The [your name here] Awards!

The Curtis Mayfield soundtrack automatically puts Super Fly above Blacula for me.

1971

Best Film
French Connection, The
Clockwork Orange, A
Last Picture Show, The
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Walkabout

Winner:

Worst Film
Drive, He Said
Safe Place, A
Diamonds Are Forever

"Winner":

Best TV Show
All in the Family (Season 1)
Mayr Tyler Moore (Season 1)
The Odd Couple (Season 1)
Mission Impossible (Season 5)
Hogan's Heroes (Season 6)

Winner:

Best Game
Uno 

Ah, Uno, the ultimate game to play with four or five other people when you're young and don't feel like setting up an entire board.  It's essentially a variation on the old card game Crazy Eights but with a bunch of extra wild cards that make things more fun.  You can play it for hours.

Crossfire

So until I started doing a little research for this I had no idea that this game was over 40 years old.  I associate it entirely with those rad TV commercials from the 90s which made it look like something to be played at the Thunderdome or something.  I always assumed that it was a new game because of that, but no, it was something that had been around since the early 70s.  Who knew?

Winner:



Best Hit Song
"Ain't No Sunshine" by Bill Wither


"Ain't No Sunshine" is one of those songs that isn't necessarily the most complex or flashily written things to ever play on the radio but in its simplicity it manages to gain a lot of power and feel sort of timeless in the process.  The concept is simple, the dude misses his woman when she's away, but it paints this picture well and Wither brings a lot of emotion in the way he performs it.  That said, there is some legitimate pop songcrafting here too with the whole "I know I know I know" section.

"Brown Sugar" by The Rolling Stones

Here we are dealing with some pretty sensitive subject matter.  Though for much of the rock listeners who love this song the riff and the groove are the main focus, actually listening to the song reveals it is in fact about slave masters having sex with slaves, an act that was almost certainly rape, but which Jagger seems to view as being a hot and sexy bit of taboo-breaking.  Needless to say this would not have gone unexamined if the song had been released in the era of the hot take.  One must remember that this was written during a period where America was just starting to reconsider its slave past in a new light.  It was the same decade that gave us the movie Mandingo and Goodbye Uncle Tom for example.  Also, you have to consider the song within the blues traditions that the Stones were exploring.  This mixture of racial oppression and sex as always bubbling beneath the surface of the Blues songs that the Stones were trying to emulate and here it seems like they were trying to sort of "go all the way" with the idea.  Not sure if that was such a good idea in retrospect, but it certainly gives me a lot of things to think about.  Also, that riff really is quite good.

"I Feel the Earth Move" by Carole King


I'm trying to decide whether Carole King can better be described as the Taylor Swift of 1971 or the Adele of 1971.  She never really had the vocal theatrics of Adele and was more of a singer-songwriter figure like Taylor Swift, but she was more in Adele's age range and maturity and her songs maybe sound a bit more like Adele songs.  Which ever one she most resembles the point is that she was able to tap into the zeitgeist of what young but somewhat sophisticated single women were feeling in the early seventies and as a result her "Tapestry" album became one of the best selling records of all time.  She was never really able to recapture that success for some reason and that has made her slightly less remembered in music history than it likely seemed she was destined for, but make no mistake she ran the world in 1971 and "I Feel the Earth Move" was her "Rolling in the Deep" and/or "Blank Space" depending on which analogy we finally land on.

"What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye


Though he's probably more known for making "baby making" music today, Marvin Gaye's best and most famous album was his politically charged "What's Going On" album on which this is the title track.  I think what makes this particular political song work so well is that it's asking a question rather than making demands.  It isn't barking out solutions that no three-minute pop song is ever going to be able to pursuade anyone to so much as it's simply being exasperated at the way things are going.  This way he can tap into the zeitgeist and still avoid alienating too many people at the same time.  That may sound cynical when I type it out like that but I don't think Gaye was being calculating when he wrote this so much as he was expressing his own real exasperations with the state of the world and admitting he didn't have all the answers.

"Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who

Like most of the Who's Next album, "Won't Get Fooled Again" was something of a happy accident.  It was originally meant to tie into this crazy science fiction rock opera called "Lifehouse" that Pete Townshend was writing and referred to this Metropolis sounding revolution that would have occurred in the plot of that thing.  Had "Lifehouse" ever come to fruition the song might have had some allegorical resonance but that probably would have been overshadowed by the silly plot it was meant to get tied into (side note: I love The Who, but I really wish the words "Rock Opera" had never crossed Townshend's mind).  On its own, the song is this incredibly powerful look at the nature of revolution and how it can become messy as hell and how the results can be mixed.  Pretty much the perfect idea to grab people who just lived through the 60s.  No wonder this became the big charting hit from that album instead of Baba O'Reilly, which would almost certainly be the more famous song in the long run.

Winner:

I agree with your worst of.

I've never seen Walkabout. Though I may choose French connection. I appreciate Clockwork, but not sure I like it that much.

I haven't seen Walkabout.

My vote for 71 is definitely Clockwork, with French Connection coming in strong at second. Third would probably be The Last Picture Show, then Dirty Harry.

Dirty Harry was closer to the worst list than it was to the best list for me.  

Coming from the guy who didn't nominate...

Cowboy hat from that Five Stairsteps song has one of my favorite R&B voices of that era, besides maybe Cornbread and Blue from The Temptations.

Was Let It Be 69?

1969
Get Back (A-side) / Don't Let Me Down (B-side)
The Ballad of John & Yoko (A-side) / Old Brown Shoe (B-side)
Something (Double A-side) / Come Together (Double A-side)

1970
Let It Be (A-side) / You Know My Name (B-side)
The Long and Winding Road (A-side) / For You Blue (B-side)

IanTheCool



Ants in the Pants was robbed.