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Yay! i get to put it up. Very surprised i wasnt beaten to the punch. Honestly, and im not just saying it because im supposed to, but this song is my absolute favorite. When it hits the middle eight, (around 3 minutes in), it could honestly go on for another ten minutes before id realise it was the same song. Its just got suc a clean sound to it.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8TBmeK9Abg

 

and a song from my childhood... the first song i actually ever remember listening to... in part because as a 4 year old i remember loving watching the spiral on my dads master of reality album, in part because the opening riff kills, and in part because for some reason i found the cough really funny:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3YtvuZ2-I0

 

and the only other song i know from the 70s. This grooves...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sejmOZVxusY

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Feel Mighty Real is a great song, but it's really fast like a hi-NRG record and I think more typical of what was to come out of Europe in 1980s with Bronski, Hazell Dean etc.

For the epitome of 1970s disco, you need a tune that is slower and has a bigger arrangement with fake strings, a bit of Rhodes, and maybe horns too! Something like this or Disco Inferno maybe.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrBYKslPrbg

 

The switch to uptempo is at 2:40

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Huh, I had always thought of Hi-NRG as a purely '80s thing, but I suppose you're right that it, like much else in the '80s, had its roots in the '70s.

(And now I may need to go drop some more tunes in the '80s thread.)

 

And now, for the answer to my challenge, which I had thought for sure someone would know or figure out, but perhaps I'm just even more of an old fart than I had realized:

 

CSNY's "Ohio" was written immediately after the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970, wherein Ohio National Guard troops fired on a crowd of students who were protesting the US invasion of Cambodia, killing 4 students (two of whom were bystanders) and injuring several others. This was the first such incident at the time (a couple of similar incidents at other universities in the US followed in the next few months), and is considered one of the major turning points of US public opinion against the Vietnam War.

 

On-campus at the time were some Kent State students who would later go on to form Devo, a band whose philosophy that humans are not evolving to a higher state, but rather de-evolving to a more regressive one, was influenced by the events of that day.

 

Another student there that day was Chrissie Hynde, who was briefly in a band with a couple of the future Devo members, and who ended up dropping out of school, left the country, and eventually became the lead singer of the Pretenders.

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Speaking of warm, that is the word I would use to describe the synth here, warm and powerful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0WNbm1jz6A

 

I could write an Ippy-length account of how it seemed like we (or at least some of us) waited the whole '70s for someone to figure out how to make the synthesizer into a full-fledged, expressive, general-purpose musical instrument. William/Wendy Carlos Williams' "Switched on Bach" was an early proof-of-principle that the synthesizer could be used as a musical instrument at all, though the actual sounds were clearly inferior to those of "real" instruments. Pink Floyd made good, occasional use in a psychedelic vein (cf. "On the Run" and "Any Colour You Like" from Dark Side of the Moon), and Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream and the like made albums suitable for a shut-in evening of navel-gazing, but these were all still specialty niches, experimental. Kraftwerk was great too, though rather on the robotic side (but "Neon Lights" was very pretty), and again not really mainstream. Steve Miller Band had the infuriating habit of starting songs with soaring electronic opening lines, only to abruptly degenerate into Foreigner/Toto/Styx-esque generic blandness. I felt their synthesizer license should be taken away from them.

 

So when Gary Numan finally came on the scene, it seemed as though at last! someone had figured out how to really bring the future to now, and make the synthesizer into an expressive, general purpose instrument that could even penetrate the mass-market as something more than a cheap gimmick. It may have been just a message of teen-age heartbreak, but you could really feel the alienation and betrayal felt by the lonely little microchip dripping silicon oil as it drifted, sparking and arcing across a dark grid.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, in a lighter vein:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEZ3VxGWwjM

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Numan is an interesting one.

 

He has become much more 'industrial' and heavy of late, NIN-ish even.

 

I quite like some of his stuff, both early and more recent.

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Can i chuck this in here until er, theres a pompous highbrow bullshit thread? (i dont really want to start a music thread from the dawn of man to the 1950s if i can help it)... I mean it did go in voyager, and that was the 70s... soooooo...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVRdEvdovgk&feature=BFa&list=PLF8895DBC857FC4A8

 

Absolutely fascinating time capsule that i kinda knew about but also kinda forgot about (or just didnt know exactly what they put on it).

Run through the playlist, theres some startlingly beautiful music here. (ah, dang, the playlist didnt work. The choice of track was only because it was the first one on the playlist, but honestly do yourself a favor, dig it out and listen to all 25 tracks).

 

The reason i actually came across it though was because I was looking for Beethovens opus 130 (cavatina) and learned it was shot into space... rightly so. :wave:

(only kidding beeth fans...)

 

(i like this version more than the one they sent up though):

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAttnQupeeg&feature=BFa&list=HL1335276821

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