“The Brothers Johnson being one of those bands that I pretty much missed completely during my white bread suburban youth … except somewhere along the line, Right on Time slipped into my stacks of vinyl. And it’s all very nice, groovy and smooth, but then Strawberry Letter 23 comes along and takes things to a whole other level of cool and soulful invention. Music you can taste as well as feel.” (Philip Random)
“In which Peter Tosh (ex of the Wailers) takes a Joe Higgs original about being dangerous indeed, and very much makes it his own. It was released in 1977 but I didn’t really connect with it until the late 80s when so-called Gangsta rap was starting to hit hard, turning the uttering of threats into a functional musical vocabulary. Ah, the good ole days.” (Philip Random)
Side One Track One of the first (and only really) Sex Pistols album is a solid and enduring f*** you to everyone that’s ever taken a cheap holiday in some broken down so-called Third World locale. Because it was true in 1977, it’s even more true now – the world ain’t equal, your luxurious fun and good times inevitably involves some other guy’s blood, sweat, pain, misery. But don’t let that worry you. Just stick to the big hotels and always drink bottled water, and if you see a new Belsen in the distance, look the other way.
Speaking of Pink Floyd, come 1977, they’d become the defacto poster children for all that pompous, bloated, overblown and wrong with the so-called Prog Rock that Punk was supposed to be annihilating. Which made the album Animals a source of much confusion, because it was so full of uncompromising bile and rage, it would’ve been punk rock if the songs weren’t so long. Pigs gets singled out here for the sheer violence of the instrumental parts, like the worst of dreams. You wake up to air raid sirens. You look skyward into the night, catch a glimpse of a pig the size of a football field, with red laser eyes, and they’re fixed on you. Welcome to 1977. The future looked grim.
“Second of two in a row from Brian Eno’s Before And After Science, because the post-punk frenzy of King’s Lead Hat has never really sounded right to me unless it’s fading up from the strange and sensual calm of Energy Fools the Magician (and vice versa). In fact, the whole first side of that album is an argument for the whole being more than the sum of its parts, even as the parts are, in turns, disorienting, magnificent, groovy, abstract, intense, everything. And Side Two – well, that’s a whole other kind of journey.” (Philip Random)
“It took me a while to warm to what Brian Eno was up to come the later 1970s. Actually, what it took was a cold night, a small town, a dose of weapons grade LSD, a bunch of people playing foosball, taking it way too seriously. Meanwhile, the soundtrack was the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, other resolutely non-psychedelic options. Something Has To Change, said a voice in my head (several million of them actually). But I couldn’t change the people or the town or even go outside really, it was too f***ing cold. But I did have this Brian Eno cassette in my pocket that a friend had recently slipped me. I could change the music. Before And After Science, said the cassette, and inevitably, effectively, seductively, about four tracks in, energy fooled the magician, and nothing’s ever really been the same.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 
