Pop composer Burt Bacharach died last week. Do You Know the Way to San Jose?; Walk On By; The Look of Love; (They long to be) Close to You; Say a Prayer; What the World Needs Now Is Love – that’s all Burt’s music.

My premise is that Bacharach and lyricist Hal David wrote the soundtrack to the 60s.

Not the hip, hindsight-biased soundtrack to the 60s.

No, I mean that Bacharach / David compositions would feature more frequently than any other category of song on the cumulative playlists generated if you were to have asked a bot each year since 1961 to construct a 20-track playlist titled “soundtrack to the 60s”.

Here are two bits of evidence to support that claim.

1. Burt was selected for a musical cameo in 60s throwback movie Austin Powers.

2. the graph above shows that Burt averaged over 5 hit songs a year throughout the 60s (1961-1970).

The topic of this post is a third bit of evidence: Burt was bereft of hits in the 70s (just two 1971-1980).

Burt’s highpoint was 1969. Nine hit records and an Oscar for Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. Yet, look what happened to the appeal of Burt’s music as soon as the 60s ended. The hits dry up. Why?

It’s not because Burt lost his craft – look what happened in the 1980s. New Burt compositions make Number 1 in 1981, 1985 and in 1986.

So, might this be explained by the “narcissism of small differences“? Could it be that the trendkeepers of the 70s rejected Burt’s new compositions because they considered them too associated with the 60s? Was Burt a victim of his own success – so synonymous with the 1960s that his sound was considered unfashionable by the inhabitants of the 1970s?

If that mechanism explains Burt’s ’70s drought then there is reason to hope that Burt’s archives contain undervalued gems from the mid-70s.