The 200 Best Songs of the 1970s

There’s no shame in being a muse—preening in silk robes on the couch, tousled hair parting to reveal full lips pouting around a cigarette, tossing off bon mots of aching elegance that nestle into the subconscious and reappear as pop hits. If that’s how Mick Jagger wanted to spend his days, more power to him. Marianne Faithfull was most famous in the ’60s as the blonde, boho moll of the Rolling Stones frontman, whose career was twined to his and widely assumed dependent on his gifts: her version of the Stones’ “As Tears Go By” was a hit in England; her near-fatal heroin overdose became “Wild Horses,” and her literary interests begat “Sympathy for the Devil;” she co-wrote “Sister Morphine.” But Jagger was also something of Faithfull’s muse, inspiring many entries in her prodigious Decca Records output of the late 1960s.

By the end of the 1970s, a decade in which she’d weathered drug abuse and homelessness (and long ended her high-profile love), Faithfull refused to be diminished for one more day. Broken English, her first rock record in 12 years, was the comeback triumph no one expected, not least in how gritty it was. The chilling title track is a prophetic merging of punk and dance, with lyrics that plumb the depths of her losses. “Could have come through anytime/Cold lonely, puritan,” she intones harshly, gliding into a bloodless snarl that would make Johnny Rotten flinch. “What are you fighting for?/It’s not my security.” It’s a terse, battle-scarred declaration of autonomy with hairpin melodic turns, early in its embrace of dance music’s dark possibilities. “Broken English” is the portrait of a true survivor, starting a new era on her terms, alone. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Marianne Faithfull: “Broken English”  

See also: Lene Lovich: “Lucky Number” / Amanda Lear: “Follow Me”

Even as her sensibilities shifted from jazz to fusion to R&B and disco, Patrice Rushen focused on her keyboards while everything else swirled around them. On “Haven’t You Heard,” the piano is an anchor for the song. This can make it feel like an early skeleton of house music, which is appropriate—it was a touchstone of Larry Levan’s sets at the Paradise Garage, and was eventually reborn as gospel house in Kirk Franklin’s 2005 single “Looking for You.”

“Haven’t You Heard” is a formally perfect expression of disco. The best disco songs imply infinity in both their length and groove, and always feel as if they’re attached to a black hole. “Haven’t You Heard” enhances time until it feels like the glitter of a cityscape unfurling through a cab window. It manages this even as the lyric itself is private—the literal text of a classified ad. “It only says ‘I’m looking for the perfect guy,’” Rushen sings, searching for connection not through direct communication but with ambient speech. This kind of intimacy, personified by the whispery translucence of Rushen’s voice, is just as easily exported to the dance floor. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Patrice Rushen: “Haven’t You Heard”  

See also: Anita Ward: “Ring My Bell” / “Herb Alpert: Rise”

Like the best outlaw country, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” looks backwards and forwards simultaneously, finding inspiration in the past even as it wonders what’s around the next curve in the road. Jennings and his peers were traditionalists who bucked the very notion of tradition. All of them had been manhandled by the industry, but few bristled against the mainstream quite as strongly as Jennings, who found himself on a series of poorly planned tours that left him deep in debt to his label and addicted to amphetamines.

If this were just a song about all the “rhinestone suits and new shiny cars” that defined country music around the bicentennial, it would have been only a minor antagonism. But outlaw country rarely gets credit for its humor or its self-deprecation, and what lends the song its gravity, aside from the world-weariness of Waylon’s vocals, is his sly assessment of his own place in the industry. Despite the hits he’d been notching for a decade, he was still just another road warrior who idolized Hank Sr. but still saw him as an almost hilariously impossible standard against which to measure himself or anybody else. –Stephen Deusner

Listen: Waylon Jennings: “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” 

See also: Willie Nelson: “Whiskey River” / Jerry Reed: “Amos Moses”

A healthy portion of Chicago’s musical avant-garde decamped for France in 1969, but the group that made the biggest splash in Paris was the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The band’s exuberant stage show reinforced its members’ organizing slogan—“Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future”—with bassist Malachi Favors often dressed like an Egyptian shaman and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell donning the garb of a contemporary urbanite. Over the course of a dozen-plus records cut in the 1970s, the band’s sound made good on the malleability suggested by this varied public image, as they created delicate improvisations and noise blowouts alike.

