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CHAPTER
19
B
y the 1970s rock was no longer the young upstart it had been two decades
earlier. Many rock musicians aspired to the critical status of classical and
jazz musicians, w ith some exploring a fusion of rock and jazz that touched
off a fi restorm of controversy in jazz circles. Other musicians, sensing that rock
was losing touch with its roots, argued for a return to simplicity, a search for
authenticity that united musicians as disparate as singer-song writers and punk
rockers. Along similar lines, black popular music saw funk complemented by
more accessible disco. Meanwhile, Broadway composers developed musical
theater in directions only tangentially related to current pop trends, and clas-
sical composers continued to probe the gap between avant-garde music and the
broader classical audience they had left behind in the mid-twentieth century.
In fact, the problem of exploring new regions of creativity without alienating
audiences was common to many areas of music in the 1970s.
W hile musicians wanted to reach a broad audience, marketing forces
continued to devise new categorical schemes to target specifi c groups. The old
categories of “race” and “hillbilly” records attest to the division of audiences
on the basis of ethnicity, region, and class; the 1950s category of “rock and roll”
introduced the notion of dividing the audience on the basis of age, reifying what
in the 1960s would be called the generation gap.
By the 1970s, then, a practice was in place that continues to the present day:
the splintering of popular music into ever smaller categories, or subgenres, that
sometimes tell the historian more about the social affi liations of the music’s fans
than they do about the music itself. Some observers argue that this fragmenta-
tion stems from the music industry’s efforts to fi ne-tune its marketing. Others
argue that it is driven by consumers, who use their status as fans to defi ne and
express their individual identity and group affi liations. Still others argue that
both supply and demand act as twin engines in the creation of subgenres. What-
ever the motivating factors, the use of genres and subgenres to defi ne social
groups is a key trait of American music in the late twentieth and early twenty-
fi rst centuries.“STAYIN’ ALIVE”
America’s Music in the 1970s
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