Have A Nice Decade: The '70s Pop Culture Box

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About Have A Nice Decade: The '70s Pop Culture Box

Amazon.com When this material originally resurfaced in an earlier Rhino-celebrates-the-'70s program, many rock scribes contorted themselves into revisionist pretzels: this isn't so bad, they argued--none too convincingly. There'll be none of that here: much of the music on this colossal box set is godawful. The world doesn't miss the likes of Sammy ("Chevy Van") Johns and Sammy ("Candy Man") Davis. Or at least it doesn't miss the records they cut during the decade of disaster flicks and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. That said, this elaborate box is something to behold. The lovingly compiled 92-page booklet provides background on the ridiculous (David Soul, C.W. McCall, Carl Douglas) and the sublime (Parliament, James Brown, the Staple Singers), and the music swings on the same pendulum, with Harry Chapin, Bill Withers, and Cat Stevens sitting amid Wayne Newton, The Captain & Tennille, and Meco's jittery electro-take on the Star Wars theme. Seven discs, 160 selections! To paraphrase a popular ad slogan of the era, you won't believe you listened to the whole thing. --Steven Stolder Review Rhino retools its Have a Nice Day ... and goes legit in the process. This time, accompanying '70s cheeseballs like Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting" are nods to classic rock (David Bowie's "Fame"), soul (James Brown's "The Big Payback"), and Motown ("Got to Give It Up" by Marvin Gaye). -- Entertainment Weekly [T]he 160-song set is upholstered with avocado green shag carpet--sculpted shag, in fact, in a smiley-face pattern--and sheathed in a clear plastic slipcover. It includes everything from No. 1 hits to one-hit wonders, and sprinkled throughout are sound bites ranging from Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon to news reports about streaking. -- USA Today