On “Théme de Yoyo,” the opening song on a soundtrack to a now-forgotten film, the Art Ensemble’s rhythm section offers up a funk groove. When the group’s notoriously wild horn players enter, they begin by playing things pretty straight—only reaching for avant-garde theatrics in brief pauses of the swinging, mod theme. Guest vocalist Fontella Bass—the wife of Art Ensemble trumpeter Lester Bowie—contributes soulful phrasings that sound downright commercial until you focus on the absurdist lyrics (“Your fanny’s like two sperm whales floating down the Seine”). No matter how out there each instrumentalist ventures, every feature spot contains references to the track’s pop-song foundation. As a piece of free-jazz funk that predates Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time band, “Théme de Yoyo” is an early reflection of the benefits the Art Ensemble reaped from their refusal to be tied to a single genre. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Art Ensemble of Chicago: “Théme de Yoyo” 

See also: Brigitte Fontaine, Areski Belkacem & Art Ensemble of Chicago: “Comme à la Radio” / Pharoah Sanders: “Love Is Everywhere”

Jorge Ben’s “Taj Mahal” is ostensibly about the famous tomb in Agra, India. The building was created by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, as a tribute to his fourth wife, Mumtaz Mahal, after her death during the birth of the couple’s 14th child. “Foi a mais linda historia de amor,” sings the Brazilian singer Ben: “It was the most pretty story of love.” The couple’s romance must have been strong stuff: the tomb was commissioned the year after her death, in 1632, and wasn't finished until 1653, at a cost of approximately $827 million in today’s dollars.

Ben’s original version of the song, recorded for his 1972 album Ben, is a subdued gem. But the version recorded for his massive 1976 crossover album Africa Brasil exudes joy, sparks flying from every exuberant note. The record would end up getting Rod Stewart—whose “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” bore a strong resemblance—sued. It’s not difficult, though, to see what Stewart saw in its jubilant DNA (unconsciously, according to his autobiography). “Taj Mahal” captures an unselfconscious excitement, a purity of a deeply familiar feeling, yet projects it at a scale that can cross decades—perhaps centuries. –David Drake

Listen: Jorge Ben: “Taj Mahal”  

See also: Jorge Ben: “Ponta De Lanca Africano (Umbabarauma)” / Tim Maia: “No Caminho Do Bem”

This track is really three ’70s reggae classics in one: Max Romeo’s “Chase the Devil,” Prince Jazzbo’s “Croaking Lizard,” and Lee Perry’s mix of both with his own vocals. All this and more gets tossed in the pot in the nearly seven-minute-long “Disco Devil.”

“Disco” doesn’t reference the flashy dance genre of the same name but rather the concept of the “discomix,” a 12” vinyl format that contains a vocal song seamlessly followed by a dub remix or a deejay version (meaning a rapped performance over the rhythm track). Perry essentially released a dub version of the Romeo and Jazzbo tracks, then followed it with a dub of the dub. It’s a particularly effective example of Perry’s innovative, eccentric production style that transforms the studio into an instrument itself. The approach to “Disco Devil” demonstrates the many ways he was able to pull pieces of a song apart and put them back together, add snippets of lyrics and sounds, and shape deep bass and rippling guitar to glide as if underwater. –Erin Macleod

Listen: Lee Perry & the Full Experiences: “Disco Devil”  

See also: Max Romeo: “Chase the Devil” / Augustus Pablo: “Kings Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown”

A decade before Michael Jackson lifted it for “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” and long before Rihanna sampled Jackson’s version in “Don’t Stop the Music” (and both got sued for uncleared usage), “Soul Makossa” was a disco scene staple. It started as the B-side to a hymn Manu Dibango wrote for his native Cameroon’s football team in honor of their country hosting the 1972 Africa Cup of Nations. By then, the jazz saxophonist was already well established, but the record was a huge flop. In his autobiography, Dibango recalls how kids and adults alike ridiculed his stuttering repetition of that now-familiar refrain: “Ma-ma-ko ma-ma-sa mako-makossa!” It was only when he rerecorded it in Paris, and that version fell into the hands of New York Loft DJ David Mancuso and radio DJ Frankie Crocker, that it spread like wildfire, even cracking the American Top 40.

