Quotes & Sayings About Music In The 1970s

When it comes to music, we live in a very different world than everyone did in the 1960s and 1970s. — Vanessa Carlton

For a long time in the 1970s, I was experimenting to build musical instruments and use them. I did a lot of ethnic music studies and other things, like electronic music. Making homemade musical instruments and performing was my major activity from the time. — Yoshi Wada

I had enough of a story churning in my head that combined all the elements of the day - the interview, the concert, the after-party's private session - when he put his guitar away and asked me if I had ever experimented with homosexuality. Talk about unexpected segues. Letting him know that I had not and wasn't about to, I successfully changed the subject by asking him to give me a condensed account about traveling to Mississippi in search of Bukka White. — Kenny Weissberg

Since hip hop emerged from the South Bronx in the 1970s, it has become an international, multi-billion-dollar phenomenon. It has grown to encompass more than just rap music. Hip hop has created a culture that incorporates ethnicity, art, politics, fashion, technology and urban life." This debunks the widely accepted argument that the genre is inherently divisive. With so many factors converging to create such an intricate, informative and multi-faceted genre, whose history and impact have bridged barriers between artist and society, it is not too complicated an endeavor to understand that its relevance repudiates its notorious reputation. — Carlos Wallace

The song 'Take This Job and Shove It' spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites. — Alex Pareene

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish. — Brian Eno

Punk was originally about creating new, important, energetic music that would hopefully threaten the status quo and the stupidity of the 1970s. — Jello Biafra

At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into "contemporary English," which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, "You son of a bitch!" (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as "Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman," which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these translations went a bit far. I recall one of the Bibles translating the inscription over the cross, "INRI" (Iesus Nazaremus Rex Iudaeorum), as "SSDD" (Same Shit Different Day), and another describing the Last Supper - the night before Jesus' death, a death he freely accepted - where Jesus breaks the bread, gives it to his disciples, and says, "It's better to burn out than fade away," but these memories could be deceptive. — Rob Sheffield

I was a kid at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, so a lot of things changed. You had pop music coming up, with David Bowie, you had new television programmes and all these things. I was fascinated. — Dries Van Noten

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s. — Camille Paglia

First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago. — Carl Wilson

It never was about the musician or the instrument - it was about the laser notes in a hall of mirrors, the music itself. It was going to change the world for the better and it has. Maybe not as fast or as much as we wanted, but it has and it still will. Whether your name is Mozart, or Django Reinhardt, or Robert Johnson, or Jimi Hendrix, or whoever is next; who you are doesn't matter so long as you can open that conduit and let the music come through. It is the burning edge, whatever it sounds like and whoever is playing it. It is the noisy, messy, silly, invincible voice of life that comes through the LP on the turn-table, the transistor radio, or the Bose in your new Lexus that makes you want to get up out of whatever you are stuck in and dance. It is Dionysus and the Maenads all over again. No one can control it and I pity whoever tries. I am old now and only a house cat sunning herself in the window - but I was a tigress once, and I remember. I still remember. — G.J. Paterson

To be in a band, at least according to the rules of rock in the 1970s, one must know how to play an instrument. But rather than waste time solving that problem, No Wavers ignored it. The point was simply to make music, not to learn how first. — Lydia Lunch

I hated most music in the 1970s, especially disco, but Bowie was edgier. — Anton Du Beke

In the 1970s, for all the Stevie Wonders, I'm sure there were five artists that were making forgettable music. — John Legend

Had Kurt Cobain not committed suicide in 1994, would his genius have survived the continuous incisions of a media that was only too proud of its ability to chisel away at his fragile psyche in the years before he decided that he'd had enough off their invasions? And, had Jimi Hendrix not passed way in 1970, would he, too have eventually fallen into decline, first equalled, then eclipsed by the brilliant wave of new guitarists: Robin Trower, Ritchie Blackmore, Mick Ronson, who emerged during the early 1970s? In death, Hendrix led by example: in life he could have been left for the dead. — Dave Thompson

I think I definitely learned how to structure songs, just from listening to a lot of 1960s, 1970s pop music, although I'm sure my mother's watchful eye had a lot to do with it. — Caitlin Rose

Take Tom Jones and mix him with Enrico Caruso, the Italian tenor-cum-castrato singer. Then add tons of pathetic love songs, faked sex appeal and musical kleptomania focusing on Western hits from the 1970s. Spice it up with a political flexibility rare even for Central European standards and a personal status close to that of the Pope. What do you get? Karel Gott, Czech pop music's most mega-super, long-lasting and brightest star. — Terje B. Englund

Take just one well-known event: The Beatles' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This has been depicted with astonishing regularity as a pivotal cultural moment; in fact an entire movie -- I Wanna Hold Your Hand -- was built around it. And that Sullivan episode was indeed a major event in popular culture. But did you know that in 1961, 26 million people watched a CBS live broadcast of the first performance of a new symphony by classical composer Aaron Copland? Moreover, with all the attention that sixties rock groups receive, it may come as a surprise to learn that My Fair Lady was Columbia Records' biggest-selling album before the 1970s, beating out those of sixties icons Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Byrds. — Jonathan Leaf