The album Yusuf/Cat Stevens crowned as “the last great” pop record
Exceptional new music is released all the time, and anyone who disagrees with this sentiment is simply not looking in the right places for something that tickles their fancy.
Granted, it isn’t always easy to find that channel where you can discover new music that is exciting for you and your specific sensibilities, but believe me, it’s out there. Good music and a commitment to genuine artistry haven’t just disappeared as a result of the music industry being driven by financial gain and nefarious practices, but it does require the consumer to do a little more legwork in order to fight against the tide of uninspired and mass-produced garbage in order to discover what really makes you tick.
While there arguably aren’t many mainstream artists today who scratch the same itch that Yusuf/Cat Stevens would have done in the early 1970s, they’re out there waiting to be discovered, and due to changing trends in how we consume music, they’re just not what the masses are searching for anymore.
However, if you’re simply so uninterested in finding new music altogether, then you’re going to start developing a belief that there hasn’t been anything good for decades, and your favourite comfort albums from aeons ago are going to remain the most important bodies of work to you. There’s nothing explicitly wrong with this sentiment, but the refusal to budge from this point of view does nothing to aid acts from outside of the mainstream in their quest to topple the oppressive forces of the major-label-backed titans.
Evidently, Stevens himself has become something of a victim of this, with his own style of music going out of fashion and ultimately leading to there being little in the mainstream that keeps him excited.
He became more and more detached from the music industry as a result, and even though his own legacy still stands strong, he proclaimed in a Rolling Stone interview in 2015 that there hadn’t been a truly amazing pop record for almost 40 years.
“I vaguely knew things like Madonna, MTV and Michael Jackson were happening, but I was not interested at all,” he argued, “As far as I was concerned, the last great record was Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life.”
A significant period of inactivity from 1978 until 1995, where Stevens rebirthed himself as Yusuf Islam, meant that when he returned to making music, everything he had once known about the inner workings of the industry had changed. With Songs in the Key of Life having come out two years before his hiatus began, it’s understandable as to why he may have felt this was the last great pop record, because this was the last thing he truly found himself engaging with.
All while he was becoming further removed from music and pivoting towards a focus on humanitarian work and family life, more and more exceptional pop music was being released. However, at the same time, you could argue that there really hasn’t ever been another record as ambitious or concise as Songs in the Key of Life, so in spite of music continuing to produce new and exciting works, perhaps he’s got a point that nobody has ever excelled more than Wonder did on this landmark release.
