer’s time-television meant just a handful of channels, video games were the size of refrigerators and could be found in arcades. The 1970s was arguably the single decade of the 20th century when recorded music was most central to culture.
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