One of the key characteristics of popular music in the streaming age is its ephemerality—songs skip in and out of your playlists like commuters at a Mumbai suburban railway station. Artists can have entire boom-to-bust career arcs within months of playlist-boosted stardom and tweet-induced meltdown. Today’s song of the summer is tomorrow’s barely remembered pop trash, rotting in a landfill along with most of the estimated 100 million odd songs on the internet today.
It takes an unlikely confluence of timing, talent and message—and incredible amount of luck—for any one album to stick in pop’s shared consciousness for more than a few months. To be fair, that’s always been true, even before the internet and streaming let all the ghosts of pop’s past out to play for your attention. But some albums manage to stay in our minds for half a century. People trawl through thrift store bins for original pressings and deify its creators as modern gods. For an example of the sort of totemic power old classics can hold, just look at Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, which turned 50 in March.
Conceived in the aftermath of the ignominious end of flower power imbued 1960s counterculture, and the corporatisation of the rock scene, this psychedelic mind-bender about nihilism, fascism and capitalism has remained a keystone of identity for young men and women across five decades. There isn’t a single file-sharing hub on an Indian engineering campus that doesn’t feature a pirated copy of DSOTM. It has become so timeless that it now almost exists outside of its original context—corporate CEOs sing along unironically to Money, even Tory leaders pay lip-service to this decidedly left-leaning album while inflicting austerity and Brexit on their citizens (hello David Cameron!)
DSOTM isn’t the only record whose shadow looms large over our cultural consciousness, though it may have the longest penumbra. Nineteen seventy three, it turns out, was a good year for timeless albums. You had funk and soul greats with mature, mid-career releases, rock icons experimenting with acoustic folk concept albums, and even the first stirrings of punk and metal’s twin rebellions against the rock establishment.
Here, in no particular order, are five other records that deserve to join DSOTM in 1973’s pop Mount Rushmore.
Aladdin Sane by David Bowie
If 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spider from Mars was Bowie’s coming-out as androgynous alien glam-rock messiah, then Aladdin Sane chronicles what happens to rock prophets after a year on the road in America. It’s sleazier, rougher-around-the-edges, and just a little battered by the dizzying insanity of transatlantic stardom. Bowie takes on themes of extinction-threatening war, mortality, drug use, urban decay, sexuality and the aftermath of fame, laid over music that takes the Rolling Stones’ blues-rock recipe and adds in elements of hedonistic NYC proto-punk, jazz and Bo Diddley-esque rock-n-roll rhythm. Songs like ‘The JeangGenie’ and ‘Lady grinning soul’ still sound as fresh as the day they were released. And the epicene, lightning-bolt faced Bowie on the cover? It’s become so popular that you can see its echoes all over queer culture even today.
Let’s Get It On by Marvin Gaye
You can tell from the first wah-wah-slick notes of Let’s Get It On that this is a record dripping with erotic vitality: sexual liberation wrapped up in sensual funk groove and seductive slow-jam rhythm. Like a sexed-up mystic, Gaye blurs the line between orgasmic ecstasy and spiritual epiphany on songs like ‘Keep gettin’ it on’ and the titillatingly explicit ‘You sure love to ball’. Gaye’s Dionysiac reworking of doo-wop, funk and silky-smooth soul on this album would lay the groundwork for the aphrodisiac funk of Rick James, the neo-soul of Erykah Badu and D’Angelo, and countless slow-jam love ballads across the 1980s and 1990s. But perhaps its most lasting legacy is as the world’s most well-known bedroom record.
