My good friends at Amazon told me Thomas Hine had a new book coming out along the lines of Populuxe dealing with the 1970's. I was really impressed with Populuxe, so I preordered it. That was a mistake; I should have waited for the reviews.
I was actually interested in what passed for style in the 1970's. Populuxe not only provided lots and lots of pictures, it managed to connect the pictures with the meaning and the reason behind them. What I got instead with The Great Funk was a history lesson on the women's movement and the beginning of the gay rights movement. While these topics are important, I found them irrelevant to the topic that I thought I was buying, which was 1970's style and fashion. Even after reading the entire book from cover to cover, I am still unconvinced of the relevance of either the women's movement or the gay right's movement to the polyester leisure suit, the Ford Pinto, disco, or shag carpeting.
This is not to say that the book did not have its moments. I would like to have seen more about the motivation behind 70's automobile design beyond the 1973 Arab oil embargo. My father once had a 1975 Ford Grenada that the Ford Motor Company marketed heavily as a poor man's version of that era's Mercedes-Benz. The interior was quite plush, but it still had an off-the-shelf straight-six engine with a lowest-bidder single-barrel carbuerator that required that the driver pop the hood, remove the air cleaner cover, and flick a valve before it would start cold. The gas mileage was about three MPG less than advertised, which was significant in the days when an economical car got 18 MPG. We also had a 1980 Chrysler LeBaron that was even plusher, and required periodic replacement of the carbuerator because not only was it a piece of junk, it was sealed at the factory to prevent tampering. Both would knock and ping on regular unleaded gasoline, and the Grenada would run sometimes for what seemed like several minutes after turning the key to the OFF position. This was the general state of American automotive engineering in the 1970's, and Hine barely touched it.
The 1970's I remember was the second golden age of television. This was the decade TV got serious and sophisticated with show after show targeted more at the adult audience than at the children who supposedly controlled the (usually remote-less) living room set. It was by this time that color TV was common enough that shows didn't need to be made using the garish colors prevalent in the 1960's, when even the Starship Enterprise and her crew were brightly decorated in primary colors and there was more action than actual science fiction.
The Great Funk did, however, do a reasonable job at 1970's fashion, which starts with a consumer revolt against what was seen as a nakedly arbitrary change (the midiskirt) designed not to provide something cool or cutting edge, but merely to get people to open their wallets.
And as for popular music, there were other kinds in the 1970's besides glam and punk - early heavy metal for one example, and progressive rock for another. Only in the 70's could one make big money from that kind of bombast. The most dominant trend in rock music weren't the alternative forms that grabbed most of Hine's attention, but the fact that rock became big business, stage shows became expensive and elaborate productions, and that the actual music is now being called classic rock. They call it classic rock for a reason, and that is because even today's young people still listen to it. I'm listening to an MP3 I created from an old record album as I'm typing this.
All in all, The Great Funk offers a superficial treatment of the Me Decade at best. One can easily find more pertinent information on 70's popular culture just about anywhere on the Internet. Two and a half stars out of five.