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Old 01-20-2021, 03:25 PM
FrankHudson FrankHudson is offline
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Well, a lot the subjective impact of art is due to the context it was created in (how society as a whole interacted with it) and with its listener's age at the time -- and it's pretty well established that the music that grabs us before age 30 or so has a particular stickiness with us throughout the rest of our lives.

These things mean that if any one of these LPs were not created in 1971 and instead through some quirk of fate created instead this year, they would be received and understood in entirely different ways. It's not the fault of any artist in 2021 that that can't duplicate that situation creating music now, nor it entirely the fault of my teenager that they don't hear those records the same way I (or my cohort) did then or now with the glow of memory/nostalgia.

Thinking of the early 70s music, one thing that occurred to me looking back about a decade later was that the role of recreational drugs cannot be underestimated in how by only a few months later than this period (in my estimation) the quality of "rock music" (including music by these same artists in many cases) dropped off. This is a complex subject, and in some cases classic recreational drugs like alcohol slowly degraded some artists creativity. Heroin had its impact on Jazz even earlier, but that extended to rock. The exact plus/minus for the use of psychedelics by artists is complicated. But the simplest chemical reason for what I saw looking back in the 80s for the drop off in accomplished innovation was the rise of cocaine.
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