Posts in history
Episode 7: Women who Rocked the 70s

The ‘girl’ thing seems to be real important for other people but I’m mystified by it. For me, Brass In Pocket was supposed to be real traditional, because tradition in rock is what turns me on. We want our rock singers to be confident and cocky, and Brass In Pocket was an act, my attempt to write a song that sounded like that.” — Chrissie Hynde

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Episode 6: The 70s Roots of Hip Hop

Nile Rogers said in an interview with Red Bull Music Academy in 2011 that he and Bernard Edwards realized that with Good Times, they had the “perfect hip hop record because the break down took so long to develop that they could have rhymes that could go on forever…” He said for Chic, the song was just the excuse to go to the chorus and the chorus was just the excuse to go to the breakdown.

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Episode 3: Nostalgia, Race, and Rebels in 70s Southern Rock

This [“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”] is a song of pain. There were Virgil Caines of the early 1970s who  looked around and they ALSO saw a South that they were starting to find unrecognizable. The landscape and how people lived were shifting. The low hanging fruit here is, of course, to focus on the race. We can’t ignore it. In 1970, we were only six years out from the Civil Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow laws. Whether white southerners like it or not, their past as one of the largest slave societies in world history and as the former Confederacy of the United States will likely never escape them, in part because some people do not want to escape it. 

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Episode 2: Countryish Music of the 1970s

Fueled by a few too many gin and tonics, Charlie Rich announces that John Denver is the CMA Entertainer of the Year but it does not end there. He reaches into his pocket, takes out a lighter, and sets the card on fire. Fortunately, John Denver was appearing via satellite from Australia and did not see it but a whole lot of other folks did. Charlie said it was an accident and blamed it on some painkillers but given the state of country music in 1975, it seemed too obvious of a statement to ignore. That statement was that the likes of John Denver were not welcome in country music.

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