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How 1971 revolutionized pop music

2021-12-31T08:22:58.002Z


How 1971 revolutionized pop music Created: 12/31/2021Updated: 12/31/2021, 9:18 AM From: Johannes Löhr David Bowie at the photo shoot for his best LP "Hunky Dory" from 1971. © Brian Ward / Warner Music A look back at the albums of 1971 shows: never before or after have there been so many pioneering, classic LPs. Pop music had grown up - and much of what is taken for granted by today's stars beg


How 1971 revolutionized pop music

Created: 12/31/2021Updated: 12/31/2021, 9:18 AM

From: Johannes Löhr

David Bowie at the photo shoot for his best LP "Hunky Dory" from 1971. © Brian Ward / Warner Music

A look back at the albums of 1971 shows: never before or after have there been so many pioneering, classic LPs.

Pop music had grown up - and much of what is taken for granted by today's stars began 50 years ago.

On New Year's Eve of 1970, Paul McCartney files a lawsuit to legally dissolve the Beatles' partnership.

A stroke of the pen like a symbol: On this day at the latest, the sixties as a pop culture era will end.

The decade that follows will be one of the superlatives - and 1971 will be its outstanding year.

The British music journalist David Hepworth advocates this thesis in his book "1971 - Never a dull Moment: Rock's golden Year".

In fact, the events from 1971 to the present day continue to have an impact.

What makes a year so special that half a century later it is still seen as a turning point?

A lot has to come together for this.

Where are the new Beatles?

The Fab Four have abdicated - Lennon and McCartney shot poison arrows at each other in song form on their solo records in 1971.

At the latest then the managers of the record companies understand that a replacement is needed.

You invest in countless newcomers - even in those who by the old standards hardly beckons with commercial success.

Bands like Yes want to be compared to classical composers and plow through breakneck scores.

They record “The Yes Album” in small sections, sometimes only for 30 seconds.

After the sound engineers have glued together a song from the band snippets with almost monastic devotion, the musicians take a quick breath - and only now learn to play it as a whole from the finished recording.

This approach turns everything that has gone before on its head.


The first bestseller in pop music

So pop comes of age in 1971 - nothing shows that like Carole King's career. She has already been in the business for 13 years and has written teenage dramas such as “The Locomotion” or “Will you love me tomorrow” for others. But the 28-year-old is completely unglamorous, flirtatious, she is at heart a middle-aged Jewish lady from Brooklyn who likes to make tapestries - English: "Tapestry".

This is also the name of her album, the song collection of a seasoned woman: self-confident, vulnerable, happy.

Tapestry, recorded for $ 22,000 over five days, sells 150,000 times a week.

The unexcited big sister voice is on the same wavelength as those baby boomers who no longer want to change the world, but want to get along with it.

For the music industry, the 25 million copies of this pop bestseller set the standards that need to be achieved - customers are no longer just young people, but increasingly also “middle-aged ladies”.

Good for the artists: they now receive a lot more money, thanks to large advances.

The rock star decadence of Eagles, Led Zeppelin and Co. can come ...


The most famous albums from 1971

View photo gallery

The helplessness of the bosses

With the new self-esteem, the influence of the record bosses is waning - it's a bit like New Hollywood, where filmmakers like Warren Beatty, William Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich are undermining the studios' influence. In 1971, films like "The French Connection" and "The Last Picture Show" were successful - although they did not follow the old patterns of crime, westerns or social drama.

Not being up to date anymore - Berry Gordy has to go through that too. The head of Motown Records led his company with a strict hand through the sixties and nicely trimmed streamlined supergroups like the Supremes so that the black music also appealed to a white audience. But the workforce complains - especially the singer Marvin Gaye, Gordy's son-in-law. The handsome boy, troubled by his brother's return from Vietnam, wants to make music that means something. Wants to address the seething social unrest and the oppression of African Americans. And all in a gently grooving, jazz-influenced ballad. Gordy reluctantly waves through the single "What's going on" - and after its mega success also the LP of the same name. It becomes a classic,who has accompanied protests since then and can still be heard today on “Black Lives matter” demos.


The rock star climbs the higher society

If there's someone who doesn't have a lack of self-esteem, it's Mick Jagger.

The former business administration student is not only the only one of the Rolling Stones who takes care in business meetings and urges the band to move to France in 1971 to save taxes - he also has a knack for making the Stones a brand, the still pulls 50 years later.

You set up your own record company, their signature: a sticking out tongue.

No less a person than Andy Warhol designed the cover of the new record “Sticky Fingers”.

It is also Jagger who finally established rock'n'roll as a division of high society.

On May 12, 1971, he married Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias in St. Tropez - an unparalleled social event and blueprint for turbulent celebrity connections to this day.


Indescribably feminine

The feminine side of pop is not only shown to advantage in the rather staid Carole King. Song heroines like Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon are much more revealing in their music and in real life - in the role of the sexual cat of prey, which has so far been played by male rockers. In Simon's hit “You're so vain”, she etched against the guy with whom she just had something: He was probably so vain to believe that this song was about him. James Taylor and Mick Jagger, who sing along in the choir, may feel addressed - and Bianca Jagger wonder what her new husband does in his free time.

At the same time, pop singers discovered their androgynous self in 1971 - glam rock was born.

David Bowie sings in a fur coat and with a lot of make-up about life on Mars, Marc Bolan and his band T Rex no longer warble like a hippie, but forge platform shoe stompers like "Hot Love".

Pop becomes stylistically and sexually diverse.


The invention of the format radio

In the hippie days, rock DJs played the song “Parthenogenesis” by Canned Heat on the radio in all its 20-minute glory, so that they could have a joint in front of the door. They didn't really think about the audience. Lee Abrams, on the other hand, does nothing else - and thus invents the format radio that still dominates the airwaves today. At the US broadcaster WPTF in 1971 his motto was: “Familiar music works.” He doesn't rely on DJs, but asks the listeners what they liked. That and only that has the chance to get back into the program. His example quickly caught on - a cornerstone of the success of the edgeless rock records by Fleetwood Mac and other bands in the middle of the decade. AOR, Adult Oriented Rock, is born. The former music of the counterculture is becoming mainstream.

Forward-looking technology

In 1971 only a handful of musicians could operate a synthesizer.

One of them is Pete Townshend from The Who, who effectively puts him at the beginning of the LP “Who's next”.

The fact that a machine sets the rhythm is new to date - and will soon be implemented in a much more radical way.

The German band Kraftwerk is already in the starting blocks.

A nostalgic look back

The year 1971 is also the first in which rock'n'roll looks back wistfully.

Don McLean sings "American Pie" about the day Buddy Holly died in 1959 - "the Day, the Music died".

He lands an international hit.

Meanwhile, Elvis Presley checks in at the age of 36, which is biblical for a rock musician, in Las Vegas and performs his old hits there.

It is the beginning of the nostalgic entertainment industry as we know it today.

“In the end, the people cheer and applaud,” reports the critic Jon Landau about an Elvis concert in 1971. “But they don't even get out of their seats during this.” He saw the future of rock'n'roll.

Source: merkur

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