A Poll: Which era had better music, the 60's or the 80's

Cafe Society
41

The 70’s were awesome. Warren Zevon, John Prine, The Who, The Stones, Rush, The Eagles, great music from Jimmy Buffett, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, Clapton, Queen, ZZ Top, Pink Floyd, Steve Miller Band, The Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive… All of these bands were at the top of their form in the 1970’s.

On the folky side of things, we had Carole King, Janis Ian, Harry Chapin, Jim Croce, Cat Stevens,John Prine, Gordon Lightfoot, and Carly Simon all making the best music of their careers.

If the 1970s had ended in 1976, it would have been hailed as the greatest era in pop music. But then disco showed up, and left its foul stench on the decade, and now when we look back all we see is polyester and Saturday Night Fever. Humbug.

42

Oh, and I’m 39.

43

Get “Black Monk Time” by the Monks, which came out in 1966. It’s punk rock.

Still… the 80’s win, no contest : )

44

and “Helter Skelter” has to be pretty close to metal.

45

Just want to point out that the 80’s don’t get to claim Tom Waits. I was listening to him in the 70’s and he was around a while before that!
For me it’s the 60’s and 70’s - except for punk, most eighties music didn’t have the emotional content for me that I found earlier. I’m coming up on 46, so add me to the boomers :slight_smile:

46

I listen to a lot of punk, so I have to go with the 80s. Punk didn’t even exist in the 60s, although some will cite bands like Velvet Underground as proto-punk. Because the choice is between the 60s and 80s (and not the 70s and 90s which several posters are discussing ;)), I have to go with the decade that featured punk and new wave bands like Husker Du, the Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Fishbone, the Clash, Social Distortion, Public Image Limited, the Pixies, the Smiths, Stiff Little Fingers, the Replacements, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fugazi, the Specials, Bad Religion, the Misfits, the Descendents/All, NOFX, Operation Ivy, REM, Sick of it All, Gorilla Biscuits, Murphy’s Law, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, the Cure, the Business, Black Flag, New Order/Joy Division, Dagnasty, the Ramones, Jane’s Addiction, Suicidal Tendencies, 7 Seconds, Youth Brigade, Snuff, Madness, the English Beat, the Toasters, Bim Skala Bim, the Cro-mags, Agnostic Front, and Huey Lewis and the News :stuck_out_tongue:

47

I had cat scratch fever and it was no big deal.

35

I would say 60’s

Of course I grew up in the 80’s and was exposed to the really good and the really bad. By the time I heard 60’s music the broadcast powers-that-be had culled out the good stuff. In short I don’t have as many painful memories of 60’s music.

48

The eighties, but likely because that’s when I was a teen. (35 now :eek: )

But I prefer soul and funk tunes from the 70’s - the period from What’s Goin’ On to Rappers Delight.

49

Your roster of acts from the 80’s inadvertently raised an important difference between good music from the 60’s and good music from the 80’s: good music from the 60’s was a lot easier to find. Songs by the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, The Doors, Hendrix, Motown, Stax, et al., filled the pop charts and were all over the radio. In contrast, most of the 80’s acts you mentioned were below the surface of popular music. During the 1980’s, you rarely heard these groups unless you had a college radio station in your town, spent most of your free time scouring independent record stores, watched MTV late Sunday night, or had some enlightened friends who would share their music with you. Otherwise, you were mostly stuck with Madonna, Wham, the hair metal bands, and other audio dreck.

50

Your roster of acts from the 80’s inadvertently raised an important difference between good music from the 60’s and good music from the 80’s: good music from the 60’s was a lot easier to find. Songs by the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, The Doors, Hendrix, Motown, Stax, et al., filled the pop charts and were all over the radio. In contrast, most of the 80’s acts you mentioned were below the surface of popular music. During the 1980’s, you rarely heard these groups unless you had a college radio station in your town, spent most of your free time scouring independent record stores, watched MTV late Sunday night, or had some enlightened friends who would share their music with you. Otherwise, you were mostly stuck with Madonna, Wham, the hair metal bands, and other audio dreck.

51

Lizard, 60s music was plenty diverse. Both punk and metal were invented in the 60s. There was no rap (though there was talking blues!), but the 60s had something much, much better: soul music, which was at its peak.

As for the statement that there were no virtuosos in the 60s … well, John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans, etc. are spinning in their graves. And Elvin Jones is coming over to your house to beat you up. :slight_smile:

52

And off the top of my head… Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight, Eric Clapton, Aretha Franklin

53

Call me a music Unitarian, but I refuse to choose.

What’s more, it’s not really a fair comparison because of reasons having to do with the restructuring of the music and radio industries, and what NDP said.

In the 60’s and 70’s, the radio market was less defined by musical genre and, frankly, race of the musicians. The cult of the DJ reached its zenith during this period. DJs were freer to choose what to play and had some personal leverage in promoting a stray or regional pick that tickled their fancy. The radio market was much more tightly regulated to prevent monopolistic concentrations, both in individual markets and across the nation as a whole, IIRC. And perhaps most significantly, a music industry near-equivalent of the old Hollywood studio system operated to promote, sustain, and assist the musical and career development of their chosen stable of musical artists over a period of years.

Today, the overall picture is truly dire. Studios drop (or refuse to promote) even their finest musicians (a cynic would say, especially their finest…) at the first sign of flagging sales or aging demographic appeal; DJs are rigidly constrained by the central-office marketing dept., and Clear Channel and their corporate ilk tyrannize the airwaves with homogenous, Top-40-driven, narrowly defined genre stations which exclude freely on the basis of race, decade, and musical taste. And the less said about MTV (which was racially self-segregated even in their “good old days” under Bob Pittman, and is basically a non-music channel now), the better.