Innervisions by Stevie Wonder
Stevie Wonder was only 23 when he wrote and recorded Innervisions in 1973, but he already had the experience—and troubles—of a much older man. He’d already released 15 albums by then, had a marriage and creative partnership end, and gone head-to-head with Motown head honcho Barry Gordy, one of the most powerful men in music, over a contract that gave Wonder full creative control over his music. His personal struggles dovetailed with social and political chaos—the oil crisis, the police shooting of 10-year-old African-American boy Clifford Grover, the post-Civil Rights era violence—on Innervisions. Writing, recording and producing the album virtually all by himself, adding synthesisers to his classic funk and soul compositions, Wonder crafted a beautiful, complex record about institutional racism, drug addiction and Nixon-era politics. The enduring legacy of tracks like ‘Higher ground’ and ‘Living for the city’ ensure that Innervisions remains one of the best albums ever made.
Raw Power by Iggy Pop and The Stooges
By 1973, Iggy Pop and The Stooges were in disarray. Their previous two albums—1969’s self-titled debut and 1970’s Fun House—had bombed commercially, and the band’s members were struggling with alcohol and heroin abuse. They’d already disbanded when David Bowie intervened, pushing Pop to sober up (only a little), organise a new lineup and hit the studio to record Raw Power. The record that emerged out of those messy studio sessions, despite a botched-up mix that Bowie had to try and salvage, would be absolutely true to its name. From the opening distortion-drenched proto-punk of ‘Search And Destroy’ to the grungy-dirge of ‘Death trip’, this is 33 minutes of deafening, ferocious, speaker-melting sound. “Dance to the beat of the livin’ dead,” Iggy sings on the title-track that is loud, powerful and brain-melting enough to raise corpses. Raw Power was one of the first records to foreshadow punk’s impending assault on rock orthodoxy, but its influence can be heard on genres like post-punk, grunge, alternative rock and noise music even today. If you haven’t heard it yet, I’d recommend the 2023 remaster of Iggy Pop’s 1997 mix of the album, a beefier version that finally allows you to hear Ron Asheton’s excellent work on the bass guitar.
Burnin’ by Bob Marley & The Wailers
Purists might baulk at this choice, given that Catch A Fire also came out that same year. But while that record is deservedly counted as one of the greatest reggae records ever, it’s on Burnin’ that The Wailers fully lay out their blueprint for “melodic propaganda”, as noted rock critic Robert Christgau put it. Though the music on Burnin’ is often as upbeat and sunny as ‘One Love’ era Marley, the lyrics are more political and confrontational here. Marley documents the poverty and injustice of life in Jamaica as well as the struggles of being Black in America, and crafts infectious calls-to-arms for spiritual rebellion and anti-authority militancy.
There’s the immortal protest anthem ‘Get up stand up’, the cop-revenge fantasy of ‘I shot the sheriff’, and the sonic insurgency of ‘Burnin’ and lootin’’, interspersed with songs about disillusion with the music industry and the redemptive power of love. Like MK Gandhi and Nelson Mandela—or contemporaries Fela Kuti and Curtis Mayfield—there was a radical edge to Marley’s politics that has been sanded away by time and the sanitising pressures of capitalism. But on Burnin’, you can hear the incandescent anger that drove Marley, Peter Tosh and the other Wailers just as much as their message of universal love.
Fantasy by Carole King
One of the most successful song-writers of the 20th century, Carole King was an established hitmaker for a decade before she broke through as a solo artist with 1971’s Tapestry. Released two years later, Fantasy didn’t spend as much time on the charts, but the 13-track song cycle—showcasing a more expansive sound that incorporated soul, jazz and folk—had a long tail, selling consistently for decades as it earned new generations of fans. On many of these songs, King creates and inhabits personas of colour—a civil rights campaigner on ‘You’ve been around too long’, a resident of America’s urban ghettos on ‘A quiet place to live’—in service of her humanitarian message. The lyricism is sometimes a little too on-the-nose, but King and her excellent cast of musicians make up for it with stellar song writing and virtuoso instrumentation on tracks like the Latin-tinged ‘Corazón’ and wistful love ballad, ‘You light up my life’.
Bhanuj Kappal is a music critic and journalist who covers independent music and counter-culture across South Asia.
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