Usually, it's an album, a body of work, or a whole career that changes the trajectory of music. Some singers and bands are just that influential, that what they do is so different or innovative from what their predecessors and contemporaries did, that the entire world of music changes for the better. It's relatively rare that a single song comes around that's so startlingly different that it's a nexus point in the cultural timeline. There's "before" these songs and "after" these songs — they're just that important in terms of how they influenced other musicians, inspired entire genres, or led to the way that music is received or perceived by the public.

It's really no surprise that so many of those special songs were recorded and released in the 1970s. It's arguably the most consistently

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