Jagged Metal is inspired as much by music as fashion. Listen here to the music we love from the 70s

Find our best of 70s soul, funk and disco playlist here on Spotify -

 

Same issues as the 80s piece — no point of view, generic survey, repetitive conclusion. Rewriting from scratch with the same approach.

70s Music

The 70s is the decade that gets credited with everything and understood least. Disco gets remembered as camp and then killed. Funk gets flattened into a mood. Soul gets reduced to a few names everyone already knows. The actual story is more interesting and considerably more tangled.

Funk

Funk came out of James Brown's late 60s work and spent the 70s becoming its own universe. Parliament-Funkadelic under George Clinton built something genuinely strange — part concert, part science fiction, part philosophy, all rhythm. The bass was the point. Everything else was decoration around it.

Sly and the Family Stone had shown what a racially and sexually integrated band could look like, and the influence of that ran through the decade in ways that aren't always acknowledged. By the mid-70s funk had fractured into several directions — the tighter, more radio-friendly sound coming out of Philadelphia, the heavier, weirder output from the Clinton operation, and the increasingly electronic experiments that would eventually feed directly into hip hop. The Bomb Squad sampled James Brown's drummer Clyde Stubblefield so extensively in the late 80s that Stubblefield is arguably one of the most-heard musicians in contemporary music, despite most people not knowing his name.

Disco

Disco gets a bad reputation that it doesn't entirely deserve. The serious end of it — Giorgio Moroder's production work with Donna Summer, the Philly soul infrastructure that fed into it, the Paradise Garage and Loft scene that ran underneath the Studio 54 version — was genuinely innovative. Moroder's I Feel Love from 1977 is a fully electronic track that sounds like it was made a decade later than it was. The problem wasn't disco. It was what happened when it went fully mainstream and lost the communities that created it.

Disco Demolition Night in 1979 — when a Chicago DJ promoted an event where disco records were physically destroyed at a baseball stadium — was nominally about genre. It was also about race and sexuality, given whose music disco was and whose communities had built it. The backlash is worth understanding in that context rather than as a simple story about a genre burning out.

Soul

By the 70s soul had become something more complicated than its 60s form. Marvin Gaye's What's Going On in 1971 changed what a soul record could be about — political, personal, continuous, not a collection of singles. Stevie Wonder's run from Talking Book through Songs in the Key of Life between 1972 and 1976 is one of the most sustained creative periods any musician has put together in any genre. Curtis Mayfield was doing something similarly serious and similarly overlooked.

Al Green was doing something else entirely — quieter, more devotional, built around space rather than intensity. His run of albums for Hi Records in the early 70s is the other side of the decade's soul story, and it holds up as well as anything from the period.

What it built

The 70s created the infrastructure that the following decades ran on. Hip hop built itself from funk breakbeats. House music came directly from disco's DNA. The soul tradition fed into R&B, neo-soul, and most of what came after. These aren't influences in a vague sense — they're direct, documented, audible connections.

The decade also established the album as a serious form for Black American music in a way that hadn't fully existed before. What's Going On, There's a Riot Goin' On, Innervisions, Let's Take It to the Stage — these were complete artistic statements, not collections of singles. That shift mattered.

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