Historically, makossa, the popular Cameroonian dance music, is a mix of soukous, highlife, and traditional Douala dance rhythms. Dibango douses it in soul, funk, and jazz to the point that “Soul Makossa” is more funky proto-disco than it is makossa. But that reimagining is also what made the song such a phenomenon; it played to people’s ideas of what a cosmopolitan African continent sounded like, presented in a format they were familiar with. In the decades to come, “Soul Makossa” would be sampled countless times over, including by the Fugees on The Score and Kanye on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. “Soul Makossa” remains brilliant in its musical malleability. –Minna Zhou

Listen: Manu Dibango: Soul Makossa  

See also: Chakachas: “Jungle Fever” / Lafayette Afro Rock Band: “Darkest Light”

The no wave scene in late ’70s New York was notorious for its room-clearing nihilism. Noisy, confrontational bands such as Mars, DNA, and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks looked to bury the corpse of rock’n’roll by rejecting its rules. Yet one of the most iconic no wave tunes, James Chance & the Contortions’ “Contort Yourself,” is less an anti-song than a body-moving dance-craze ditty. “Now is time to lose all control/Distort your body, twist your soul,” Chance yelps over the tightly wound groove of his quintet, who sound like an unhinged version of James Brown’s band the J.B.’s.

But as “Contort Yourself” progresses, Chance’s destructive attitude creeps in. His screams get longer (“Forget about your future!”), his saxophone gets noisier, and slide guitars scrape across the song like rakes over concrete. By the end, Chance advocates total annihilation: “Once you forget your affection for the human race/Reduce yourself to zero, and then you’ll fall in place.”

Still, “Contort Yourself” is nihilism you can dance to, and it typified the Contortions’ unique mix of punk, funk, and jazz. That mix would influence many danceable early ’80s New York bands—Bush Tetras, ESG, Liquid Liquid—and point toward the disco scene that eventually took over Manhattan. But no one could replicate the sharp mania of “Contort Yourself,” a song that still twists and shouts. –Marc Masters

Listen: James Chance & the Contortions: “Contort Yourself”  

See also: A Certain Ratio: “Do the Du (Casse)” / Teenage Jesus & The Jerks: “Orphans”

“Baby's on Fire” is barely a song, in the conventional sense—two chords mercilessly alternating for five minutes, a single snatch of melody repeated with almost no variation, a lyric that sidles around clear sense, and a guitar solo that takes up more than half of its running time. It divided the listeners of Eno’s first solo album, Here Come the Warm Jets, into those who got it and those who were left eating its ashes.

For all its minimalism, there's a lot going on in this song: a celebration of a catastrophe happening in plain view, knotty wordplay and snappy onomatopoeia, and the vicious camp of Eno’s vocal (there’s an arch, shivering grin behind the way he enunciates, “This kind of experience/Is necessary for her learning”). The track’s centerpiece is the conflagration of Robert Fripp and Paul Rudolph’s all-devouring instrumental break with Eno’s “treatments” spraying fuel all over it. Before “Baby’s on Fire” and Warm Jets, Eno had been the eccentric, glammy keyboardist in Roxy Music; after them, he became known as the ingenious weirdo who thought about sound in ways nobody else did. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: Brian Eno: “Baby's on Fire”  

See also: Brian Eno: “Here Come the Warm Jets” / Brian Eno: “Third Uncle”

The story goes that, sometime in the mid-’80s, David Byrne found Estudando o Samba (“Studying Samba”) in a record store in Rio De Janeiro. He assumed it would be like the rest of the samba records he was collecting, but its cover gave a hint of something subversive: the image of a barbed wire fence scrawled across a white surface. Of course, Byrne became so obsessed with the record, he tracked Zé down and asked if he could release the album in the States, as the first dispatch of his then-new Luaka Bop records. Soon after, Zé was enjoying overdue fame as samba’s best deconstructionist.

