Answer Happy

As Alice Echols went on to claim, ג€Nothing seems to conjure up the 1970s quite so effectively as disco. Even at the time, critics remarked upon disco's neat encapsulation of that decadeג€™s zeitgeist. ג€˜It must be clear by now to everyone with an ear or an eye that this era,ג€™ wrote journalist Andrew Kopkind in 1979, ג€˜is already the Disco Years, whether it will be called by that name or not.ג€™ A former sixties radical, Kopkind was by turns fascinated, bemused, and appalled by the disco epoch, and he likely imagined that in years to come fellow cultural critics would share his interest. But the seventies have not loomed large in our national imagination, except perhaps as comic relief. For many Americans, these were the forgettable years.That forgettability owes a lot to the 1960s, the outsized decade that dwarfs all others in recent memory. The sixties will always be remembered for their audacity, whether found in the courage of civil rights protesters who put their bodies on the line or in those doomed but beautiful rock stars who tried breaking through to the other side. By contrast, the seventies seem the decade when nothing, or nothing good, happened ג€" an era memorable for the countryג€™s hapless presidents, declining prestige, bad fashions, ludicrous music, and such over-the-top narcissism that Tom Wolfe dubbed it the ג€˜Me Decade.ג€™ Before the decade was out, this narrative of decline had become routine. ג€˜After the poetry of the Beatles comes the monotonous bass-pedal bombardment of Donna Summer,ג€™ huffed one NewYork Times writer in 1979. It is a measure of the era's persistent bad press that a recent book challenging this view carries the pleading title Something Happened.As for the sixties, it doesn't matter how much silliness went down, we still invest those times with seismic significance. Take Joe Cocker's performance atWoodstock. His spasmodic thrashing about and his vocals, slurred to the point of incomprehensibility, are something of a joke today. Cringe-inducing though it may be, however, Cocker's performance is never made to stand in for the whole of the sixties. The sixties remain enveloped in the gauzy sentimentalism of what might have been. Yet the iconic image of John Travolta as dance-floor king Tony Manero in white polyester suit, arm thrust to the disco heavens, has come to symbolize the narcissistic imbecility and inconsequentiality of the disco years.Were it not for the Rubaiyat, I, too, might well regard the seventies as a lamentable and regrettable period in American history. The Rubaiyat was, yes, a disco. It was located in the heart of sixtiesland: Ann Arbor, Michigan, the home of the University of Michigan and legendary incubator of radical activism. At the height of the seventies, the town's annual Hash Bash ג€" a smoke-in to reform marijuana laws ג€" was still going strong and so were its two food co-ops-one reform, the other orthodox when it came to selling white foods (that is, rice, sugar, and flour of the white variety). Ann Arbor also had bookstores galore, including the original, wonderful Borders Bookstore, and any number of hippie-ish restaurants and bars such as the Fleetwood Diner, the Del Rio, and the Blind Pig. Musically, it prided itself on its vintage music (it hosted one of the earliest blues festivals), but at heart it was a rock town besotted with Iggy Pop and the Stooges and Sonicג€™sRendezvous, a band fronted by Patti Smithג€™s future husband, Fred Smith. Its leading music store, Schoolkidsג€™ Records, stocked disco, but never played it. All of this is to say that disco-averse Ann Arbor came close to providing something of a safe haven from glitterball culture.The Rubaiyat was no red-velvet-rope disco where fashionista doormen determined who was sufficiently fabulous to gain entry. This would never have worked in a town where down jackets and army surplus were hardly an unusual sight. The club did have some pretensions to classiness, but the mismatched, sagging booths and bordello red defeated occasional efforts at upmarket sophistication. What the Rubaiyat did have were better-than-average speakers, a heterogeneous clientֳ¨le, and a weekend cover of three dollars.ג€Echols, A. (2011). Hot stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York: W. W. Norton.The passage implies that cultural commentators tend to agree on which of the following ideas about music?

A. Popular music is typically inane because its success is determined by the narcissistic desires of the marketplace.
B. Popular music and the social life around it are an important window into the national mood.
C. An era is defined by whatever music becomes popular because this reflects people's desires and influences.
D. The most talented artist of an era are ג€doomedג€ because they are not appreciated by their contemporaries.