‘It has stood the test of time’: was 1971 the greatest year in music?

In Asif Kapadia's new Apple TV+ docuseries, the music of the year, and its cultural and political impact, receives much-deserved attention

Volume is paramount on the new Apple docuseries 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything, both in the play-it-loud sense as well as the sheer-quantity sense. The watershed social and artistic moment explored across the eight episodes contained a staggering amount of genius, to the point that an interview quickly dissolves into the same awed name-cataloguing one might expect to hear around a college radio station or independent record shop.

It's a predictable answer," executive producer James Gay-Rees tells the Guardian, but my favorite is What's Going On, really one of the greatest songs of all time."