Nineteen Hundred Seventies
The Stories of Teen Punks That Ruled New York In the Late ’70s
The year was 1977, and the first generation of New York City punk and alternative bands had moved on to larger venues and the international touring circuit. The thrash of hardcore was still a few years down the pike. Yet the storied music venues of Manhattan were alive and aloud with excited, underage patrons. They […]
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A Guide to the Dance Music on Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’
Beyoncé’s new album, “Renaissance,” is consciously steeped in dance-music history, cannily embracing decades of samples and sounds: the 1970s disco of Donna Summer and Chic, Jamaican dancehall, internet-speed hyperpop. She chose collaborators, references and even specific keyboard sounds that pay homage to club-land memories while making her own 21st-century statement. Here are some of the […]
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Veterans of Carter-Era Inflation Warn That Biden Has Few Tools to Tame Prices
WASHINGTON — When inflation surged in the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter convened his top economic advisers for weekly lunch meetings in which they tended to offer overly optimistic forecasts of how high prices would rise. But the political consequences of rising prices could not be escaped: By 1978, Democrats had lost seats in the […]
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Kool & the Gang Get the Dance Floor Moving. Have They Gotten Their Due?
“Do something,” the producer Gene Redd instructed the drummer George Brown and the bassist Robert “Kool” Bell during an early recording session in New York. “Say something! Sing something.” That prompt in the late ’60s was what Kool & the Gang — a jazz group with a crack horn section that evolved into funk, then […]
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The All-Female Band Fanny Made History. A New Doc Illuminates It.
JUNE MILLINGTON EXITED Fanny in late 1973 in part because of a near “nervous breakdown,” she said in a video interview. “I’m glad I left, because I knew that my life was on the line on some major level.” She was sitting in front of a crackling fire at her home on the campus of […]
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