There really was a great variety of good music. Check the Top 100 lists through the decade. There was a lot of utter dreck as well. Even that might have been at least somewhat interesting.
Punk wasn't exactly evenly distributed. The only reason I knew about it then at all was from people writing about it, which made it appear to be an artifact of journalism.
I remember hearing "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the radio for the first time, and thinking they'd never play it again, 'cause it was just too weird.
The Top 40 crap then was better than today, simply because it used real musicians and vocalists. Music wasn't put together like Lego blocks by some computer geek working with a music workstation. Let's not even get started on pitch correction of vocalists, good grief!
I was just cycling home in the dark and deliberately went the wrong way into a one-way street. The "One Way Ticket" Eruption song came to mind, man. I haven't heard that in over 35 years probably. Completely forgot about it. I didn't even speak English; now I understand what it's about, listening to it on YT.
Between '65 and '79 there were 6 times as many research papers predicting warming. That was even despite increasing knowledge of Ice Ages.
"The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus" http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
Nor am I saying that this represented a consensus view that later changed to another consensus view. I think, however, that it took time before the ice age faction gave way.
Meanwhile, in reading popular science reporting of the time, I think it is not too subjective to claim that the ice age notion took hold for bit in the public imagination before global warming did.
"Later on more work was done to get better global temperature proxies and it was decided that the trend was upwards."
Anecdotal memories of an article or two on Ice ages in the Seventies do nothing to support that claim - It was wrong.
nuff said
Please. The lack of variety in the public sphere is exactly what led to the "underground" music scenes. In the 70's the new unheard music was punk and the like.
When I left for college in '79 it was an absolutely jaw-dropping, exciting experience to find an entire music store filled with this "alternative" music that no one played (outside of college stations, which played anything. Even then, some of the college stations still played Top 40. What was the point of that?)
>Most Americans had never heard of espresso.
True, although if you were paying attention to the movie, "Shaft" ordered espresso. I noticed this but still didn't understand what it was supposed to be.
>Doomsayers were worried about something they called the "greenhouse effect".
To be fair, early in the 70's it seemed to some researchers that the historical trend was downward and we were headed into a new ice age. This was widely reported. Later on more work was done to get better global temperature proxies and it was decided that the trend was upwards.