Overdrive 1984

Freeways was the final Randy Bachman album of the first BTO era, released in 1977 after their first of many "greatest-hits" collections put much of their chart activity in a tidy package on 1976's Best of B.T.O. (So Far)…

Peter Mergener is one of the artists you might like to refer to if you want to prove that the music business is unfair. His first formation Software was musically equally groundbreaking as German compatriots Tangerine Dream and their 80s output possibly better than that of direct inspiration Klaus Schulze. Still, even though they did manage to become an underground sensation, their music never made it to those big concert halls and only occasionly to the radio. After the breakup of his band, Mergener continued as an acclaimed solo artist, who again won the hearts of a dedicated group of music lovers with a prolific body of works. It would be well deserved, for if you haven't heard of Peter Mergener, you haven't heard of electronic music!

Ben Davies called Bachman-Turner Overdrive's first album a "fusion of Lynyrd Skynyrd-style Southern/trucker rock and ZZ Top's anthemic arena rock," and with their logo imprinted in a big metallic gear which looks like it inspired James Cameron's Terminator trademark, Randy Bachman, his brothers Tim and Robbie, and C.F. Turner dish out a methodical mix of plodding hard dirges…

Picking our list of the Top 100 '70s Rock Albums was no easy task, if only because that period boasted such sheer diversity. The decade saw rock branch into a series of intriguing new subgenres, beginning, at the dawn of the '70s, with heavy metal. Singer-songwriters came into their own; country-rock flourished. The era ended with the revitalizing energy of punk and New Wave. No list would be complete without climbing onto every one of those limbs. Here are the Top 100 '70s Rock Albums, presented chronologically from the start of the decade.

Lange Zeit arbeitete er mit Michael Weisser zusammen, mit dem er insgesamt 14 Alben auf dem vom Elektroniksolisten Klaus Schulze gegründeten Label IC/Innovative Communication veröffentlichte, zuerst unter dem Namen Mergener & Weisser, dann unter dem Namen Software. Die Musikformation Software setze sich konzeptionell mit dem aufkommenden Thema „Computerkultur“ auseinander. Software-Cover und das Artwork aller Tonträger (LP, MC, CD) zeigen Grafiken von Computerkünstlern wie MAPART (Heinz-Otto Peitgen), Herbert W. Franke, Jürgen Brickmann, Able Image Research, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Nelson L. Max, David Sherwin, Andy Kopra, Mental Images.

Picking our list of the Top 100 '70s Rock Albums was no easy task, if only because that period boasted such sheer diversity. The decade saw rock branch into a series of intriguing new subgenres, beginning, at the dawn of the '70s, with heavy metal. Singer-songwriters came into their own; country-rock flourished. The era ended with the revitalizing energy of punk and New Wave. No list would be complete without climbing onto every one of those limbs. Here are the Top 100 '70s Rock Albums, presented chronologically from the start of the decade.

Back in hip-hop's old school era – roughly 1978-1982 – albums were the exception and not the rule. Hip-hop became a lot more album-minded with the rise of its second generation (Run-D.M.C., Whodini, the Fat Boys, among others) around 1983-1984, but in the beginning, many MCs recorded nothing but singles. Two exceptions were the Sugarhill Gang and Kurtis Blow, whose self-titled debut album of 1980 was among hip-hop's first LPs and was the first rap album to come out on a major label. Thus, Kurtis Blow has serious historic value, although it is mildly uneven. Some of the tracks are superb, including "The Breaks" (a Top Five R&B smash in 1980) and "Rappin' Blow, Part Two," which is the second half of Blow's 1979 debut single, "Christmas Rappin'."