The Seventies Sucked: A Selection from Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005)

“If the Sixties were marked by the naive, self-congratulatory impulse to believe that everything happening was new—and everything new was significant—the Seventies were an age of cynicism, of lost illusions and reduced expectations. Mediocre times, wrote Albert Camus in The Fall, beget empty prophets. The 1970s offered a rich harvest of them. It was an age depressingly aware of having come after the big hopes and ambitious ideas of the recent past, and having nothing to offer but breathless and implausible re-runs and extensions of old thoughts. . . .

The avowedly politicized language of punk rock bands, exemplified in the Sex Pistols’ 1976 hit ‘Anarchy in the UK’, caught the sour mood of the time. But the punk bands’ politics were as one-dimensional as their musical range, the latter all too often restricted to three chords and a single beat and dependent upon volume for its effect. Like the Red Army Fraction, the Sex Pistols and other punk rock groups wanted above all to shock. Even their subversive appearance and manner came packaged in irony and a certain amount of camp: ‘Remember the Sixties?’ they seemed to say; ‘Well, like it or not, we are what’s left.’ Musical subversion now consisted of angry songs decrying ‘hegemony’, their counterfeit political content masking the steady evisceration of musical form.

However bogus their politics and their music, the punk generation’s cynicism at least was real, and honestly come by. They were the sour and mostly untalented end of a growing spectrum of disrespect: for the past, for authority, for public figures and public affairs.”—Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005)