Zé grew up in the Hinterlands of Bahia, Brazil, in a village so remote that it didn’t get electricity until he was 17; soon after, he studied modernist composition and hooked up with the tropicalistas in urban Salvador. Zé’s music reflects both these worlds; it’s rooted in rural tradition and laced with a cynical cosmopolitanism. “Doi,” from 1976’s triumphant Estudando o Samba, strikes a perfect balance: its percussion forms from earthy, machinelike clanks, and a minimalist guitar is the only other actual instrument on the song. Its thrust comes from a chorus that feels universal, primordial even, and Zé allows himself to disappear into it. It’s a strange and satisfying effect, and a rigorously intelligent way to balance formal experimentation with heritage. “Doi” exists in some nether-zone between the past and the future, and nothing in music sounds like this, still. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Tom Zé: “Doi”  

See also: Tom Zé: “Um Oh! E Um Ah!” / Secos & Molhados: “Sangue Latino”

Betty Davis’ voice is where pleasure meets pain, so of course she had to cut a song about S&M. People speculated whether “He Was a Big Freak” concerned her ex-husband, Miles Davis, or her rumored (and denied) lover, Jimi Hendrix. It wasn’t about either, Davis said, though she admitted that her dominatrix’s “turquoise chain” was a reference to Hendrix’s favorite color. Gossip aside, Davis’ act was scandalizing because it starred a powerful young black woman in control of her own desires.

On “Freak,” she takes on various roles in order to meet her partner’s needs—housewife, geisha, mother—but sounds so intoxicated by her power that his satisfaction becomes secondary. Her delivery evokes a woman possessed as she roars and vamps through her seduction. Davis keeps switching gears until a new darkness emerges from her throat, and a storm rises from the guitar. Her pointillist funk thrust loses its precision and starts stumbling in the perilous ascent towards climax. Eventually, “Freak” fades out, though Davis is still roaring as the mix dims. It feels like she’s just getting started. –Laura Snapes

Listen: Betty Davis: “He Was a Big Freak”  

See also: Betty Davis: “Anti-Love Song” / Millie Jackson:“ If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don't Wanna Be Right)”

Born Leo Morris, drummer Idris Muhammad played with dozens of jazz giants before and after taking his Muslim name, but found his artistic voice at Kudu, CTI’s soul crossover label, where he collaborated with David Matthews, a keyboardist who arranged and co-wrote several James Brown hits. You don’t have to have a degree in composition like Matthews did to wrap your head around the melodic composure of “Could Heaven Ever Be Like This,” their peak achievement together and Muhammad’s biggest hit. Singular, spiritual, and straight-up gorgeous, “Heaven” silences even the staunchest disco-hater.

Elements of the song have been repeatedly sampled and replayed, but its bittersweet harmonies are best experienced the way DJs played it back in the spring of 1977 and for many years to come: from its first effusive note to its very end. Over the course of eight-and-a-half minutes, “Heaven” takes dancers on an exquisite journey, the arrangement soaring from ethereal harp to Brecker Brothers horn blasts to raucous rock guitar. Too otherworldly to be championed by every DJ, “Heaven” was nevertheless so beloved by those who did that it reached No. 2 on Billboard’s dance chart. The only subsequent record to truly do it justice, Jamie xx’s “Loud Places” honors that it’s not simply a dance song, but also a prayer. –Barry Walters

Listen: Idris Muhammad: “Could Heaven Ever Be Like This”  

See also: Candido: “Thousand Finger Man” / Kiki Gyan: “Disco Dancer”

Falsetto is frequently used in reggae, but not often is there a track as gently piercing as Junior Murvin’s 1976 classic. As resonant now as it was then, Murvin’s song about the militarization of police reflects reality far beyond Jamaica, leveling the playing field between the illegal and the legal. “All the peacemakers turn war officers,” sings a prescient Murvin. “Police and thieves in the streets, oh yeah/Scaring the nation with their guns and ammunition.” It was an important soundtrack of protest when it was released in London in the summer of 1976, during racial tensions that led to riots during the Notting Hill Festival and unrest in Brixton.  

