We’re a big fan of places that are a single source of things you need, and since the best things in life are free, today we will focus on free song lyrics.
The 1970s (at least in the USA) saw a surge in popularity for several different genres of music, including disco, funk, smooth jazz, jazz fusion and soul music. Rock music played a key role in the American music scene throughout the entire decade, and the subset of punk rock thrived in the mid and later part of the 1970s.
Glam rock, hard rock, progressive rock, art rock and heavy metal also began to reach higher levels of success and awareness.
There’s a solid breakdown of the 1970s in music with lots of history and artists over at Retrowaste. Their list digs deeper than what you find on Wikipedia concerning the 1970s.
So, let’s say you want to dig in deep on a genre of 1970s rock music such as the emergence of punk rock and how it plays into song lyrics from the 1970s. To do this, you need to learn a little about parts of the 1970s by digging around a bit in one place, and looking at lots of actual song lyrics.
Punk Rock from the 1970s
Punk rock formed out of the evolution of 1960s garage bands and early glam rock bands that created out-of-the-mainstream music that became highly influential. The early acts created short, fast-paced songs with hard beats and harsh singing styles. They often included politically themed anti-establishment lyrics. There was a grungy, do-it-yourself element to the bands, with many of the acts self-producing or going through extremely independent record labels.
A large percentage of punk rock songs that shaped the genre in the 1970s carry very harsh lyrics. The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones, and Patti Smith are some of more well-known punk rock acts that put the genre on the map. You can see some of the tone we are talking about in the lyrics for I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones. That’s one from 1978.
Others songs that blend elements of punk rock in their music became very popular as well, and you can see it in their more mainstream-acceptable lyrics put to a punk rock, energetic beat. You can see it in the lyrics to One Way or Another from 1978 by Blondie, a huge hit that crossed several genres of music.
If you look around at lots of 1970s song lyrics, you can really learn a great deal about things you are interested in. It’s easy to find a clear path to knowledge if you spend some time in a single source for things like song lyrics.