How Much Do You Know About Music from the '70s?

The 1970s didn't just make music. It rewired what music could be.

In the span of a single decade, the world got disco balls and safety pins, synthesizers and slide guitars, concept albums stretched across four sides of vinyl and three-chord anthems banged out in under two minutes. It was a decade of glorious excess and raw rebellion, often in the same year, sometimes on the same street.

Consider the sheer sprawl. This was the era when a former teen prodigy from Detroit built entire orchestras out of Moog synthesizers. When Jamaican reggae crossed oceans and became a global language of resistance. When German engineers made robotic electronic music that would quietly shape hip-hop, techno, and pop for the next fifty years. And when a British art student turned himself into an alien rock star, then killed off that persona and reinvented himself again.

Here's something worth chewing on. The most groundbreaking soul album of the decade almost never came out — the label boss initially hated it and called it uncommercial, then watched it become a masterpiece. Meanwhile, a certain six-minute rock opera was rejected by executives who insisted radio would never play a song that long. It went to number one. Twice.

The technology was changing just as fast as the sounds. Multitrack recording exploded. Producers became artists in their own right, sculpting records that could never be performed live the way they were pressed. And the humble live album — once an afterthought — became a genre-defining statement, capturing bands at their sweaty, improvisational peak in smoke-filled ballrooms.

But how deep does the knowledge really run? Plenty of people can hum the hooks. Fewer know who played the guitar, ran the mixing board, designed the cover, or signed the record deal that changed everything. The names behind the names. The venues, the labels, the exact running times that trivia legends are made of.

From punk basements in Manhattan to disco floors in every city on earth, from prog epics to Motown grooves, this quiz digs into the decade that refused to sit still.

Time to find out how much of it really stuck. Take the quiz and see.