1In his groundbreaking 1979 study on subcultural styles, Dick Hebdige suggested that a defining characteristic of the punk movement was its rhetoric “steeped in irony” (63)—at least that was the case for the “culture of deconstruction,” one of two streams in the punk movement Ryan Moore distinguishes. To him, the early punks “recycled cultural images and fragments for purposes of parody and shocking juxtaposition, thereby deconstructing the dominant meanings and simulations which saturate social space” (307). However, when in 2017 Great Britain celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” it was doubtful whether punks appreciated the mise en abyme. The original title had been “No Future” before manager Malcolm McLaren saw an opportunity in hopping on the jubilee bandwagon and hijacking—rather than celebrating—the monarch’s reign. When the song was released, pressing plants, radio stations, and retail outlets objected to its “indecency,” and, in some cases, flat-out refused to produce, distribute, or even indirectly advertise it. The literature on that high point of the punk era never fails to mention that the single should have reached number one in sales during Jubilee week, but the British Marketing Research Bureau manipulated the chart positions: only a blacked-out song title and group name appeared at the top spot (Savage 261-67). Yet in 2017 it was celebrated with a flourish of exhibits and commemorative events sponsored by such institutions as the British Library, the Museum of London and the British Film Institute. It seemed that the establishment had succeeded in turning the “no future” movement and its deep-seated distrust of top-down organizations into a harmless piece of the collective past—an institution itself.

2Joe Corré—Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s son—decided that he, for one, would not be joining in the celebrations. Instead, he chose to stage one of his own. In response to Punk London—a coordinated effort to celebrate the city’s history of punk he claimed had been endorsed by the Queen herself, [1] Corré burnt the “relics of punk” on a barge bedecked with the effigies of four politicians (Theresa May, Boris Johnson, David Cameron and George Osborne), who might have profited from the official commemorations. “The Queen giving 2016, the Year of Punk, her official blessing,” Corré stated in the Telegraph, “is the most frightening thing I’ve ever heard. Talk about alternative and punk culture being appropriated by the mainstream” (Vincent). Then, as he set alight his collection of punk memorabilia, estimated to be worth around £5m, he declared: “Punk was never, never meant to be nostalgic—and you can’t learn how to be one at a Museum of London workshop.” Yet his gesture can be read as more than a desperate attempt to preserve the independence and liveliness of punk.

3Much like his father 40 years earlier, what Corré operated was a kind of détournement, through which he gave his own interpretation of the tribute events, negating the incorporation of punk into collective memory and national heritage. “Punk is a part of my life I’m no longer interested in; it’s been that way for a long time,” he stated in the Guardian. “But when you had the establishment saying they were going to celebrate 40 years of [Sex Pistols single] “Anarchy in the UK,” I treated that as an opportunity. Destroying something—people had no idea of its value, actually—is an exercise in showing people how manipulated they are, and the sort of reactions they have to things” (MacInnes). In doing that, Corré turned the establishment’s weapons on itself and used historical echoes to his own benefit. His staging of the punk’s funeral echoed one of the Sex Pistol’s 1977 stunts related to the release of “God Save the Queen”: the band played a gig on the top deck of a boat drifting down the Thames during Jubilee week, mocking the Queen’s own voyage down the river two days later. In addition, Corré chose the date of 26 November for the incineration, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of another Sex Pistols single, “Anarchy in the UK.” Thus, by staging his own punk funeral, Corré was not fighting the punk, “no future” movement’s becoming the past, but rather fighting the reification of a style that had itself initially attacked the fetishisation of difference characteristic of late capitalism. It could be said that Corré’s gesture was also an attempt at a more authentic and fitting commemoration of the Sex Pistols’, and punk’s in general, semiotic warfare on the establishment’s attempts to use cultural symbols to deflect attention from social crises. This ship, however, sailed a long time ago—there is no denying that punk itself has become such a cultural symbol in 2017.

4In many ways, punk has monopolized the meaning of the 1970s, subsuming a period which James Curtis has defined as the “most complicated decade in the history of popular music” (235). Punk has received most of the attention directed at the music of the era, to the point that it has obscured other niche genres that might lead to a different—sometimes contradictory—understanding of the decade, such as disco, progressive rock or glam rock. Ironically, as Andy Bennett notes, while Anglo-American popular music studies has originated in the 1970s, very few scholars of the discipline have written on the popular music of that decade—even today, the literature is scarce, except for punk. Most importantly, as is all too often the case with studies of popular music, the mainstream has become a silent majority in the literature, which seems to be a continuation of rock’s dismissal of the pop centre (more on this later). [2] This volume aims at restoring some of the balance between popular music styles of the 1970s in the scientific production and to look at some of the singular voices of the 1970s that punk has obscured. It also questions the usual chronological limits and epistemic logics on which most surveys of the musical decade are based.

