What 1971: The Year that Music Changed Everything left out

• A closer examination of what else was happening musically reveals much that the series has ignored

Watching the eightepisode, absorbing and archive-dense series 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything you may be initially carried away by its argument for the significance of its chosen year, musically and in terms of the tumultuous social and political upheavals that provided the background for some of the greatest recordings in history.

After all, 1971 was the year in which disaffection at Richard Nixon’s empty promise to end the war in Vietnam reached boiling point on the streets across the US; it was the year in which women took a stand against the conventions they were expected by the patriarchy to abide by and it was a year that saw Black Power force white America to recognise the racial inequality at its heart.

These changes are reflected in director Asif Kapadia’s focus on albums by a variety of artists across a range of genres. From Marvin Gaye’s quietly devastating critique of Vietnam in What’s Going On? to the pioneering work of female singer songwriters such as Carole King and Joni Mitchell, the angry indictments of racial discrimination by Gil Scott Heron, the gender-bending glamrock of Marc Bolan and David Bowie and the high jinks of Elton John and Alice Cooper.

However, for any music anorak who is willing to allow Kapadia to make his argument for 1971, without necessarily getting on your high horse to make a case for another year as “the year that music really changed everything”, a closer examination of what else was happening musically in 1971 reveals several things that the series has chosen to ignore.

The biggest of these lacunas is perhaps the often unfairly categorised greatest crime against musical taste that is progressive rock. It was the year in which prog rock proto pioneers Genesis released Nursery Cryme, Soft Machine

released their Fourth and Pink Floyd made the magically atmospheric Meddle.

It was also the year in which stadium giant, over-the-top prog acts such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Van Der Graaf Generator and Yes released big selling albums. Prog is noticeably absent from the series, either because it’s still considered by many as a great musical mistake and cultural embarrassment or because its celebration of excess doesn’t fit within the alternative vision of society envisioned by the series’ chosen ones.

Conservative and establishment music is only briefly mentioned in the eight episodes in the form of the smash hit musical album Jesus Christ Superstar and the cleancut, Mormon conservatism of The Osmonds.

Two of the most glaring omissions from Kapadia’s argument for 1971 are two of the biggest and most important hard rock albums released in that year, which went on to provide influential impetus to everything from the 80s power rock of Mötley Crüe, Poison and Guns ’n Roses, the heavy metal of Metallica and Megadeath and the angst ridden ’90s grunge of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.

Those albums are Led Zeppelin’s IV, which included Stairway to Heaven, the most played radio rock track in history and Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, which became a foundational text for a variety of subsequent metal subgenres. It seems preposterous to conduct a discussion of the 70s without acknowledging the Dark Lordinspired howls of Robert Plant and Ozzy Osbourne and the thousands of fans who filled stadiums to hear them.

If Kapadia and his cocreators’ emphasis is on political music and artists whose work directly reflected the ideological struggles of that year then one also has to ask why the folk musicians who had been the original carriers of the antiestablishment baton in the 60s fail to get a mention here?

Sure Bob Dylan was on hiatus, releasing only a second volume of greatest hits in that year and not due to reappear until 1973 when he brought out the soundtrack album to Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. But other folk stars were still recording, including Dylan’s former lover and folk legend Joan Baez, folk pioneer Dave Van Ronk and, most significantly, the folk-inspired, if not always directly folk-aligned poet, Leonard Cohen, who released his seminal Songs of Love and Hate in 1971.

Likewise, the hugely popular, if often more conservative fanbased country music scene also saw important releases in that year, including Johnny Cash’s overtly political album Man in Black, Dolly Parton’s feminist championing Coat of Many Colours and several albums by country stalwart Merle Haggard.

Inexplicably Kapadia has made no room within his heavily black consciousness assessment of that year for one of the singularly most important totems in the history of black music, Funkadelic’s fuzz guitar, psychedelic masterpiece Maggot Brain. Nor has he allowed for any mention of any music released by jazz pioneers in 1971 — including Miles Davis’s Jack Johnson and Live-Evil and the original, Afrocentric and consciousness-expanding brilliance of Alice Coltrane and saxophone pioneer Pharoah Sanders, never mind the fusion funk of Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Ultimately, while 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything makes a commanding case for the grand claim of its title, it does this only if you ignore what it so pointedly erases from that year and those erasures may say as much, if not more, about that year and its music as that which is included.

● 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything is available on Apple TV+