The track has been re-recorded a number of times, most famously by the Clash on their debut album. However, the original, recorded in the legendary Black Ark studio, is a textbook Lee Perry production. There’s that perfect amount of echo, carrying Murvin’s vocal improvisations and the humming chorus along, making them bounce off the walls and charge ever forward. –Erin Macleod

Listen: Junior Murvin: “Police & Thieves”  

See also: Junior Murvin: “Cool Out Son” / Horace Andy: “Skylarking”

On his previous Eurodisco hits, the French drummer Marc Cerrone mirrored Giorgio Moroder’s long, sensual suites with Donna Summer while accentuating both their symphonic splendor and kickdrum wallops. For the title track of his second 1977 album, he took a page from Summer’s “I Feel Love” and similarly traded soaring strings for undulating synths, but did so without the overt sex. Instead, he and cowriter Alain Winsniak introduced an unprecedented strain of dystopian disco dread. Neither Kraftwerk nor Berlin-era Bowie had an immediate international dancefloor impact as profound as “Supernature.”

Years before GMOs became a food source and organic crops a common alternative, “Supernature” sang of an imagined past when science introduced agricultural breakthroughs with unanticipated consequences. “The potions that we made touched the creatures down below/And they grew up in a way that we’d never seen before,” warns English session vocalist Kay Garner with a star-quality growl oozing menace and authority. As the track grows more sinister, mutant monsters take their revenge until humanity reverts to a primitive state where it must once again earn its place.

How did such a deep sci-fi theme find its way into an album that sold huge numbers and paved the way for space disco, techno, acid house, and other dark dance floor strains? The future new wave icon Lene Lovich wrote these uncredited ecological lyrics. She’d soon use her fame to raise consciousness for animal rights. –Barry Walters

Listen: Cerrone: “Supernature”  

See also: Space: “Carry On, Turn Me On” / Gino Soccio: “Dancer”

The Whispers formed in Los Angeles in the mid-’60s and were hardly seen as cutting-edge by the time they released “And the Beat Goes On” in 1979. But they were in fact pushing boundaries, thanks in large part to the genius of SOLAR label producer Leon Sylvers, who, along with record producer Kashif, was one of the most important composers in late-’70s/early-’80s R&B. Together, on opposite sides of the country—Kashif in New York, Sylvers in Los Angeles—the two charted a path post-disco, incorporating new electronic elements and playing with grooves.

“And the Beat Goes On” was one of Sylvers’ most successful records as a producer, hitting No. 19 on the Hot 100. The groove was so modern, it was the product of a Will Smith one-track-jack in the late ’90s, when the rapper’s “Miami” lifted liberally from the post-disco classic; the record had aged well, its quick strings and electronic textures as fresh as they day they were recorded. –David Drake

Listen: The Whispers: “And the Beat Goes On”  

See also: Detroit Emeralds: “Feel the Need in Me” / Leon Haywood: “I Want' A Do Something Freaky To You”

“Don’t Leave Me This Way” first took shape in 1975 in a more modest arrangement, as a Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes song sung by Teddy Pendergrass. Pendergrass’s tender vocals keep the songs as two distinct components—a verse and a chorus separated neatly by scale and intensity. When Thelma Houston recorded the song for Motown a year later, her arrangement reached for the sky; the version accelerates steadily, a gentle melancholy lifting off into the denser and more pressurized atmosphere of disco. Throughout, Rhodes piano shimmers like light filtering through clouds.

Houston’s performance is remarkable: her vocals are as composed as they are exposed, stable as they are sensitive. “I can’t survive,” Houston sings, her voice occasionally collapsing into a whisper. “I can’t stay alive/Without your love.” It’s this complexity that, years later, led the song to be embraced as a metaphor for the devastation of AIDS in the gay community. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Thelma Houston: “Don’t Leave Me This Way”  

See also: Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes: “Don't Leave Me This Way” / Evelyn "Champagne" King: “Shame”

It’s ironic that one of the all-time greatest Philly soul acts weren’t even from Philadelphia. The Spinners hailed from Detroit—they were even billed as “the Detroit Spinners” in the UK—and like most of the city’s top talent at the time, they recorded on Motown, where they landed the Stevie Wonder-penned hit “It’s a Shame.” But it was only after signing to Atlantic Records that they truly found their voice. Under the guidance of super-producer Thom Bell, they embodied the sound of ’70s Philadelphia soul: lush, sensual, and ridiculously generous, all strings and bells and orchestral grandeur.