5In The Historian’s Craft, Marc Bloch describes decades as the “faces in arithmetical masks” that “haunt the pages of our books.” [3] The habit of slicing up history into decimal measuring units is at least as well-seated as the dogged self-correcting tendency to take a somewhat liberal understanding of the subsequent slices for the sake of thematic convenience—decades can start earlier or later than is mathematically accurate or acceptable, end late, shrivel up or expand well beyond the ten-year mark. This happens with centuries as well; the twentieth century starts with the First World War, the eighteenth century is framed by Louis XIV’s death in 1715 and the Revolution in 1789, and it can even stretch from 1688 to 1815 in its “long” version in England. The decades of the twentieth century tend to be defined by more transnational limits, as history becomes world history—or comes to be understood in more global terms—still the fact remains that the decade with a distinctive identity is one of the strongest meta-narratives to have survived post-modernity.

6While it is doubtful that each decade or century breeds a cohesive ethos—and even though such periodisation can introduce an artificial fragmentation of what could otherwise be seen as a linear sequence of events, [4] it cannot be denied that temporal punctuations such as decades do play a role in the way contemporaries experience the passage of time—as was made most obvious perhaps by the debates and mild panics that heralded Y2K. Decades have an impact on the way we envision time, as well as on the way we remember culture and national history, and they are constructed retroactively as well as pre-emptively, commercially as well as politically.

7If the 1960s have been extended and enlarged into the mythical “long sixties” (1955-1975), [5] it seems that the 1970s have had to squeeze between the end of the previous decade and the beginning of the eighties. Their existence as a substantial chronological entity is all the more problematic as the Baby Boomer generation encompasses all of those born from the early-/mid-1940s to approximately 1960-1964, and segues directly into Generation X—which means it has to share an oversized cohort of teenagers with the Sixties. For that reason, and even more so than for other decades, the homogeneity of the seventies as a distinctive period in history seems contrived, which might explain the fact that most scholars chose to define its zeitgeist as one of fragmentation and high individualism.

8While most decades receive a moniker when nostalgia starts to kick in—approximately twenty years after the fact—one of the most enduring era-defining labels for the 1970s emerged in 1976. In “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” Tom Wolfe set the tone for subsequent categorizations of the 1970s as a time for individuation and egotism. Such early efforts at reading the decade may have been partly due to an impetus to create the 1970s on the ashes of the over-signifying 1960s: heterogeneity and individualism were the most straightforward response to the community-building of the 1960s and its ready-made symbols, such as Woodstock or the Summer of Love. In the US as in the UK, it was felt that the culture had become more preoccupied with realizing one’s individual potential or, as the oil crisis rolled in, just surviving economically, rather than mobilizing and taking to the streets to try and change the system. Wolfe and other pundits noted that the dominant concerns of most people had shifted from issues of social and political justice to a more selfish focus on individual well-being. In the UK, according to David Simonelli, in light of the two devaluations of the pound in 1967 and 1972, inflating prices, and the OPEC oil crisis,

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student demonstrations against nuclear proliferation and journals calling for cultural upheaval seemed simultaneously dangerous and frivolous—dangerous to the adult establishment, frivolous to working-class young people who wanted jobs, not a commitment to the “revolution.” Rock music and its critics demanded cultural change, but with full wallets and comfortable backgrounds, the hypocrisies of such demands were more glaring than ever.

10While music is here presented as taking its cues from the economic context, the history of music itself provides a plethora of events that can signal a paradigm shift from the 1960s to the 1970s. The tragedy at Altamont, [6] the consecutive deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix in 1970, then of Jim Morrison in 1971, as well as the break-up of such iconic groups as the Velvet Underground in 1973 [7] or the Beatles, all mark an all too obvious change from the idealism and optimism of the 1960s to the sobering mood of the 1970s. No doubt the burgeoning rock criticism also helped theorize the differences between the 1960s and 1970s, and refine the categorization of new music into distinct genres and subgenres. [8]

11In his article on “UK Popular Music and Society in the 1970s,” John Mullen notes that music often serves as a justification for the periodisation of history, and that authors tend to present each stylistic development as a reaction to societal trends. “Surely,” he writes, “the ‘no Future’ Punk rebellion showed mass working-class youth anger, Glam rock showed the broadening within society of a more relaxed approach to masculinity and femininity, Reggae the demand of young black people in Britain for visibility?” (1) An extensive literature review confirms that in popular music studies as in history, most accounts of 1970s rock mimic more general considerations on the era, and identify it as “a decade of fragmentation” (see, for example Stuessy 302, Candelaria & Kingman 130, Ward, Stokes & Tucker 167, Scheurer 198) [9] which fostered a “profusion of styles” (see Moore 2017, 104-53). Unsurprisingly, several musical histories prefer to present a list of performers representative of each style, without any attempt at presenting a cohesive overarching narrative. This is the case of Curtis’s Rock Eras, in which the author focuses on single artists or groups as representative of each style. Each chapter is therefore a self-contained study of a particular issue or performer. If there is coherence of any kind, it is to be found in the relation between musical styles and sociological developments, which suggests that music is a reaction to its historical context.

