![\"Bass](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Bass-Guitar-Bass-Four-String-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ Oleg Ivanov)<\/p>\n
Tue 2 September 2025 22:00, UK <\/p>\n
1971 was a new dawn. But unlike the hangover of the 1960s<\/a>, as it came to be known by counterculture loyalists, it was a change most people hadn\u2019t known they\u2019d needed.<\/p>\n Starting with Joni Mitchell, \u201871 proved to be a place where only those embracing the leftover perils of the \u201860s could thrive. Often, as it is now, it\u2019s seen as a huge risk to spotlight your insecurities or your uncertainties. And most people whose tentative descent into the \u201870s was marked by immense trepidation felt that talking about it would be one sure way to kill their careers.<\/p>\n But Mitchell proved that hiding away from your fears would be worse career suicide than leaning into them, and so she ruminated on everything they\u2019d lost and everything she\u2019d lost, pouring her heart into Blue without sidestepping any of the harsher details. For many, \u201871 came with the harsh winds of unavoidable disillusionment, but here was a way to use that strange displacement and dissonance and make it into timeless art.<\/p>\n That wasn\u2019t all that came out of this particular year. While Mitchell and a handful of other singer-songwriters were showing how to be brave, others were gearing up with more of a bite, with Queen ramping up to change the boundaries of rock, and Black Sabbath chancing the power of darkness in a new swirl the world would soon celebrate as the birth of heavy metal. In another corner of the ring were people like Elton John, whose first prog rock foray in Madman Across the Water unknowingly set him off to becoming the vibrant glam rock powerhouse we\u2019d all meet and love.<\/p>\n