1970-1975: rock's golden age

Rock's golden age: 1970-1975, when art lived in the grooves

What do "Selling England by the Pound", "Exile on Main Street" and the first roars of Black Sabbath have in common? That the five years from 1970 to 1975 concentrated a creative density with no later equivalent. Between hard rock and prog, between electric blues and the first hints of metal, rock stopped being dance music and became a territory of experimentation and excess. Anyone who hasn't dived into that half decade hasn't understood what came after.

A handful of years that changed everything

The label "golden age of hard rock" is not cheap nostalgia. In less than 72 months, albums were released that are still considered masterpieces today: the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street", Genesis' "Selling England by the Pound", or the albums that defined the heavy sound of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. What makes that five-year span unique is that the symphonic refinement of Yes and the rawness of the Japanese bands covering Sabbath before metal had a name could sit on the same shelf. And if anyone was looking for oddities, there was the story of a drummer who turned down the chance to replace Keith Moon in The Who.

The dark side: when the riff rules

While prog demanded patience and a trained ear, rock's harder branch went straight for the gut. Black Sabbath was no longer a blues rock band. And out of that brew protopunk was born: there are songs from 1969 that sound as if the Dead Kennedys had recorded them ten years earlier, a rarity that some highlight as a sign that the rage was always there, waiting for its moment. One track is even cited as being so explicit that whoever uploaded it to YouTube didn't dare write its full name for antiestéticar of censorship.

The legacy the industry has failed to repeat

It's hard to find anything in later discographies with the same density per minute. A lifetime isn't enough to listen to everything recorded in those years, and yet every list of essentials falls short. The contrast with today's output, which some dismiss with the word reggaeton, is fierce. The difference isn't just in the sound, but in the ambition: the goal was to break the mould, not to satisfy algorithms. Meanwhile, reggaeton keeps filling stadiums. Every era gets the art it deserves, or so they say.