5 Songs From 1971 That Define Rock History

It is arguable that every year in the history of popular music is important. Genres are constantly evolving, and even when a particular year doesn't produce as many classic records as another, bands are likely writing, recording, or digesting the music of the past that will come to influence their next release. But when it comes to rock music, some years stand out more than many others as being especially decisive in terms of timely releases that amount to a culmination of the genre to that date, and those that drive rock forward to new pastures.

As many critics have noted, one of these key years appears to be 1971, when a whole bevy of seismic tracks hit record stores and changed rock and roll forever. By 1971, the United States had been rocked by almost half a decade of the "British Invasion," which had established bands from the U.K. as some of the biggest acts on the American music scene. The Rolling Stones continued their dominance with controversial songs like "Brown Sugar," while Led Zeppelin pushed the genre to new levels of bombast with epics like "Stairway to Heaven."

Those may be the most famous classic rock songs of 1971 today, but there were plenty more that, at the time, made a splash right when it truly mattered. Here are five more rock tracks from 1971 that define rock history. 

1971 was a huge year for The Who, who had become megastars in 1969 thanks to the release of their innovative yet accessible rock opera, "Tommy." Looking for ways to match the commercial and critical success that they had enjoyed in recent years, the British hard rock band had spent 1970 working on the abortive "Life House" project, but once it was shelved decided to take things in another direction.

Reflecting songwriter-guitarist Pete Townshend's interest in Indian mysticism, The Who moved towards themes of divinity and anti-materialism, in line with the teachings of Townshend's Indian guru, Meher Baba. Townshend had also grown to admire the work of Terry Riley, a pioneering avant-garde composer working with electronics. Townshend used a computer to create a musical read-out of biographical details of Baba's life, which became the basis for "Baba O'Riley." That such a conceptual work could become a smash hit opened the door for greater avant garde play for a great many musicians in the 1970s and beyond. Though widely heard throughout the late 1970s and almost ubiquitous in popular music in the 1980s, the synthesizer was still in its infancy at the time The Who made "Baba O'Riley," and its use here was also highly influential.

Few bands have been as consequential for the direction of rock music as Black Sabbath. The Birmingham, U.K. band is credited, along with The Beatles' legendary song "Helter Skelter," with blowing the doors open for the hard rock offshoot, heavy metal, and for creating the satanic aesthetic with which several rock genres are still associated.

But with "Children of the Grave," Black Sabbath opened yet another avenue of influence in the world of rock music. Having gone supernova in 1970 with the release of "Paranoid" — taking the band led by singer Ozzy Osbourne and guitarist Tony Iommi to levels of fame and drug use that they were unequipped to deal with — they found themselves recording their third album in London with a huge budget from their label and pressure to replicate their recent success.

Recording what would be the album "Master of Reality," Iommi found himself struggling to return to the sound of previous albums, as he had lost the tips of the fingers on his right hand in an accident. Partially to relieve the pressure on his finger tips, he down-tuned the guitar, giving him a heavier sound than he had achieved on record previously. Its use of "Children of the Grave," which was panned by critics initially but which is now held among the band's finest work, has influenced various metal, nu-metal, stoner, and drone artists. Meanwhile, the song's impassioned anti-war lyrics, a continuation of a theme in the band's discography, most notably in their song "War Pigs," showed that being politically aware chimed with metal, leading the way for later bands such as Rage Against the Machine and Anti-Flag.

A whole host of new genres were finding their feet in the early 1970s. Among them was progressive rock, which saw virtuoso musicians embracing theory, technicality, and boundary-pushing to take rock music forward to new levels of complexity. Yes was one of the leading progressive rock bands of the era, who made their name supporting the likes of Cream on the British circuit in the late 1960s. 1971 saw the release of their fourth album, "Fragile," which arrived in the U.K. in November and in the U.S. a few months later.

Considered Yes's breakthrough album, "Fragile" is also where you will find their biggest hit on the Hot 100: "Roundabout," which, in its album version, is an eight-minute-plus extravaganza — the centrepiece of which is a barnstorming keyboard solo by newly-recruited master player Rick Wakeman. The culmination of everything Yes had created to that point, with mystical lyrics that were reportedly inspired by a cannabis-hazed drive through Scotland, it became the defining song of the prog rock genre and cast a long shadow over the decade that followed.

While metal and prog were going their own ways, a newly-birthed genre was preparing to take the charts by storm: glam rock. Though glam rock may be all but dead today, in the early 1970s it sounded like an evolution of the garage rock and hard rock of the 1960s, and it is notable for instilling a new, shimmering theatricality into rock music. And no act was as formative to the sound of glam rock as T.Rex, the British band led by charismatic frontman Marc Bolan.

T.Rex's 1971 hit "Bang a Gong (Get It On)" was an especially important release. It topped the charts in the U.K. and made the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. Its infectious stomp led the way for what we now consider the biggest artists of the century to find their voices, including David Bowie himself, whose Ziggy Stardust era draws heavily from Bolan.

Bolan's influence didn't just stretch to glam, however. Down the decades, he has been cited as inspiration for a wide variety of bands like The Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Oasis, while psych rocker Ty Segall's music often bears a striking resemblance to the genre-bending work T.Rex created in the early 1970s.

It could be argued that Alice Cooper's contribution to the shape of popular music in the second half of the twentieth century is somewhat underappreciated, with the original shock rocker remembered more for his theatricality — which undoubtedly laid the template for later make-up-clad acts, most notably KISS — than the impact of his recordings had on other musicians at the time.

"I'm Eighteen" was Alice Cooper's commercial breakthrough, with the single being the first track to enter the U.S. Top 40 and to convince Warner Bros. to invest more heavily in the band led by vocalist Vincent Furnier (who later legally took on the name Alice Cooper from the band). With its lyrics reflecting adolescent angst and rebelliousness alongside a hard rock sound, "I'm Eighteen" took subject matter typical to early rock and roll and repackaged it for the generation that would come after, most notably punk acts such as The Ramones and The Sex Pistols. The song was also pivotal in the world of metal, as demonstrated by the cover version recorded by the band Anthrax in 1984.

The importance of 1971 in the history of rock music is widely acknowledged among music historians, so much so that this list could have easily stretched much farther than it has. Including the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin tracks mentioned in the introduction, there is an abundance of other great rock songs that have become iconic in the rock genre in one way or another. Rod Stewart's "Maggie May" was a huge hit in 1971, while John Lennon cemented his solo reputation with the release of "Imagine," which, unlike many songs released by rock artists at the time, feels utterly timeless.

The songs above, however, have been especially chosen for breaking fresh ground and acting as catalysts for the establishment of fresh musical conventions within emerging rock sub-genres. And it goes without saying that to do so they built upon what came before them, giving rock music a new twist and cementing the artists in question in rock history.