I consider the 70's more intriguing than the 60's in some ways from a socio-music point of view. 1972, for instance, saw both Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick and Yes's Close To The Edge shooting straight to the top of the Billboard 200 for a time that year. And by that point Emerson, Lake and Palmer were well on their way to superstardom also: they'd be selling out arenas left and right until the end of the decade despite how pretentious, lengthy and overblown many of their works are.
Anyway, I think the former of the two albums mentioned (Thick As A Brick) is of particular curiosity because it's basically a 44 minute suite that got cut in half because of the vinyl format, and yet it was both a critical and commercial smash hit: were people's attention spans really that much better in my parent's generation than today?
Although I'm pointing out the obvious here, music like that isn't marketed to as wide a range of demographics as it used to be, if at all. It's a curious phenomenon that seems to be unique to that decade.
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