Pop Music—The Year It Peaked and Why It Declined

November 30, 2025
Music

It’s long been said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Decades ago, my mother was visiting my sister and me in Boston. As my mother was a professional artist, as well as an instructor in art history at private schools, she wanted to visit the art galleries on Boston’s famed Newbury Street.

I will never forget our collective chagrin at some of what we saw. One “painting,” priced at thousands of dollars, consisted of nothing but seven or eight small ballpoint pen marks that seemed to have been stabbed on the canvas randomly. What really stunned us, however, was a painting that was just a blank canvas—no marks or brush strokes whatsoever. It was entitled “Snow” and was priced at thousands of dollars. As we departed the gallery, my mother made a subtle wisecrack to the receptionist.

Were we wrong to be disgusted by this art? Is a canvas, with paint splashed haphazardly over it, as good as a Rembrandt, because beauty is just subjective, depending on “the eye of the beholder”? Or are there some objective criteria by which we can measure art?

The rich, of course, have long had financial motives for investing in modern art. They can buy a painting by an inept artist, later have it evaluated by a friendly appraiser as being worth millions of dollars—rather easily done since beauty is “subjective”—then donate it to a museum of modern art, erasing their entire tax liability through this “charitable donation.”

But I think it transcends finance. The satanic Deep State, as one division of its never-ending war on humanity, has striven to uglify the arts, be it painting, cinema, architecture or—as this post explores—music.

I need to establish at the outset: one person’s “This song rocks” is another person’s “This song sucks.” It’s always been that way. My parents’ generation loved Big Band music in the 1940s; I never did. And Don McLean’s 1972 hit “American Pie” deplored the music I liked in the late 60s; he preferred the Buddy Holly era. If this post says good or bad things about a song, it’s just my opinion. However, as we will also see, certain studies have established some objective criteria about pop music’s transitions.

For me, pop peaked in 1970. Looking back at the Billboard “Top 100 Hits” for the years 1966, 1967, 1968, and 1969, I spot between 20 and 30 songs for each year that I really liked, that I thought were high-quality.

But for 1970, the figure soars to 53. There were nine songs I can remember that didn’t make the Billboard 100, so I put the number at 62. I was 18 that summer, and was glued to the radio. The music was so good, I couldn’t wait to hear the newest “top 40” countdown each week. And looking back, despite all the changes I’ve personally gone through since then, I don’t feel any differently about the general quality of those songs—the melodies, harmonies, instrumentation, and most of the lyrics.

I’m going to embed a sampling of these songs, to hopefully make a point. No one, of course, has to listen; feel free to skip over them. (Obviously I own no rights to these songs; I’m just linking them from YouTube.)

Sad but Beautiful Songs from 1970

Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water,” which Billboard ranked song of the year:

Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia”:

Linda Ronstadt’s “Long, Long Time”:

James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain”:

Glen Campbell’s “It’s Only Make Believe”:

The Hollies’ “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”:

What would any collection be without Elvis? “Kentucky Rain”:

Incidentally, neither the Ronstadt nor Elvis songs made Billboard’s “Top 100.” That’s how stiff the competition was.

Socially Relevant Songs

Backed by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, Melanie sings the antiwar “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).” I thought that, musically, it was one of the most powerful songs of the year:

(Melaine and the Hawkins Singers can be seen performing the song live in the Netherlands here.)

(Let me just interject that I disavow the leftwing values of the sixties counterculture, which I was part of back then. The Vietnam War was engineered and then deliberately dragged out, and the counterculture controlled by the Deep State from behind the scenes, as Timothy Leary, the guru of LSD, later admitted. In the meantime, I’m just saying the music quality was good—probably to help attract young people into the new radicalism.)

Edwin Starr’s “War” is perhaps the best-remembered antiwar song of all time. But no way it reached the top of the 1970 charts without “the Man’s” consent:

The Temptations departed from their romantic trend to sing “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today),” a social commentary

Some songs, not intended to have social meaning, were taken that way. “Ride, Captain, Ride,” by Blues Image, was interpreted by many as a metaphor for escaping the culture:

“United We Stand,” by Brotherhood of Man, was a love song, but became a political anthem, as Vietnam war protests peaked in 1970, the year of the Kent State shootings:

Songs that Grabbed You

This final group has no common theme in their lyrics; they were just songs with energizing melodies, rhythm, and orchestration.

