Discobahn: Annivyrsary 1974
When I started gathering my research for this Annivyrsary back in January, one thing became clear—1974 was not a good year for music. This was very much a puberty period, an awkward personality vacuum that comes between shedding the old and fully realizing the new. This was to be my Waterloo.
Which is the first thing we should talk about: Perhaps the biggest, longest-lasting musical event of 1974 was the winning of the Eurovision Song Contest by none other than ABBA. “Waterloo,” their first-ever single, launched a career that not only landed a movie and its sequel on every Delta flight going forward but also led to Swedish dominance in pop, further hammered home by Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling” this year and continuing through Max Martin’s producing work in 90s, 00s, and today.
As far as shedding the old goes, this was one of those years where genre progenitors—The Stooges for punk, King Crimson for prog—dissolved themselves and gave way to more commercially viable butterflies—the Ramones, who played their first show at CBGB this year, and Rush, who released their 1974 debut before Neal Peart even joined the band. The lightning of Suzi Quatro’s “The Wild One,” Patti Smith’s “Hey Joe,” and even Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” could be seen before the thunder of “God Save the Queen” and “White Riot” was to be heard in 1977.
At the same time, this was the year of two more genre-planting monoliths: “Rock Your Baby,” the first disco single to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, which almost single-handedly invented electronic music. And that’s not even touching Brian Eno’s monumental year, releasing two art-rock masterpieces after quitting Roxy Music and writing “Third Uncle,” one of the songs that invented goth when Bauhaus covered it in 1982.
So clearly, once I dug, I found the juice—but it was a long time coming, readers. A lot of the stuff I had to listen through was swill. It seems the blockbusters of 1973 (Dark Side of the Moon, Aladdin Sane) left such a vacuum that no great work could survive until the Big Bang of the hedonistic late-20th century reared its head. At least the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself.
‘74: I was defeated. You won the war.
‘74: I promise to love you forever more.
When I started gathering my research for this Annivyrsary back in January, one thing became clear—1974 was not a good year for music. This was very much a puberty period, an awkward personality vacuum that comes between shedding the old and fully realizing the new. This was to be my Waterloo.
Something preposterous happened in 1964: On the week of April 4, one artist had the top five songs on the Billboard Hot 100. It’d never happened before and it hasn’t been matched since. Mere weeks before, in the warming days of March, America found that no fewer than 60% of all records sold were songs by the Beatles.
Safe to say three of the most consequential albums of my life came out in 2013, and that list doesn’t even touch the dozen other nearly perfect albums from this year—Trouble Will Find Me, Modern Vampires of the City, Cupid Deluxe, Yeezus… 2013 changed music as we know it, and a lot of the biggest artists today cemented their status or debuted this year, from The 1975 to Beyoncé.
I do remember that this is the year I got a Nintendo Power subscription though. And I do remember one day, flipping through said Nintendo Power in the back seat of the family van, my parents slid a revolution into the CD player. That was the day I first heard Now!That’s What I Call Music! 14.
So for me, ‘93 was the first year of the 90s, and its evidence lies in several places: in the birth of the Riot Grrrl movement and third wave feminism with Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl”; in Nirvana’s dyspeptic final album before Cobain’s untimely death; and in Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the harbinger for the soon-to-be golden age of hip hop.
Some stories of note in 1983: the invention of Detroit techno, as embodied by the single “Clear” by Cybotron; the birth of English indie rock as we know it with The Smiths debut and follow up singles (“Hand in Glove” and “This Charming Man,” respectively); and the birth of American indie rock as we know it with R.E.M.’s Murmur.
If you want a little taste of what 1973 was like, go watch Licorice Pizza, the title of which refers to the old LP, a.k.a. the vinyl record—and boy, was this year firmly the middle of the Album Empire.
It’s time for the first of our Annivyrsaries, my favorite history class, and we’re starting with the sounds of 1963. So naturally, I want to focus on something that hasn’t been touched as much by scholars—the rise of the Surf Song.
It was the year the world was supposed to end. For music, in a own way, it did. As the 2009 class of indie darlings delivered underwhelming follow ups (Shields, Centipede Hz, Swing Lo Magellan—many now, in ten years time, seen as unsung greats), critics were reckoning with the rise of poptimism.
In 2002, I was listening to All That You Can’t Leave Behind from the backseat of a minivan while I flipped through the pictures in Nintendo Power. I thought all songs debuted through Now That’s What I Call Music! I was Coldplay’s perfect mark—I had no idea what a cliché even was.
