ABSTRACT
The late 1960s/early 1970s was a special time in the history of popular music, where now-familiar forms and styles first emerged. It was a period of seemingly endless innovation, where a plethora of newly formed bands appeared, and each one had the opportunity to be as distinct and original as their imaginations would allow. It was also a period of marked cultural change, one where rock divested itself of the youth liberation culture that had marked its 1960s raison d'être to become centred on musical expression and the theatre of the stage—art for art’s sake in the context of rock. Simon Frith recognised the emergence of that process as early as 1978, describing it in terms of ‘fragmentation’:
In 1967 the rock business was clearly dominated by the idea of a unified youth culture, a newly liberated generation, but the rest of the musical decade revolved around fragmentation as rock became heavy metal and folk-rock, country-rock, teenybop, progressive and disco, singer/song-writers and glitter.
(Frith 1978 in Gillett and Frith 1996: p. 144)