As a followup… y’all may have seen me disparage the 70’s from time to time. Now, there were a few good things to come from the 70’s… Star Wars probably being about the best. But apart from Star Wars, when I think back to pop culture from the 70’s, there is, for no readily perceivable reason, one thing above all else that comes to my mind:
Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck Of the Friggen Edmund Fitzgerald, a hit from late 1976, about a year after the sinking of the actual Edmund Fitzgerald. It is technically a good song. Probably technically a *very* good song. But Got Dayum is it gloomy and depressing. And for some reason… it just seems to encompass the mood of America at the time (even though it came from a flappy-headed Canadian). Even with Logan’s Run’s promise from only a few months earlier that one day you’d be able to download your very own Jenny Agutter, Edmund Fitzgerald just seemed to make it clear to the world that everything was terrible.