Ann Arbor-based music review site AllMusic.com has an interesting
 article up on one of its blogs this week, entitled AllMusic Loves 1977.
 ( http://blog.allmusic.com/2008/6/6/allmusic-loves-1977/ ) 
 In it, various AMG editors and reviewers talk about memorable music
 made in that year and I have to admit they make a pretty convincing
 case that it was an exceptional year in music.

 Plenty of familiar 70s acts were in full swing but the undisputed
 mainstream success of the year was Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours",
 though Steely Dan's "Aja" made a none-too-shabby try for the title
 and the Eagles' "Hotel California" would have been a strong contender
 had it not been released three weeks before the end of 1976.
 
 Notoriously, 1977 was the apex of the disco music trend, epitomized
 by the astonishing commercial success of the "Saturday Night Fever"
 soundtrack.

 But the reaction to disco was also well underway, as shown by a strong
 collection of debut albums (and non-debut breakthrough albums) by
 up-and-coming punk rock and new wave acts -- The Clash and Sex Pistols'
 debuts, Elvis Costello's "My Aim is True", "Talking Heads '77", Wire's
 "Pink Flag", Television's "Marquee Moon", and many others. 

 In London, Jamaican superstar Bob Marley was recording "One Love /
 People Get Ready" for his album "Exodus." 

 Away from center stage there was also quite a bit going on outside
 the spotlight.  Influential producer Brian Eno recorded the last
 of his 70s pop albums and began work on "Music For Airports", the
 first of his ambient series and Kraftwerk recorded "Trans-Europe
 Express" -- neither received much attention at the time but twenty
 years later both events were hailed as huge influences on electronic
 music.

 Much has been written about the decline of the music industry --
 some of it true, much of it hysterically overreaching.  But it 
 certainly feels sometimes, looking at the music released in a
 blockbuster year like 1968 or 1977 and comparing it to today,
 unlikely that we'll ever see that kind of year again.  Is it only
 the benefit of hindsight that makes a year like 1977 seem so golden?

1 responses total.

I've been wanting to write about this and not really sure what to 
add.  1977 was certainly a fun year to live through, as a music 
fan.  I had started picking up the British weekly "Melody Maker" 
for its folk music coverage (written mostly by one Colin Irwin, who
I still read today in other magazines) and so I was getting lots
of exposure to the hype cranked up over the Sex Pistols, the Clash,
and the New York constellation around CBGB's.

(Personally, the good times seemed to keep going through about 1980,
and then I lost the thread in both rock and folk music, and 
there was very little for me for about five years, until the mid-1980s.
There were a few years in the 1980s where I bought just handfuls of 
LPs and didn't like most of them.)
 
There seem to be times when the culture and the art and the business
all come together and magic happens.  Beyond 1968 and 1977, there's
an evolving thesis (someone had a book about it) that there was a 
Great Era of Rock Music 1965-1985.  I might push the cutoff date back
to 1990, but there was something running loose in those years.

It's hard, of course, for me to divorce this from feelings that the 
music one grew up with was The Most Important Music Ever.  I note that
Allmusic had a parallel article on the great year 1999, and I skimmed
that article and felt like a visitor from Mars.

In opera, it is proposed that the great works mostly come from 
"The Extended 19th Century", which runs from about 1788 (Mozart) to 
1929 (Puccini's last opera, incomplete at his death).   
American Musical Theater is considered to have a golden era 
running from the 1930s (?  no time to research) until about 1968 ("Hair").

There's an article in Salon about the albums that were on the charts 
in one week in late 1969.

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