The music lover with better-than-average taste has to pursue “the good stuff” like it was Soviet-era samizdat – from the recommendations and finds of friends, internet message boards, knowledgable clerks, and whatever industry insiders you happen to know; from the better mags (mostly British); from radio anomalies like the freeform, independent WFMU (which webcasts, a further anomaly for indie radio), and so on.

54

This 45 year old votes for the 60s.

Simon & Garfunkel, Dylan, Elvis, Beatles, Stones.

55

Well, I think that acts in the 60’s were dropped/not promoted just as often as they are nowadays. And the record companies had too much control over artists in the '60’s I think, at least in some respects.

As far as record companies dropping their finest musicians because of flagging sales/aging demographics, Patti Smith still has a recording contract. The Rolling Stones still have recording contracts. Paul McCartney, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Robert Plant, I could go on.

56

The Grateful Dead made dozens of albums before they ever had a single top 10 hit.

Now, if a band has two albums in a row that don’t crack the top 20, the studio will buy out their contract.

Even worse, but solid regional bands who consistently sell 250,000 copies of their albums have a terrible time maintaining record contracts, even though those sales figures are soundly profitable. The record company would rather focus their efforts on a handful of superstar acts than have to deal with a whole bunch of mildly profitable bands. When Wilco made Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, their label dropped them like a hot rock because the album wasn’t ‘commercial’ enough, despite the fact that every single album the band had made before that turned a profit for the record company.

After reviewers almost unanimously praised it as a masterpiece, another record label owned by the same parent company bought the album back for twice what their other subsidiary paid to drop it. And it opened on the charts at #13, by far the highest opening of any Wilco album.

There’s a far, far better case to be made for anti-trust practices in the record industry than at Microsoft. In fact, I think the big five labels were just successfully sued for price fixing.

57

Scrivner, DJs only had a lot of freedom to choose what they played in the 60s on FM radio. And, relatively speaking, nobody listened to FM–that’s why the FM DJs had the freedom in the first place. As soon as large numbers of people started listening to FM in the 70s, the formats tightened up and the free-form commercial radio station went the way of the dodo.

AM radio was where all the action was. Top 40, the leading 60s AM format, was incredibly restrictive on the one hand–only a handful of records were played on a station at any time, and only those that sold enough to make the chart. On the other hand, the Top 40 stations didn’t care much about genre, so a song by the Beatles might be followed by Sinatra which might be followed by James Brown. So there was both diversity and a lack of diversity at the same type.

58

I’m 41, and I’ll take the Sixties.

By the time I got out of college in 1982, I’d pretty much given up listening to any contemporary popular music at ALL…well, okay, I loved the Smiths and the Replacements…

Everyone’s mentioned all the Big Famous Stars of the '60s already, but I just want to put in a plug for the Nuggets box set of garage band classics. Some damn fine rock and roll in there.

59

Wumpus, thanks for the clarification. I think the [de]evolution of rock radio can be summed up thus [but if anyone believes otherwise, please chime in]:

60’s: AM major market: Top 40 defined and payola-corrupted, but not limited by genre or race.
nascent FM markets: DJs get to “go commando,” with virtually no corporate strictures. The FM freeform rock radio golden age.

70’s: AM declines due to the no static at all* appeal of FM. [thanks, Steely Dan!]
FM stations adopt rigid, albeit station-determined, formats (like “morning zoo” blocks) and station programmers draw up [payola-influenced] playlists. But I suspect that most FM DJs still managed to enjoy a degree of personal autonomy.

80’s: AM stations mostly converted to news/talk/religious/etc. formats.
FM stations increasingly bought up by larger broadcasting/media companies, up to the limits defined by tight federal regulations governing corporate ownership and concentration. I believe that playlist control, even in the late-'80’s, was still mostly locally determined; i.e., drawn up by the station programmer (who, more often than not, was himself a former DJ at that station, promoted to that executive/managerial position).

90’s: Federal deregulation of the broadcasting and media industries. A wave of corporate concentration ensues, with the result that almost every FM station is owned by one of five giant media conglomerates. Clear Channel in particular innovates money-saving and market-homogenizing practices, including the culling of DJ staffs and using a few DJs to host programs broadcast by multiple stations, and the supplanting of station-level programmers by central office marketers, whose music picks are then imposed (by genre) on all the corporation-owned stations.

One example will suffice: or, how I became a Flaming Lips fan. About three, 3 1/2 years ago, I heard a DJ play a wonderful song I’d never heard before. Luckily, she identified the artist and title (“Buggin’”) immediately after playing it, before going to commercials. I immediately bought The Soft Bulletin, and exposed my friends to it, and bought another copy for my brother. I only heard “Buggin’” on that station that one time. Not long after that day, the family that owned that 'Jersey shore station, which had been an independently-owned holdout, turning down one buyout offer after another, sold it to one of those big companies. Although I still tune in occasionally, it’s just a format-check on my part, to hear what’s playing. I can’t bear to really listen for more than a few minutes. It’s all like a real-life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers!

The overall situation is just so depressing. I think of people like my aging parents, who think that most new music is crap, which is probably a natural enough response anyway, but is almost justified by their very shallow exposure to what’s out there, which isn’t much. :frowning:

60

:smack: Argh. Must… preview reply… before sending it in….