Bland on Blonde: why the old rock music canon is finished

The 1970s brought about the idea that rock was important – and needed a canon of greatest albums to match. But in a digital age, is definitive musical excellence a ridiculous notion?Rock’s flight into seriousness in the 1970s had many ill effects. There was prog rock, jamming, not releasing singles – and the idea that the couple of decades since Elvis had produced enough music of sufficient worth to produce a canon. In 1974, like a university English department sending out a...

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