How did 70s rock music transition into 80s music?

@bdp24 ”Authoritarians hate intelligence.”  Ain’t it the truth.

Authoritarianism, in practice, has obviously yielded bad results throughout history.  But an individual adopting authoritarian thinking, while perhaps not actually making laws or issuing tangible punishment to dissenters, is also destructive.  This type of thinking is immune to political ideology.

An artist like the Velvet Underground who says, “we don’t cotton to this trendy hippy nonsense.  We are going to do our own thing,” is reviled because of their distinct break with the prevailing trend.  The authoritarian thinking here is, “we don’t wear all-black, leather and shades.  We don’t do that around here. We wear paisley, tie dye, bell-bottoms, and denim.  We don’t sing honest depictions of S&M, heroin and amphetamine use, sodomy, transgenderism, and violence.  We sing songs about being anti-war, pro-peace/love, and pro-hallucinogen and pot use.  We do make exceptions for Northerners and Californians appropriating rural southern/Appalachian sounds à la The Band and Sweetheart of the Rodeo.  We also make exceptions for Brits appropriating southern rural American blues sounds à la The Yardbirds, Cream, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and John Mayall and the Blues Breakers.”

Wouldn’t ya know it…50 years later, those VU albums are considered pop music milestones and no one today gives a hoot ‘n heck about Country Joe and the Fish and the Flying Burrito Brothers.

Dylan, of all people, had to deal with virulent opposition to his artistic choices.  For the egregious crime of having electric guitars, organ/piano, bass and drums in lieu of a solitary acoustic guitar and braying harmonica, and choosing to sing lyrics that were not explicit, pointed critiques of injustice and social ills, he was charged with being a sell-out, a heretic, and a traitor.

Wouldn’t ya know it…the majority of people today will listen to Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde 20 times before giving a solitary spin to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or The Times They Are a-Changin’.

The group-think that typifies an all-too-consequential contingent of today’s population is very similar to these things from the ‘60s.

Any artist who deviates from the established dogma and orthodoxy of speech and ideation is branded as a conservative, a bigot, and a social problem. Any question posed to these precepts, regardless of its validity, is deemed an act tantamount to  tacit endorsement of bigotry, hatred, and modern conservative ideology.

I’ve probably said this a half-dozen times before on various threads, but sometimes you just have to rely on your subjective impulse and ignore the intellectual folderol we so often use to bolster our arguments on art & music. When I worked in the movie biz reading & evaluating movie scripts and other literary material for possible filming, the head of the studio would sometimes phone me up and simply ask, "Is it good?"

By the same token, though, it can definitely be fun as heck to dutifully count the angels on the head of that pin.

@edcyn Art pursuant of intellectual and emotional honesty and truth, rendered with intelligence, artistic bravery, and sensitivity is “fun as heck.”  Art that induces pleasure without insulting my intelligence is “fun as heck.”

Are these ideas the defining criteria of “good” for most studio heads?  Is their definition of “good” not at least a little influenced by a product’s viability as a commodity?

After watching what studios provide funding for, I have a sneaking suspicion that studio heads and I have very different definitions of “good.” 

I love that when in France during the 1965-6 world tour with The Hawks, Dylan hung a giant American flag on the wall behind the stage. The war in Vietnam was gaining in unpopularity in the USA by then, but was already very unpopular in the rest of the western world. Dylan was letting the frogs know he was playing American music, and was proud of it. "Play Loud" (what Dylan told Hawks drummer Mickey Jones) is how Bob responded to the booing of those who disapproved of him abandoning purely solo acoustic guitar and singing. 

mitchagain -- Thanks for bringing up Be Bop Deluxe. I might have mentioned all this in a long-ago thread, but I enjoyed the heck out of them. Bill Nelson remains one of my favorite guitar players. Virtuosity to spare but decidedly un-serious. Another of the fret-flyers that got me into shopping for an electric guitar. Saw the band at the Santa Monica Civic. As the concert wound down, Bill Nelson promised to play until we asked them to stop. I hate to say it, but in the middle of one more endless waddly-widdly guitar solo my feet decided to to wander back to my car.. One too many hot licks for this poor guy to take.