Blind Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours”:

Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” proved songs about God and Jesus could be a hit, even if the theology wasn’t exactly traditional:

Diana Ross’s version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” proved a cover version could equal an original:

R. Dean Taylor’s “Indiana Wants Me” evoked memories of the Bobbly Fuller Fours’ 1966 hit “I Fought the Law”:

Not everyone liked the lyrics to Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold,” but there was little debate about the music:

The Dutch band Shocking Blue’s “Venus”:

Chairmen of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time”:

With “Gypsy Woman,” Bryan Hyland proved he’d come a long way since ‘’Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” 10 years earlier:

It was hard not to like Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown”:

Well, that’s 21 songs. At the very end of this post, I’ve put the linked titles of 41 others.

The Fall Begins

In 1971, I was expecting the flow of great songs to continue. But I found hits were suddenly a distinct minority.

Song ratings were supposedly based on listener demand. I remember a Boston DJ in 1971 (probably on WRKO) saying approximately these words: “What?! How did this thing get this high on the charts? Does anyone really want to listen to it? What’s happening, people? This has to be rigged!”

The tune he was referring to was “Timothy,” a song about cannibalism—people eating people. Was there actually popular demand for it?

Pop radio always had a few irritating songs, but 1971 seemed to take it to a new level. Now bearing in mind that this is just my opinion, I remember my surprise when “Mr. Big Stuff” hit #1 on the Boston charts. It was “soul music,” but not the kind you heard from the Supremes or Temptations. It had no engaging melody; the lyrics were simplistic and kept repeating over and over:

Mr. Big Stuff
Who do you think you are?
Mr. Big Stuff
You’re never gonna get my love

But what probably annoyed me most was Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” being named Billboard’s song of the year. I had nothing against Three Dog Night; they’d done some decent songs in the past. But the lyrics to “Joy” were like a nursery rhyme:

Joy to the world
All the boys and girls, now
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me

The rest of the lyrics were about drinking wine, having fun, and making love—total self-indulgence. How had this replaced the poignant “Bridge over Troubled Water” as song of the year?

I had a roommate that year who ran a club band that played covers of top hits at audience request. But he told me they always refused to play “Joy to the World”—because they thought it sucked.

The Decline Continues

I kept listening to radio, hoping that excellent music would revive. But as I now look over the yearly Billboard Top 100 charts, here—at the risk of pissing off a lot of my fellow boomers—is the number I considered great, including ones I recall that eluded the “100” list. (Not having relistened to every song, I’ve undoubtedly missed one here and there.)

1970   62
1971   19
1972     8
1973     8
1974     8
1975     5
1976     1

1976, of course, was the year disco took over. When “Disco Duck,” performed by Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots, hit #1 on the charts in 1976, I turned to my roommates and said, “Boys, music has sure come a long way since the Beatles.” We all laughed. After that, I stopped listening to radio. I knew the era of great music was over. Gone were the beautiful melodies and evocative social songs. The problem wasn’t simply that disco was “different.” Nor that it was dance music—so much of rock ‘n’ roll had been danceable. And it wasn’t because disco had originated in gay and black nightclubs, something I didn’t even know then. What we didn’t like were the simplistic, redundant song compositions—Silver Convention’s four-minute “Get up and Boogie” had only six words to its lyrics: “Get up and Boogie” and “That’s right!” We also disliked the self-indulgent “me” culture Disco was promoting, with people wearing sequined shirts and bell-bottom pants, as the music pushed a “life is just good times” mindset.

My roommates and I weren’t alone in our opinion. I started seeing people around Boston wearing “Disco sucks” t-shirts.

Micky Dolenz of the Monkees was doing TV commercials for collections of oldies, saying “What ever happened to the great music?” In 1978, Bob Seger released his single “Old Time Rock & Roll,” which included these lyrics:

Today’s music ain’t got the same soul
I like that old time rock and roll
Don’t try to take me to a disco
You’ll never even get me out on the floor

Things peaked on July 12, 1979 with “Disco Demolition Night” at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Organized by radio DJ Steve Dahl and White Sox promotions director Mike Veeck, fans could attend a White Sox doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers for 98 cents if they brought a disco record. As promised, Dahl blew up the collected records in center field between games. The stadium was filled to capacity, with 20,000 fans turned away.

Fans burning disco records that didn’t make the demolition. Photo by Chuck Kirman, Chicago Sun-Times.

