When answering this question, I think it wouled be fun and meaningful if people also stated their agew – or their “generation,” if they don’t want to be that specific.
My own vote: I prefer the 60’s, and I’m 37.
Not to say I didn’t like some things about the 80’s: The Clash, X, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, The Bangles, even some bubblegum.
BUT-T-T-T-T…I’ve been watching a lot of late-night television lately, and I’ve seen a lot of infomercials that way. When an advertisement for a Time-Life collection of “60’s Gold” came on, my jaw dropped in ecstatic recollection of all those great tunes. I even went and bought the freakin’ thing. An hour later, there was an ad for the Time-Life 80’s collection, and my jaw dropped again…in amazed realization of how much it all SUCKED! Serious bad memories! Why would anyone want to listen to that crap, much less PAY for it???
45, my first reaction was that I prefer eighties over sixties, but like seventies even better. Being methodical, I had a quick look at my list of favourite songs and the statistics confirm my feeling:
Age 27, prefer the 1960s but not to an extreme degree. I think there were some very good 1980s bands that deserve to be remembered as much as any from the '60s (just as the '60s had its fair share of eminently forgettable rubbish).
Age 41, the sixties by far. Most of the 80’s bands I liked, actually had wax and were performing in the late 70’s but didn’t get recognized until the 80’s.
While I think there was some nice music to come out of the 60s, I have a very strong preference for the music of the decade in which I grew up, the 80s. In fact I would take Duran Duran over the Beatles any day.
The 60s. The Beatles, the Who, the Stones, the Kinks, the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Motown, Pink Floyd, etc.
80s. Squeeze & the Police, but little else of interest.
Though I’d probably actually prefer the 70s. Disco gave the era a bad name, but you also had fine music from 60s groups like the Who, the Stones, the Dead, the Kinks, and Pink Floyd, as well as the entire new wave – Talking Heads, Clash, the Sex Pistols, Joe Jackson, etc.
I grew up during the 80s, so naturally I’m biased. Not only do I just plain like the music, I have gobs of memories associated with it.
I can certainly appreciate a lot of 60s stuff on its merits alone, but very little of it has any personal resonance with me, which I think really enhances your choice in music. (Hence why everyone thinks the music that they were listening to in high school was the pinnacle of human achievement and it’s all been downhill from there.)
If it weren’t for the hair-band heavy metal craze in the 80s there would have been very little for me to enjoy listening to during my youth. If I compare the “popular” music between the two decades, such as Duran Duran, Wham, etc. for the 80s and Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, etc. for the 60s, I’d say the 60s wins it hands down. For the record, I’m 32.
60s by far. As other people have mentioned, many of the “80s” bands actually were 70s bands with long lives. Queen’s debut album, for example, was released in '73, and Bohemian Rhapsody, that quintesential '80s song, was released in 1975.
So, 60s for me, not that the '80s didn’t also have a lot to offer.
Of course, I meant that it WOULD be fun if people gave their AGE. Durrrr.
Yah, I was forgetting about REM. Also the Violent Femmes. But I still vote 60’s.
Actually, my favorite bands in the 80’s were Umbral, Terror Train, The Underthings, The Uninvited and Harlequin’s Groove. You never heard of them because they spent their time playing local clubs in L.A. like Al’s Bar, The Shamrock, Club Lingerie and At My Place, and in most cases never signed with anybody or cut a record unless they spent their money on a “vanity” recording. They don’t exist anymore…the clubs or the bands…snif
I’m 25. I prefer the 60’s. It seems as if the 80’s was a decade full of fun one-hit wonders, though that might just be because I wasn’t alive in the 60’s to hear that decade’s flash-in-the-pan arists. However, when I think of “80’s music” I rarely do think of artists who did well, like REM or The Cure, I just think of artists who had that one really neat song, then disappeared off the face of the earth until their Behind The Music specials aired on VH1.
There are a couple things I’d like to know before I die. One of them is why one food tastes great to someone, and awful to someone else. Must be something chemical/social?
A related thing is exactly what (not impatient foot stamping, swooning, raves and rants) causes someone to find a band interesting. A lot of it’s got to be association, right? I thought the B-52s sucked until I saw them in concert. Then I liked them.
So, somewhere in your past, one assumes there are great evenings with friends spent listening to Duran Duran. Great insights you had listening to their songs.
I have no such associations with Duran Duran (except thinking their name was braindead). But plenty with the Beatles, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Stones, Frank Zappa, etc. So guess which I prefer?
This is one of the nice things about classical music, tho, and that is with a great deal of hindsight now we can see that Beethoven really was a pretty good musician. Despite the fact his MTV stuff was really boring.
The 80’s, because of post-punk. Probably 99% of what I listen to on a daily basis. The Teardrop Explodes, the best Kate Bush albums, great albums from the Fall, Wire, the last good Bowie LP, 4AD (Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses) Factory Records (New Order, Section 25, The Wake, Durutti Column, many more), Creation (Felt, Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine), C86 and the best stuff from Sarah Records… I could go on all day.
I came to young adulthood in the 80’s, and have always been very much into modern music. I find that there’s more stuff from the 60’s though that I would consider classics and still listen to today.
It’s about classic quality bands, not necessarily an era. I still love The Clash, Talkingheads, and Devo, as well as Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull and some Zeppelin. And I’ll always appreciate The Beatles. Some stuff ages well, and some stuff doesn’t. The stuff that does from either era, (and the 70’s as well), still finds a spot in the rotation.
I recently listened to some 80’s New Wave stuff though, and I find it pretty mediocre even though I was a big fan at the time.
I’m 33 and it’s the 1960’s for two very simple reasons:
The Beatles Whatever era they had been a part of, that would be the one that had the better music.
Motown
As for the 80’s I find it astonishing that no one has givien more then a passing mention to metal, which it can be well argued was the dominant genre of the decade, particularly the mid-late 80’s. Bon Jovi, Van Halen, The Scorpions, Skid Row, Ozzy Osbourne, Poison, Motley Crue, Whitesnake, Lita Ford and of course Guns N’ Roses.
The 80’s also had Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, Cyndi Lauper, Prince etc.
I’m 37 and, at the risk of betraying my generation, I pick the 1960’s over the 1980’s going away. Granted, at any given time, there’s going to be both good music and utter crap and, in terms of crap music, there was still a lot of it around in the 1960’s (1910 Fruitgum Company or Bobby Goldsboro anyone?). Nonetheless, to me it seems as though the ratio of good to rancid music was a lot higher in the period from about 1964 to 1971 than it was during most of the 1980’s.
BTW, I also think the early to mid 1990’s were a better period musically than the 1980’s. As for now, I think we’re coming out of the worst fallow period since the mid to late 1970’s.