That’s a lot to juggle, and some of Bell’s lesser productions collapsed under the weight of their arrangements, especially once disco pressured them to become busier and busier, but the Spinners had the delicate touch to pull it all off. Just years earlier, they’d been shouting and wailing, but the best moments of “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love” are practically whispered; every time lead vocalist Bobbie Smith is offered the opportunity to go loud, he goes soft, letting Bell’s dulcet accompaniments do the singing for him. The restraint adds even more depth to his coos of, “I don't need all those things that used to bring me joy/You've made me such a happy boy.” The ’70s yielded countless songs about falling in love, but few are as blissful as this. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: The Spinners: “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love”  

See also: Spinners: “I'll Be Around” / Isley Brothers: “(At Your Best) You Are Love”

Not many can challenge Todd Rundgren as the foremost architect of ’70s rock. As a producer, he shaped defining albums for Grand Funk Railroad, Hall & Oates, and Meat Loaf...but also the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, and the Tubes. In his simultaneous solo career, he stayed one step ahead of the trends he solidified with other artists, veering between soft-rock rebellion, prog fantasias, and experiments in song suites and remakes.

Triangulating Rundgren’s busy decade is nearly impossible, but “International Feel”—the lead track from his frenetic A Wizard, A True Star—does a fine job. Recorded at the ad-hoc Secret Sound studio Rundgren built in a New York City loft, the song balances between his audiophile obsessions and pop instincts. It’s Philly soul in a spacesuit, fading in with revving engine sound effects, tickled from all sides by synthesizer sprites, propelled by heavily filtered drums that sound lifted from a Led Zeppelin IV session. The use of “International Feel” in Daft Punk’s 2006 film Electroma only confirmed its otherworldly futurism, and that Rundgren was ahead of his time even as he played a preeminent role in defining it. –Rob Mitchum

Listen: Todd Rundgren: “International Feel”   

See also: The Move: “Feel Too Good” / Dennis Wilson: “Pacific Ocean Blues”

When guitarist Julz Sale, bassist Ros Allen, and other bassist Bethan Peters came together to form Delta 5 in 1979, they decided to double up on the low end because, as Allen has said, “neither of us played guitar, and we thought it would make the music more exciting.” They were not wrong.

Part of a contingent of Leeds art instigators that included Mekons and Gang of Four, the socialist funk-punk pioneers released their iconic debut single on Rough Trade just as the ’70s were petering out. The song opens with a tense soda-counter come-on that bleeds feminist sarcasm: “Can I have a taste of your ice cream?” the three women deadpan in unison. “Can I lick the crumbs from your table? Can I interfere in your crisis?” They gnarl knots of guitar noise until the whole song sounds like a collective effort to suffocate those same questions, but only after telling the leader of the pack to fuck right off: “No, mind your own business!” This one genius idea on loop set Delta 5 on their way. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: Delta 5: “Mind Your Own Business”  

See also: Mekons: “Where Were You” / Slits: “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”

“Caravan” fits into an established tradition of songs about listening, a metatextual lyric about gathering with friends and dancing to a song on the radio, made into a song one might gather with friends and dance to. When it appears on a classic rock radio playlist, the lyric becomes abruptly instructional. “Turn it up!” Van exhorts. “Little bit higher! Radio!” Syntax crumbles in the whirl and flutter of his emotions. “Caravan” has a kind of rhomboid structure, its energies constantly building toward an acute angle; the individual instruments in the song—including Van Morrison’s voice—combine and swell into a wordless chorus: “La la la la la la la.” This is, essentially, the vocabulary of rhythm and blues, which Morrison, on “Caravan”’s album Moondance, had finally, almost seamlessly absorbed into his own music, and of which “Caravan” is its most excited expression. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Van Morrison: “Caravan”  

See also: Van Morrison: “Into the Mystic” / Randy Newman: “Sail Away”