{"id":1251,"date":"2014-10-15T06:57:23","date_gmt":"2014-10-15T06:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=1251"},"modified":"2016-08-13T00:43:04","modified_gmt":"2016-08-13T00:43:04","slug":"guardians-of-the-galaxy-why-1970s-pop-produces-awesome-mixtapes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/guardians-of-the-galaxy-why-1970s-pop-produces-awesome-mixtapes\/","title":{"rendered":"Guardians of the Galaxy: why 1970s pop produces awesome mixtapes"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Joe Bennett<\/a>, Bath Spa University<\/em><\/p>\n

The top selling music album in the USA is currently Guardians Of The Galaxy: Awesome Mix Volume 1<\/a> \u2013 and has been for three weeks. Those who have seen the film will know that the track listing is based on a fictional mixtape made by main character Peter Quill\u2019s dying mother, and given to him when he was a boy (shortly before his abduction by cannibal outlaw pirate aliens). Mrs Quill\u2019s music tastes consisted mostly of classic pop from the 1970s, and the songs play an important part in the story.<\/p>\n

Back in the real world of 2014 pop music, cross-media promotion clearly gives the album an advantage over other top spot contenders such as Now 51<\/a>, The Gaslight Anthem<\/a> and 5 Seconds of Summer<\/a>. Even so, people won\u2019t buy music unless it\u2019s good; clearly, thousands of 21st century moviegoers have realised that four decades ago a lot of mainstream pop music was, well, awesome.<\/p>\n

The \u201cdadrock\u201d era of the late 60s and early 70s casts a very long shadow over popular music\u2019s cultural history, and it\u2019s difficult to deny that some of these recordings have stood the test of time.<\/p>\n

\u2018Awesome Mix Vol. 1\u2019, as provided by Starlord\u2019s mum.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In this period rock and pop music listening was, famously, the primary leisure activity (along with sex and drugs) of the postwar baby-boomers. If you were born in the spring of 1955 you would have been 17 when Bowie released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars<\/a>. Popular music was the ideal cheap mass-distribution retail recreation product. Unlike movies, where (pre-VHS or DVD) you had to pay every time, a single vinyl purchase would give you an infinite number of listens to your favourite song. So vinyl sales increased<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Because people were buying so much music in the \u201870s, this allowed artists and songwriters to take artistic and commercial risks. Listen to the ridiculous \u201cooga-chaka\u201d intro and verse in Hooked on a Feeling<\/a> \u2013 12 bars of completely unaccompanied vocals. Or immerse yourself in the epic back story<\/a> to Bowie\u2019s \u201cMoonage Daydream\u201d and follow Ziggy Stardust\u2019s ascendancy from quasi-religious alien to rock star. Would either of these be likely contenders for the top ten singles chart of 2014?<\/p>\n

Ooga-chaka.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But all this creative freedom was constrained by technology. The early 70s saw the transition from 4-track, through 8-track, and eventually up to 16-track recording, so artists could not overdub<\/a> instruments indefinitely. Synthesisers could only play one note at a time. Digital sampling had not yet been invented, the earliest sequencers could play only a few notes, and drum machines were limited to preset rhythms<\/a>. So almost every part of the arrangement was played live by humans in real time.<\/p>\n

This is important because it shows how different playing music in a band is to editing music on a screen. In a 1970s studio, if a musician made a mistake there were only two options \u2013 re-record the part, or leave it in. And studio time was expensive, so everyone had an incentive to get it right. These conditions drove strong musicianship, intensive rehearsal and (thanks to the large industry markup on retail vinyl) big rewards for those songwriters, vocalists, producers and instrumentalists who could produce great sounds within these constraints.<\/p>\n

When a human musician is playing an instrumental part, he or she is responding, moment to moment, to the rest of the song arrangement. In the first four bars of The Five Stairsteps\u2019 O-o-h Child<\/a>, we can hear Dennis Burke\u2019s soulful drum groove react to every note in the trumpet melody, pushing and pulling the timing and dynamics to fit perfectly into the arrangement, as his brother James holds the descending guitar chord in bar four until the exact point when the brass section decays. To listen to this recording is to experience six musicians \u2013 independently, simultaneously and together \u2013 drawing us into their soundworld for every moment of three minutes and 17 seconds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

These days it\u2019s possible to program this level of detail into a sample-based computer workstation, but the result is usually more perfect, consistent and accurate than humans can manage. We hear the technical inaccuracies of 1970s musicians as performance subtleties, constantly reminding us of the presence of a real person at the other end of the microphone. This communicates the humanity of the band to the listener.<\/p>\n

But we shouldn\u2019t be luddites, nor should we rose-tint the 70s. Objectively, pop music sounds better now than ever, in the same way that 2014 movies look better than 1970s movies. We have higher fidelity, more control of the mix, an effectively infinite palette of synthesised and sampled sounds, and more accurate vocals through comping<\/a> and auto-tune.<\/p>\n

Today, 10cc would not need to record 624 voices for three weeks<\/a> with a 12-foot-long 2-inch tape loop stretched around the studio just to make some ethereal backing chords. And yet here we are in 2014, watching Hollywood\u2019s finest CGI-powered contemporary sci-fi while listening to a 40-year-old vocal recording.<\/p>\n

Creativity thrives when given a problem to solve, and the constraints of 70s music technology forced musicians to exercise all their artistic communication skills. As Igor Stravinsky said in 1942, \u201cthe more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one\u2019s self of the chains that shackle the spirit\u201d. Technological limitations collided with consumer demand to provide a golden age of creativity in popular music. Mumrock will never die.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Joe Bennett does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Joe Bennett, Bath Spa University The top selling music album in the USA is currently Guardians Of The Galaxy: Awesome Mix Volume 1 \u2013 and has been for three weeks. Those who have seen the film will know that the track listing is based on a fictional mixtape made by main character Peter Quill\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":5785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1251"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5786,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251\/revisions\/5786"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}