I must’ve gotten my hands on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004, when I was 10 or 11 years old. Grand Theft Auto maintains a dual reputation as one of the greatest video games of all time as well as one of those Matrix-level Y2K-era youth corruptors.
The first time I went crowd-surfing was in a stranger’s dark living room to “Come On Eileen.” I remember being lifted on shaky hands and the warm breeze borne from the drunken crowd. It was during that thumping chant of the bridge, every foot moving to the brow-beating stomp. My nose scraped the ceiling as I sang along.
At the height of his fame, David Bowie forged Ziggy Stardust to help him withstand the heat of the limelight. He quickly came to resent it. He was starting to think that he was Ziggy. He even went as far as trying to kill Stardust off one summer in London. “That fucker would not leave me alone for years,” he once said.
Pretend it’s 1962. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring hits The New Yorker in June. In a month, heavy smog descends upon London; the first Walmart rears its head in Arkansas. Another month, and Marilyn Monroe is dead. The world could collapse any day now.
Summer morning doesn’t strike the Midwest sky so much as it subdues it. The sun will lay the night down gently—first with the grip of firm, pink fingers, then a whispered command in daffodil light.
It's 2001: CDs are excessive. Packing 1.4 million bits into a single second of stereo? In reality, we need only 128,000—a mere twelfth the size of what we were sold.
In 1991, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine spent three years making their second record, held up by perfectionism and his visionary sound—thousands of pedals to make the guitars shimmer, a mirage of pitch-bent tremolo effects.
She and I stood face-to-face—cheeks rolling as we chewed in calculated fury—in a bathroom flooded so many times you could see from peeling paint the location of each waterline. Moments ago, we’d scoured the concrete for bright strips of green between the rippling sheet of the Mississippi River and the faded auditorium where we now conspired.
At 11:59 p.m. on the first day of 1971, families watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson witnessed the last ad for cigarettes ever broadcast on television. 60 seconds dedicated to Virginia Slims. Those who preferred CBS’s Merv Griffin saw the same but for a different pack—Marlboros. Dick Cavett fans got Benson & Hedges.
1961 was what MAD Magazine called an Upside-Up year. It’s strobogrammatic, rotationally symmetric—flip it upside-down while no one’s looking and the number appears to have remained the same. If 1969 is the year that changed everything, we ought to christen 1961 as the year the world flipped upside-down, unnoticed; no one seemed to be paying any attention.
The real reason I had no time to write was I got so sucked in to making the damn playlist. It had to be longer this time, both because I had so much material (it was the year of my musical awakening) and because we could all use a longer escape.
This Valentine's Day, Hulu released a new TV version of High Fidelity. I told myself I wouldn't watch it. Its existence felt like a trick, its timing too convenient. It only took me two nights to cave. I set down the movie to watch the whole thing twice; some will disagree, but I think it's fantastic.
1990 was the year that the Pale Blue Dot photo was beamed back to Earth by Voyager 1—as it left the Solar System, Carl Sagan told NASA to have the craft turn its camera around and take one last photo of the Earth against the black canvas of space. In the shot, our planet is barely bigger than a pixel.
In 1980, a Japanese manufacturer of electronic instruments launched its first line of drum machines. Instead of pre-recorded samples, this machine made its own sounds—particularly, a booming bass drum that sounded like Flubber hitting a trampoline.
Ten years is as far as you can stretch in time while still holding your sense of self. Walk back through each week, however, and it's exhausting to see just how far time's canyon will reach. The decade is the standard unit of change.
In 1960, America was adjusting to being the empire. Our version of love was designed to support structures of power, and myths of supremacy reigned. Threatened by a liberated woman, male culture doubled down and curdled into the mess it is today.
2009: the last good year, or the first bad one? Less depends on the events of the past, and more on how young you are when they happen.
We narrowly avoided this being the single worst playlist I've ever put together, just by how crazy pop music had become in 1999. Maybe Y2K had us losing more of a grip than we thought; whatever the reason, it was a year that a lot of the lamest songs of all time were released.
Let me bring you back to 1989: the number, another summer, sound of a funky drummer. Ten years after "Rapper's Delight," hip hop was in full-roaring-force ramping up to the Golden Age of the 1990's, and one of the biggest works of art that year was Spike Lee's incendiary Do the Right Thing.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.