Popular music of the ’70s and ’80s mixed and matched parts assembled earlier in the 20th century, borrowing from the melisma of soul, the locomotion of rock and roll, the improvisational verve of jazz, and the compositional depth of classical music. The sudden shift flummoxed the music industry, which had inherited a profoundly prejudiced business structure from the totalizing predation of Jim Crow. For decades, Black music was tracked and marketed under the catch-all “race record” banner, fomenting the birth of rhythm and blues. But by the ’70s, a tsunami of Black acts like Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire leaned into amorphous songwriting, which yielded intricate, diffuse albums bristling at the thinness of the categorization and prestige available to them. In the meantime, white artists weaned on this music smudged the primary colors in their own songs and a stately but showy easy-listening revolution, later known as “yacht rock,” began in earnest.
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