Nothing like this had occurred before. In 1966, U.S. teens burned Beatles records after John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but the backlash was against the comment, rather than the music itself.

Uh, oh, here comes my old friend Marvin, who I haven’t seen since I wrote Truth Is a Lonely Warrior. (You may need to click the box below twice,)

Why Did the Music Go Down?

In 2002, I encountered the first clue about music beginning to deteriorate in 1971. I was preparing to compose my only album (Freedom Shall Return, a collection of 12 “politically incorrect” songs). I bought a copy of Tunesmith by Jimmy Webb. He’d written several of Glen Campbell’s hit songs, such as By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, and Galveston, as well as the classic MacArthur Park. In that book he wrote:

It is interesting to note that the encroachment of the exclusive “playlist” superimposes neatly over the rise of the “independent programmers” whom I blame mostly for the disappearance of democratic Top 40 radio which gave birth to rock ’n’ roll in the first place. Even as early as 1967 the writing was on the wall. In June of that year Brian Wilson [of the Beach Boys] drove down to KHJ on Melrose Avenue in East Hollywood with his brand-new single “Heroes and Villains,” avec entourage et acoutrement, only to have the DJ on duty (Johnny Williams) refuse to play the record because it wasn’t “on the playlist.” By 1971 one programmer, Bill Drake, a guy who looked more like a professional linebacker than an arbiter of teenybopper taste, was deciding what was to be played on virtually every Top 40 radio station in the whole country.

I asked Microsoft Copilot if song quality had gone down after 1970 and it agreed that it had. Supporting Webb’s view, it said:

By the early 1970s, radio playlists became tightly controlled. DJs lost freedom to play diverse tracks, and stations focused on “approved” Top 40 hits. This narrowed exposure and encouraged formulaic songwriting.

Grok chimed in:

Jimmy Webb’s anecdote is 100% accurate and captures the exact moment when the old world of pop songcraft collided head-on with the new reality of centralized, consultant-driven radio. What he’s describing is the birth of the Top 40 format as a national monolith, and Bill Drake was the single most important architect of that transformation. . . . Drake in Los Angeles picked the records, and stations from Boston to San Diego played essentially the same 30 songs. . . .

Webb, being an old-school craftsman . . . felt this shift personally. The kind of lush, structurally adventurous pop ballad he excelled at simply stopped fitting the new radio reality after about 1970–71. . . . Drake personally chose and ranked every record every week.

According to AI, Drake based his selections and rankings on record sales, Billboard ratings, and radio audience surveys.

However, I suspect there was more to it, because the Deep State has long dictated the trends of American culture. In my post on the Golden Age of Television, I explored how TV programming was deliberately wholesome to begin with, to lure Americans into buying TV sets. But once TV ownership topped 90 percent in 1963, the programming was incrementally changed to coincide with the sixties revolution.

The musical center of that revolution was the Beatles, whose success, as Mike Williams has documented, was artificially created by the Tavistock Institute and other hidden hands. Since moving my blog to jamesperloff.net, the most-viewed post on it is “Hey, Hey, We’re the Beatles,” by guest writer Patrick O’Carroll, based on Mike Williams’ work.

Just as stunning are the ironic links between the American hippie music scene and the Deep State (especially the military and intelligence communities), detailed by the late David McGowan in his landmark book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon. Many of the famed rock bands resided in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, a short distance from each other, and from the Lookout Mountain Laboratory, a top-secret military installation.

Jim Morrison of the Doors (whose songs I often listened to in the day) was the son of Admiral George Morrison, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the Tonkin Gulf at the time of the notorious 1964 “incident” used to launch the disastrous Vietnam war.

Like many sixties Laurel Canyon bands, the Doors were abruptly created. Morrison had no previous music or singing experience; none of the Doors had even been in a band before. Yet unlike most musicians, who must undergo years of development and struggle before success, the Doors swiftly had an array of hit songs and a recording contract. Their producer, Paul Rothchild, had served in the Army Intelligence Corps.

If the global Deep State controlled the rock scene of the sixties in both the U.S. and UK, then it made sense that they controlled the later genres. I personally doubt that disco, or any subsequent phase, such as hip hop, heavy metal, or rap, were initially generated due to audience demand (which is not to deny that people really engaged with these trends).

