Week 3 of History of Rock Part 2 is going to be devoted to rock music in the second half of the 1970s. So as we begin this discussion of rock music in the second half of the 1970s, let's review sort of how we got here. remember that one of the arguments that I've been making in the videos that I make in my textbook is that you can really see rock music from late psychedelia. Maybe even from the mid-60s, but certainly late psychedelia '66 through '69. Connecting up with music in rock music in the 70s, and as I will argue this week, continue to the end of the decade. I, I make that point because a lot of times people want to chunk it into three sort of very separate things, sort of the way we've done with the videos. But, without the argument that they're really all connected in a, in a certain kind of way according to certain kinds of ideas. so the psychedelia is seen as one kind of thing. Rock music from the first half of the decade is seen as one kind of thing, and rock music from the second half of the decade is seen as yet a third thing. Again, I think they're all grouped together and there's a kind of a pattern that holds them together. remember that at the, at the, the psychedelia, we got rock music getting increasingly ambitious. And blending together a number of different kinds of styles experimenting with blending different kind of styles into, into rock music. Without any of those particular stylistic blends becoming patented or characteristic. So, a group could bring in any kind of influence and it didn't be, become a particular stylistic marker. That if you brought country music and all of sudden you became country rock or something like that, you just used it. it was a kind of a wild experimental period. As we go into the beginning of the 1970s, remember that I talked about the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon. And the image on the front of that album, which is a, a prism, and white light going through one end. And all the different colors going for the other end of it. And the idea there being that the white light is almost like this psychedelia coming out of the late 60s. And the different colored lights are like the different styles of specialty styles that begin to develop in the early 1970s. So we're talking about country, rock, and blues rock and progressive rock and singer-songwriter, and jazz rock. All of these things that have been part of a kind of stylistic soup in the late 60s now become kind of specialized kinds of styles, and so we talked about that. What happens in the second half of the 70s is that what had been a kind of stylistic separation in specialization starts now to consolidate again. So that features from various kinds of styles from the first half of the decade now start to become combined, recombined at the end. So, you'll see a kind of exploration a kind of specialization and a kind of consolidation that occurs. What holds all this music is something that I call the hippie aesthetic. And the idea that this, this music that all drives is all driven by the idea that rock music should be as good as it can be. That rock musicians are artists who have a responsibility to push the music forward, to push the envelope, to always do something new, something different to explore new things. Never to repeat themselves unduly or too much. and to be the most professional kinds of musicians they can be. we will see this week that what happens at the end of the 70s is that a group of musicians come along who push back on all of that hippy aesthetic stuff. First, the punk musicians and then the new wave bands and artists start to push back and, and embrace a kind of a return to simplicity. Almost that, that the more sort of amateurish you seem the more authentic you are, the more real your music is. The more professional you seem, the more contrived it is, the less sort of real and authentic it is. So, that reaction against the hippie aesthetic is one of the kinds of things that marks the very end of this decade. I'll come back at the end of the this week's lectures. And after we've talked about the second, after the 70s, and we'll review this sort of arc that I'm describing here. That sort of pulls together not only the music from these, from these first three lectures here, but also music from part one of the course. one of the things that we're going to see happening in the second half of the 70s that's important, is the rise of the big album. What starts to happen in the second half of the 70s, is album sales, as the rock business continues to get bigger and bigger, and there's more and more money in it. All of a sudden, there are albums that hit with such tremendous force, with such tremendous sales. That all of a sudden, everybody's sort of surprised. They'd never dreamed that records could sell so many, there, there could be so much money and so much profit in this rock business. That goes hand in hand with the development of FM radio, which you may remember from the beginning of or from the part one of the course. We talked about its beginnings in 1967 back in San Francisco and other kind of sort of small underground FM free form radio stations and formats and this kind of thing. Well, as the 70s unfold, there's more and more money in FM radio, which means there's more and more ad, potential advertising revenue. And radio starts to get increasingly formatted in order to sort of maximize the listeners who are listening to the station in hopes of maximizing the profits from the advertising. So this was just a real growth, and maybe even sort of homogenization, and to a certain extent. growing conservative nature of FM radio is a big role of the second half of the 70s. And then the, the across the 70s we can see a tremendous growth in live performance and live venues. What started out in the 60s as group playing in things like you know of ballrooms and theaters. Now by the time we get to the middle of the decade, we've got these they're playing in places like arenas and stadiums. In fact, sometimes the music is called a rated called arena rock in the second act, because that's so often where the music is performed. what that means is that in cities all across the country. Now there are specialized people where people come and play. There are specialized promoters who do these kind of gigs. A circuit develops and people sort of go through that as they tour. There are special companies that arise for sound. Such special companies that arise for lights that go with the group says they couldn't just becomes a much more increasingly sophisticated kind of business. So the bottom line in all of this, whether we're talking about the sales of records, or FM radio, or live venues is live venues and live concerts. Is just the growth of the business and more, more money, more, more profit available in it. Some people would say that this leads to a kind of a degeneration of rock music in the second half of the 70s. That's because there's so much money in it. And, and because there's money in it, it means that corporations that had not previously been involved with music, are investing in music companies. So that they can take advantage of turning a quick profit in the music business. Because of all this money that's involved, the music starts to become. Safer and safer as every label goes for that big album that's going to turn a fantastic profit. radio becomes more and more constrained. that, the, the music becomes almost cynically constructed. Almost like you'd think of the teen idols or some of the [UNKNOWN] building stuff from the early 1960s. It's cynically constructed to sell the most copies. And people who believe that, I'm just saying that's my point of view. That's not the way I'm teaching it, but that's one point of view. people who believe that call that music from the end of the 1970s corporate rock. They see it as a real dumbing down of rock music. And it's something that never should have been, it's not the real thing, it's inauthentic. Now, the first obvious problem with that is that a lot of the groups that they hate so much, [LAUGH] I'd love to hate so much. People like Foreigner Boston and Journey, and groups like that just happen to be the core of what most people think of as classic rock. So, there's a real divide here about the late 1970s whether they constitute a, a period of synthesis and consolidation aesthetically or whether they're a, a kind of a, just a kind of a dumbing down. And the homogenization of the entire decade. So, like what we've done before in this class, we'll let you decide about that. I'll offer both explanations or both, present both cases to you. So, let's get rolling here. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the specific features. Of mainstream rock, 1975 to 1980.
