I was watching a documentary the other night about how the music of 1971 supposedly changed the world. The breathless thesis was that everything pivoted on a single point, and that point was Ohio State. Not because the campus suddenly discovered harmony and counterpoint, but because four students were shot dead the previous spring at Kent State. One documentary error in the title, and suddenly the history of protest becomes a geography lesson. But the idea holds even if the narrator cannot tell Ohio’s universities apart. The killings in 1970 were the moment the American state demonstrated it was quite prepared to turn its rifles on its own children, and the music that arrived in 1971 was a howl of disbelief.
It is worth remembering that the National Guardsmen who pulled the triggers were acquitted. Not because the evidence was thin, but because the judge made it abundantly clear the case belonged in the wastepaper basket. The legal test was intent; the defence offered fear; and the politics of Nixon’s America did the rest. Four dead, nine wounded, 67 rounds fired, and the official conclusion was a collective shrug. The state apologised years later without admitting fault, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of sending flowers after running someone over.
Out of that moral vacancy came the music of a country that no longer believed its own civic fairytales. 1971 was a year in which the sheen came off everything. Marvin Gaye asked what was going on, which was a polite way of saying everything was going wrong. Sly Stone moved from technicolour optimism to a kind of exhausted paranoia. Lennon tried to imagine a better world because the one outside his front door looked increasingly deranged. Even the soft stuff, the Carpenters and their fellow purveyors of musical anaesthetic, existed because people needed something to dull the edges. Protest and escapism were two sides of the same national migraine.
And this is the point the documentary almost stumbled into. Popular music does reflect the state of a country, but not in the simplistic way the nostalgia merchants would have you believe. It absorbs the tension in the air and then spits it back out in melody, distortion, and the occasional banshee wail. When a society is confident, the music struts. When it is frightened or divided, the music retreats into introspection or hardens into rage. When it is exhausted, it becomes minimalist or nostalgic. If you want a cultural seismograph, skip the newspapers and listen to the charts.
Look at the eras. Postwar prosperity gave us cheery pop and the first rebellious twitch of rock and roll. The 60s began with optimism and ended in a fog of assassinations, Vietnam, and bad acid. The early 70s fractured along every political seam. Britain’s late 70s managed decline gave birth to punk. Reagan and Thatcher offered glossy confidence on the surface, while the underside produced Public Enemy and goth kids wearing sunglasses in the rain. The 90s oscillated between Britpop’s champagne foam and grunge’s existential hangover. The 2000s served up R&B gloss as a pressure valve for a decade defined by terrorism and the credit bubble. The austerity era brought grime from the margins to the main stage because it was the only genre honest enough to describe the country that had actually emerged.
Music does not mirror events, but it certainly catches their smell. You can tell more about a society’s state of mind from what its young people dance to than from any number of speeches in Parliament or Congress. Kent State proved that in 1970. The bullets hit flesh, but the echo hit the culture. By 1971 it was ringing out of every radio.
So yes, the music of 1971 did change the world, but only because America had already changed and not for the better. Artists reacted because the country was reacting. The documentary, bless it, wanted a simple origin story: a single year, a single spark. The truth is messier and far more interesting. Music is not the cause. It is the aftershock. And sometimes, as in 1971, it is the only honest record of what a country refuses to admit to itself.
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