Blitzkrieg Bop and the Death of Excess

The Ramones released their self-titled debut that April, fourteen songs in under thirty minutes, no guitar solos, no orchestral pretension, nothing but pure, stripped-down, breakneck simplicity delivered by four guys from Queens who'd adopted a shared fake surname and built an entire aesthetic out of leather jackets and torn jeans and the deliberate refusal of everything progressive rock had spent half a decade building toward. It barely sold upon release, reaching only the mid-100s on the American charts, and its actual commercial impact in the United States would remain modest for years. But its influence traveled considerably faster than its sales figures suggest, especially once the band toured England that July and a small, hungry crowd of future musicians — among them, by most accounts, several people who would go on to form the Sex Pistols and the Clash — watched the Ramones play and immediately understood that the entire sprawling, technically dazzling architecture of arena rock could simply be discarded, replaced by three chords and a genuine, unmistakable urgency. This is the same rebellious instinct that gave the decade Black Sabbath in 1970 and would give it disco's populist glitter later this same year, all of it proof that popular music kept refusing, over and over, to settle into any single comfortable orthodoxy for very long.

That same year, the Eagles released Hotel California in December, a record whose lush, meticulously produced sound sat almost diametrically opposite the Ramones' deliberate crudeness, and whose title track — a sprawling, ambiguous meditation on excess, illusion, and the impossibility of escaping the very lifestyle it critiques — became one of the most inescapable songs in American radio history. And Stevie Wonder released Songs in the Key of Life that September, a sprawling double album so ambitious in scope, so thoroughly generous with its musical ideas across gospel and jazz and funk and orchestral pop all at once, that it debuted at number one on the Billboard charts, the first album by an American artist ever to do so straight out of the gate. Taken together, the Ramones' furious minimalism and Wonder's maximalist generosity represent the two poles the entire decade's music had been stretching between since 1970 — strip everything down to its rawest essential truth, or build everything up into its fullest, most complete possible expression. Both instincts, somehow, kept producing masterpieces, right through to the decade's final years.

I'll close this section here and pick up the year's films next — Rocky, a boxing picture from an unknown actor-writer nobody in the industry believed in, and Network, a furious satire about television that turned out to be less satire than prophecy.