nifty groovers

What do these songs have in common?

1/ They come from a time when the gap between rock and black music was really small, compared with the gulf that now exists

Such that you almost wonder what the point of postpunk's vaunted embrace of funk and disco etc was as a gesture -  given that the funk was already so deeply imbricated with mainstream rock music. It didn't need to be added or restored, it's there. 




So you can  see - if you shove to one side the rhetoric and the clothes and the theory and the adversarial positioning - a continuum of Seventies rock that runs from beginning to end of the decade and that is steeped in black music - following its changes, absorbing its innovations (like the Larry Graham-esque slap bass bit in "Slow Ride" by Foghat... essentially no different as a musical move than scores of postpunk guitarists trying to copy Nile Rodgers )

They loved their Free after all, Go4




Old Wave / New Wave - the difference collapses as more and more time goes by






2/ The other thing they have in common - well, most of that first batch up top  - is that they are used in movies. Something about this kind of groove-oriented early Seventies rock seems to move the action along. These feel-good tunes are a perfect fit for the "up" phase of a film like Boogie Nights e.g. the scene when things are going swimmingly by the swimming pool (they use the Three Dog Night and "Spill the Wine" in that sequence) or the more fraught but still thrillingly kinetic climax to Goodfellas (the soundtrack jumping from "Monkey Man" to "Jump Into the Fire" in a way that will never cease to electrify).

3/  They are all nifty groovers

a/k/a

liberation-through-energy artifacts

It's the mundanity of the liberation-through-energy...  its sliced-white-bread, staple background to the times quality that I find interesting.... Most of the above are second-division acts, solid radio providers,  one-or-two hit wonders .... the liberation and the nifty grooviness is a general condition of the era... Even if (as per the kids in Dazed and Confused) the inhabitants of that era feel that the Seventies has fallen from the heights of the Sixties....  They don't know how good they got it.