I still heard songs I liked after 1976, such as Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” (1977), Bette Midler’s “The Wind Beneath My Wings” (1989), Linda Ronstadt’s “Dreams to Dream” (1991), The Pretenders’ “I’ll Stand by You” (1994), and Dido’s “White Flag” (2003). But these were songs that seemed to slip through the cracks.

These days, I usually only hear current songs when walking through a supermarket or other public venue. The studio musicians and orchestras of the past have largely been replaced by synthesizers. Even backup singers are increasingly rare. But what has struck me most for decades now is the absence of distinct melody. The notes usually lack range, and like the lyrics, are highly repetitious. (And any socially relevant songs—extremely rare—have been “woke” and politically correct.)

Is this just my opinion, or are there studies to confirm it?

“Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music” (2012), was a study conducted by researchers at the Spanish National Research Council. It analyzed nearly half a million pop songs from 1955 to 2010, and here’s what it found (summary by AI):

Timbre Variety Decline: Songs increasingly use similar sound textures, reducing diversity.

Simpler Chord Progressions: Harmonic complexity has diminished, with fewer chord changes and simpler structures.
Loudness Increase: Average mastering levels have risen steadily, confirming the “loudness war.”
Homogenization: Overall, pop songs sound more alike than in earlier decades.

The study can be read at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.5651v1.

Additionally, Queen Mary University of London published a study in 2024 in Scientific Reports announced as “Pop Melodies: Getting Simpler in the Age of Complexity?” It analyzed all the Billboard Hot 100 hits from 1950 through 2023. As summarized by Microsoft Copilot, the study “found a steady decline in melodic complexity, with notable drops around 1975, 1996, and 2000. . . .

Findings:

Both pitch and rhythm complexity declined by about 30% over the period.
Three distinct simplification phases:
- 1975 → coinciding with disco and stadium rock.
- 1996 → rise of hip hop and R&B dominance.
- 2000 → digital production and streaming era.
Despite more complex production tools, melodies themselves became simpler and more repetitive.

The report is announced here and the full report is here.

Degeneration of Radio

In 1957, Debbie Reynolds costarred with Leslie Nielsen (in a serious role), in the film Tammy and the Bachelor. The movie flopped at the box office. However, Reynolds recorded the title song, Tammy. According to Reynolds, the song was not expected to do well, but a DJ picked it up, and requests began pouring in. It spread like wildfire to other stations, and became a smash hit, staying on the charts for 23 weeks. As a result, Universal Pictures re-released the film, which became a modest commercial success.

I bring this up to make a point. At one time, radio DJs were free to play songs that they liked, and listener demand could drive a song to the top of the rankings. In other words, it was a democratic process. (A caveat here: Mike Williams has pointed out to me the payola scandal, in which a 1960 Congressional hearing revealed that a large number of DJs had accepted bribes from record labels to push certain songs.)

Today we are in a completely different era—the corporate age. Corporate giant Clear Channel (now called iHeartMedia) bought more than 1,200 radio stations between 1996 and 2000. DJs and other staff at local stations were massively laid off, replaced by prerecorded streaming of songs. Gone were the days of local DJs interacting with their communities—taking song requests, promoting hometown charity events, etc. At night and on weekends, many of these stations are unstaffed, and a phone call made during those hours only gets you a busy signal. This is all summarized in an excellent 2012 documentary Mike Williams recommended to me, Corporate FM, which includes interviews with numerous radio figures who were outed by the system.

To sum up: Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there are benchmarks demonstrating that music, just like other arts, has been “dumbed down” and handed over to corporations, a modus operandi of the Deep State.

Postscript: 41 Other Hits of 1970

These include everything from soft love melodies to hard rock to soul, sometimes creating dissonance from one song to the next, but this dissonance underscores the bygone variety listeners were once exposed to. Today, I don’t care for the messages in a few of these songs, but the music quality lives on.

“(They Long to Be) Close to You” by The Carpenters

“Get Ready” by Rare Earth

“Let It Be” by The Beatles

“Everything Is Beautiful” by Ray Stevens

“Make It with You” by Bread

“Hitchin’ a Ride” by Vanity Fare

“Cracklin’ Rosie” by Neil Diamond

“O-o-h Child” by The Five Stairsteps

“Love on a Two-Way Street” by The Moments

“Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” by The Poppy Family

“All Right Now” by Free

“Julie, Do Ya Love Me” by Bobby Sherman