12Saying that what unites the 1970s is the very disintegration of unity, seems like a fallacious way to both accept and avoid the temptation of dividing rock history into decades. In this respect, the 1970s are somewhat iconically similar to punk: while punk relied on devices that held items of clothing together—the safety pins, buckles, and zips—it rejected the idea of unity with a vengeance. In a similar fashion, the only thing that could be postulated about the 1970s as a homogeneous decade is that it was a time of fragmentation and singularity, or at least that it has come to be seen that way. Punk itself can serve as the symbolical safety pin that holds the 1970s together.

13This might be why punk is the most studied and documented musical movement to have come out of the 1970s—much more than disco, glam rock, or heavy metal. That, and its potential for theoretical speculation. In addition to being the main exhibit in Dick Hebdige’s seminal Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the history of punk is easily understood as a reflection of the several social, cultural, and political changes that occurred not only in Britain, but also in the US in the 1970s, including the economic crisis, mass deindustrialization, the abatement of 1960s movements for social change, and the growth of ultraconservative political forces, culminating in the elections of Thatcher and Reagan.

14However, if one opts out of the “music as a reaction” viewpoint, there were shifts in the music industry that point to a paradigmatic change in the music of the era, without having to resort to the larger political or economic climates. Even punk can be analyzed along such musical lines, as the Sex Pistols’ music disassembled the conventions of rock and roll by creating a sound/noise which “seemed to make no sense at all, to make nothing, only to destroy” (Marcus 64). In deliberate opposition to commercial rock music, the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten defiantly used a working-class dialect, while the rest of the band flaunted their ineptitude as musicians, in opposition to the claims of virtuosity that were common in progressive rock or heavy metal.

15The point of view adopted in this volume is to look at singular voices of the 1970s—both in the sense of individual and particular. The goal is not to provide an accurate description of the decade in music, for such a task, as I hope is by now obvious, would be deluded and impossible. In so doing, the authors’ contributions all suggest, if indirectly, that the particularities of 1970s music are to be found outside of a Pavlovian political reaction to the times and point at larger musical continuities. They all partake of an alternative view of 1970s music.

16The idea of fragmentation, beyond genres and styles, can be found in the increasing gap between rock and pop, as rock bands became more and more album-oriented while pop flourished in a singles-oriented market. Rock musicians favoured the LP format and “concept albums” which allowed them to develop specific artistic visions, which required more time and attention from their listeners. They accepted less and less to be lumped up together with novelty bands who released isolated singles for easy, uncommitted consumption. The distinction crystallized into widely opposed aesthetics and, in quite a few cases, theatricals. Both realms were theorized as separate Weltanschauungen and fostered clearly recognizable subcultures: metalheads, punks, rude boys, disco fans, to name a few, were as much about the music as about the lifestyle and an accepted set of shared values. According to Simonelli, “the rock audience and critics considered pop music banal, disposable, simple, and chart-oriented. Rock and pop were no longer simply separations of taste—they were also separations of class, age and sex, new social barriers that arose in place of the old ones that rock and roll had originally set out to destroy” (190). In other words, in the 1970s, it looked like rock had given up its 1960s aspiration to appeal to the mainstream, and was therefore content to cater to a niche audience. In parallel, many rock musicians came to view themselves as artists, and their recordings as works of art—most prominently in the progressive/art rock scene.

17John Mullen’s article reacts to the long-standing disregard from journalists and rock critics alike, and investigates the truly “popular” music of the era, looking at the singles and artists that topped UK charts during the decade. As such, his contribution answers Andy Bennett’s and Christophe Pirenne’s calls for a truly “popular” music study, when most academic production in the area has focused on niche (sub)genres. In this sense, Mullen’s approach—his attempt at a history of the musical mainstream—represents a singular choice in surveys of 1970s music, but it also helps us understand that what we think of as the music characteristic of the decade was actually that of a very small segment of the British population. This is all the more glaring as popular music is a commodity which is defined, packaged and remastered by the music industry itself—compilations of 1970s music tend to include much more varied items than scholarly surveys of the decade.

18One of the most successful British acts of the 1970s, Queen, has been one of the casualties of this disciplinary bias. Echoing Mullen, Guillaume Clément looks at one of the most popular bands of the 1970s (as well as of the 1980s, and 1990s by way of their Greatest Hits reissued in 1991), which has nevertheless seldom been considered worthy of scholarly attention. Clément shows how the band’s forays into a variety of musical and performing styles can provide useful insights into the societal changes happening in Britain during their early years.

