Have You Seen Her

For anyone who grew up during the last days of AM radio, anyone who remembers gas shortages, disco scarves, and feathered hair, this mammoth seven-disc box set, Have a Nice Decade: The 70s Pop Culture Box, will be a holy grail of nostalgia. First of all, the discs themselves contain a staggering 164 tracks. Basically, if you remember the song, it's probably included: from enduring chestnuts even today's teenagers can sing ("Fire and Rain," "Fly Like an Eagle") to obscure gems of kitsch like "The Night Chicago Died" and the supremely maudlin "Billy Don't Be a Hero." If you were born in the 1960s, you'll probably find this stuff enjoyable rather than embarrassing (to the degree that you can think back on your adolescence without cringing). But don't let the music distract you from the packaging, either. The box is covered in avocado-green shag carpeting (embroidered with a happy-face pattern), and the booklet contains photos of all the artists, essays on the politics and culture of the period, and capsule references to notable events, fads, and people. Only Rhino Records could have put out a reissue package of music, images, and text this perfect.

Rhino's expansive six-CD box set of 1970s soul called Can You Dig It?, this wonderfully sequenced collection stands as an impressive survey of the genre in its own right, running the gamut from Al Green and Marvin Gaye to the Chi-Lites, Sly Stone, the Staple Singers, and Earth, Wind & Fire and beyond with nary a slack track in sight. It may technically be a sampler, but in being so it doesn't have the luxury of pausing for breath or historical reflection, which means this compilation, sampler or not, delivers bang for the buck from end to end.