[3] According to jazz scholar Christopher Meeder, the Lifetime eschewed the funk influence of Miles Davis' early fusion music with a mixture of heavy rock drumming and the "light, rapid swing" that was Williams' signature.

Composed by McLaughlin, it was first recorded for his 1969 Extrapolation debut and was regarded by Nicholson as an extension of that album's "free-flowing approach ... but reinforced by the volume and energy associated with rock".

[16] In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau hailed Williams as "probably the best drummer in the world" and was astonished by the album,[14] calling it "a frank extrapolation on the most raucous qualities of new thing jazz and wah-wah mannerist rock".

[7] Dennis Polkow of the Chicago Tribune wrote that in spite of the album's questionable sound quality, the music has an "energy and spirit" that has never been surpassed in fusion.

This development was stifled by commercialism, he said, as the genre "mutated into a peculiar species of jazz-inflected pop music that eventually took up residence on FM radio" at the end of the 1970s.