19The profusion of niche styles identified by most scholars, in opposition to mainstream pop and versatile bands such as Queen, can be explained by artistic cross-pollination and by structural changes within the industry as much as by the breaking up of cultural consensus. The early-1960s British Invasion influenced two main streams of American artists, who, in turn, introduced new trends into the British scene. While the Beatles provided the impetus to develop a sophisticated pop-oriented style (such as jangle pop, the music of the Byrds or even the Beach Boys of Pet Sounds), the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, and others inspired a harder rhythm-and-blues based style in American rock (most famously American garage bands like the Beau Brummels, the Kingsmen, or Question Mark and the Mysterians, among others, and later the MC5 or the Stooges). By the end of the 1960s, those two streams had begotten acid rock, folk rock, country rock, and art rock, to name just a few. Stuessy points out that the fragmentation was also a result of the record industry’s own dynamics: by the 1970s, no single performer or group could capture the attention of the public like the behemoths of the 1950s and 1960s, Elvis Presley or the Beatles. While the industry came to depend on a relatively small number of multiplatinum superstars to turn a profit, like other big businesses, it felt an increasing pressure to offer a variety of choices to its customers—hence the multiplication of niche genres, reflected by the multiplication of sections in record stores. In this case, the evolution of the industry matches the perceived rise of a new kind of identity formation that relied on market-based personal choices. As Ryan Moor states, after the economic crises of the early 1970s, “partially freed from the authoritarian grip of religion, family, local community, the military, and the work ethic, consumers [were] now left to themselves to fabricate an identity from the unending flow of celebrities, lifestyles, and products which confront them in public and in their homes” (3). Music provided such a profusion of commodified identities, because of the fragmentation of rock styles as well as the packaging of musicians into rock stars, with commercially appropriable features (style, dress, words, attitudes).

20Christophe Lebold’s contribution reflects on Lou Reed’s own self-creation, in the context of the rock-star-oriented music industry. It must be noted that while this is the only article of this volume on an American artist, Lou Reed’s experience reflects the many transatlantic exchanges between American and British artists and scenes that extended the British invasion into the 1970s, and sometimes reversed it. According to Felicia M. Miyakawa, very few sources treat 1970s rock music exclusively in the UK or the US. Most establish connections between practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic, especially for heavy metal and punk. Musically speaking, punk was indebted to American garage rock from the 1960s and to bands such as The Stooges, MC5 and The New York Dolls, which were active in the US at the beginning of the 1970s. Christophe Lebold shows how Lou Reed began shaping his rock persona in London, which in the 1960s had become the centre of the rock universe (although it can be said that New York became the centre of the rock avant-garde at the same moment). Lou Reed recorded his first three solo albums in London. His second, Transformer, was produced by David Bowie, arranged by Mick Ronson, and included cover art by Mick Rock, nicknamed “the man who shot the seventies.” During this period Reed became “himself, at last” according to Andy Warhol, and his albums fared far better in the UK than the US charts. While his approach to self-fashioning through rock iconology might appear egotistical, much of his self-creation was founded on the impersonation of minority voices: the downtrodden, the hungry, the freaks. Lebold posits that the last element of his persona was the figure of a closet humanist, shedding light on the darkest places of society and the human soul.

21The reconfiguration of rock as art for art’s sake went hand in hand with an increasing shunning of politics. This idea can be found in Tim Heron’s and Jeremy Tranmer’s articles, though their angles differ broadly. In his contribution, Heron explores the Northern Irish punk scene as a space where politics and ethno-national identity were secondary to the music, and one that provided the youth of Ulster with a means of expression and an opportunity to be “normal” teenagers. While Tranmer’s article focuses on the intersection between politics and punk, his exploration of Rock Against Racism (RAR) exposes the lack of spontaneous affinity between the music and the cause, and the many different reasons, not all of them political, which led punk bands to perform at RAR events. Besides, Tranmer’s analysis includes an investigation of the continuity between punk and post-punk, which brought the movement into the 1980s—which could be used as a case for the “long 70s of punk,” as proposed by Theo Cateforis.

22Drawing on cultural studies, semiotics, star studies, and performance studies, the contributions in this volume invite us to reconsider the meaning of the “Me Decade”: from fragmentation to diversification, from egotism to individuation, and from radical anti-establishment subcultures to communal places that allowed for the personal expression of intimate feelings. Joe Corré’s own theatricals notwithstanding, not a few niche bands went on to become popular artists who, as the years went by, became part of the iconology of rock, of our memories of the decade and, eventually, of our heritage.