1971: O Ano em Que a Música Mudou o Mundo

While it did indeed cover a great many bands, songs, and issues of the day, one INCREDIBLY HUGE and surprising ommission was the biggest rock song of not only 1971, but all of the 1970s, and even some would claim to this day, the greatest rock song of all time... STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN by Led Zeppelin. I simply cannot understand how an 8 part series about the music of 1971 could ignore this very important and influential song.

I was 16 in a 1971. This really took me back. Fun to binge on. Plus, it's as good a soundtrack as you'll hear anywhere.

I'm always interested in music documentaries, and there have been some good ones over the years. This was lacking. It didn't know what it wanted to be: a documentary about how culture influenced the music or how the music influenced the culture. And if it tried to make a case that the relationship was symbiotic, it fell short. Their was no real "through line." There were interesting sections or stories but in the end, it just felt forced.

I enjoyed much of what I saw in this series. The archival footage let me see things like Bowie's appearance at Glastonbury that I had never encountered before. I had seen footage of the Stones in the south of France in '71 but this offered some new clips and new background, which was interesting. The same holds true for the emergence of Elton John in the US that year.

The biggest flaw for me is that this often seems to take on the binary sort of thinking that has afflicted our political discourse of late and applied that to 1971 issues. It seems you were either for Nixon or a supporter of the extreme left. Obviously that isn't the case, but that is how it seems to be presented here. The same holds true for the episode dealing with the Black Panthers, Angela Davis and the Weather Underground subversives. It does a poor job of laying out the whole spectrum of positions with the various subtleties and instead goes for the simple political bad/good in presenting the characters. It seems to not understand that you could be opposed to Nixon and his policies without being a communist or far-left supporter. The same holds true for the segments about the UK underground press, which seemed to devote a lot of time to a group that was mostly appealing to an extremist fringe and did not make much impact on the greater society in the UK.

I was slightly baffled by the amount of time given to An American Family, the PBS series featuring Pat and Bill Loud and their children. While it was certainly a groundbreaking piece of work that helped illustrate the social changes in society at the time, I thought this series was about music, and so it struck me odd to find so much footage of it here. At least the producers do not sidestep the point that drug use was the cause of the downfall of many of the artists who had emerged around this time, showing that in all the years since, some things really never change in the music and entertainment business.

With all that said, the series is still fairly entertaining to watch, and really is mostly suffering from a misleading title. While some music certainly did lead to societal change, the series does not focus on that exclusively and takes the viewer to other areas where they probably should not have gone.

Overall, an interesting docuseries. My biggest frustration was the opening narration and the lack of introspection of the narrators in general.

The opening scene is narrated by Chrissie Hynde of "The Pretenders". She states how she and her fellow anti-Vietnam War students set fire to the ROTC buildings at Kent State University, because ",The ROTC was a military presence on our university... The military presence had to go." Kent State University is a state-run (and therefore government-run/funded) university. The ROTC cadets were her fellow students, most participating in ROTC solely for scholarship purposes to be able to afford a college education, and were not government employees / had NOTHING to do with the Vietnam War. The burning of the ROTC buildings at Kent State is what DIRECTLY led to the National Guard presence on campus, which caused the Kent State shootings. At NO POINT does she take responsibility for or show remorse or regret for her and her fellow protestors' actions. Had the ROTC buildings not been set on fire, the National Guard would not have been called in, and students would not have died.

I think we can all acknowledge that the Vietnam War was something the US should not have been involved in, but the hateful and purposeful destruction of property and abuse of ROTC cadets and US soldiers at that time was (and still is) deplorable. Hate and violence do not make other hate and violence okay! "Make love, not war" isn't just something to preach but to practice as well. Self-righteous hippies gave birth to self-righteous millennials.