It did for the people who were the angst-ridden audience at the time. We just happen to be a small audience - teens in the early 90s. The grunge music of the 90s was and always will be pertinent to the time it came out but don’t discount it because it wasn’t part of your culture of the time. The 60s mean nothing to me but the 90s were everything, and I’m sure it’s the opposite for you.
Wikipedia’s list of the top selling albums of the 60s:
Year* Performing artist(s) Nationality Album Ref.
1960 Various artists – The Sound of Music Original Cast Recording [5]
1961 Various artists – Camelot Original Cast Recording [6]
1962 Various artists – West Side Story Soundtrack [7]
1963 Various artists – West Side Story Soundtrack [8]
1964 Various artists – Hello, Dolly! Original Cast Recording [9]
1965 Various artists – Mary Poppins Soundtrack [10]
1966 Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass United States Whipped Cream & Other Delights [11]
1967 The Monkees United States More of The Monkees [12]
1968 The Jimi Hendrix Experience UK Are You Experienced? [13]
1969 Iron Butterfly United States In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida [14]
Looks just as bad as every other decade to me.
Lots of factors to cover:
I believe that the 60s had a higher percentage of better music among the recordings/singles/albums released to the public. Compared to recent years, it was far more expensive to record + mix + master + distribute high quality music (and low quality music for that matter) during the 60s. So, generally, music had to be good or at least potentially appealing to a certain demographic audience in order to be financed. There were some odd exceptions like The Shaggs, but it was their delusional father who paid for their 1969 album.
Also, there was an explosion of creativity that blossomed during the 60s in my opinion as a result of emerging/improving audio technology and to some extent psychedelic drug use. It wasn’t until the 60s that multi-track recording with overdubs became common. The automatic double-tracking machine was invented in1965. The fuzz and wah effects pedals were invented in the mid-60s. Speakers were improving. Tube amplifiers were becoming more powerful, dynamic. Analogue synthesizers were developed. Microphones were improving. Try to compare Hendrix’s *Electric Ladyland *album 1968 to anything from 1964.
The Beatles having carte blanche access to EMI’s Abbey Road studios after their intial successes were critical, I think, to the rapid advancement of recording techniques and creativity within rock music in the 60s. The Beatles were able to take their time in the studio to experiment with different techniques and arrangements which is most evident in the 1966-1967 era.
Today, there is plenty of great new music out there, but there is also a whole lot more music as a whole…and with that is a whole lot more crappy music to sift through and find the good stuff. It is far cheaper to record and release music today than in years past, but it is more difficult for musicians or record labels to make any $$$ by selling music. Most popular new music now is commercialized garbage but that’s also true of years past.
if you want to find new and interesting music, I suggest searching independent artists’ music on Bandcamp.com, last.fm, kickstarter.com, myspace.com, reverbnation.com, and other sites. Sure, 49 out of 50 artists suck…but the good ones are worth the frustration IMO.
Gods, no, music was not better in the 60s. It was getting better, but that’s just the start of a progressive track.
The two are not synonymous - in fact, to my taste, they’re often mutually incompatible.
I was an 18 yr old freshman in college in 1991. So yeah, it was part of my culture at the time. Now the cultural significance mostly consists of the song Two Princes by The Spin Doctors playing in the background to indicate that a movie scene is supposed to take place in the early 90s.
Yes, and in fact he talks about the Beatles as one of his prime examples. (Also Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and other uber-rich computer geeks.)
What strikes me is how so many rock icons were born during WWII, and how many got into the business to make money or meet girls, not make great music. It just seemed like there was really fertile soil for great music in the US, and more so the UK, in those years.
How popular music goes about its business has changed a great deal over the years. To grossly oversimplify, to me a lot of the popular recordings of the 60s and 70s were focused on the band concept (even for R&B hits of that era, which are almost always credited to the singer, the hits seem to be much more about the sound and the groove than the song itself). As a musician I find that even (subjectively) mediocre pop records from that era can have something interesting about them to me.
In the 30s and 40s, recorded music was much more focused on the songwriter – the same song would run up and down the pop charts in different versions with different singers and bands (Cite!). (Live music was obviously focused on the band and bandleaders – on the dancers, really.) As a sort-of songwriter (and curious musician), I can find something interesting even in the substandard songs of that era.
Today, it seems like it’s really more producer-focused than anything else, and as someone who’s always been disinterested in the recording process I find it harder to get interested in when it doesn’t strike on areas I’m familiar with. But I can imagine an 18-year-old who’s grown up putting together loops in GarageBand and downloading remixes of everything hears a lot more on Top 40 radio than he or she would in, well, an actual garage band.
It’s also correct that it’s unfair to compare what’s currently running on a Top 40 station with your internal greatest-hits mix that’s been developing for 40 years. True snobs will considers the 1930s and 1940s the pinnacle of American songwriting, but the link cited above is the actual Top 40 songs from 1930-1934, and contains a load of unremembered songs and many acts that are ignored today by the very same snobs (plenty of Guy Lombardo!).
(My personal listening prejudices aren’t entirely created by the era I was born in. I was born in 1965 but I really like country music from the 20s to the 50s but very little after that. I have an affection for 70s Top 40 but would never claim that it’s the greatest era of pop music ever.)
My take is that the musical talent in the 60s was no better or worse than it is today. (By the way, when I say 60s, musically, it’s really 1966-1971 I’m thinking about)
Some things that works to an advantage for the 60s.
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The music style was cool. A lot of rock music, untainted by the stupid synth sounds of the 80s for instance.
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The biggest talent had a better work ethic than today, and thus they produced many more albums than todays biggest talent, which of course is an advantage. Also this means that they make more albums while they are best. If Radiohead had kept up a Beatles-esque level of productivity in their Bends-Ok Computer period, I wouldn’t object to calling them the best band in history.
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Time / radioplay / being the innovators have worked in their favour, regarding how we estimate them. I think if we compare the 90s to the 60s it’s not obvious which is actually best, if no points are awarded for innovation. The 00s are disappointing though, I think.
I would like to add to those praising this post. There was a lot of good music in the 60s and a lot of bad music, but even with the bad music, a lot of it was interesting because it was, in one way or another, experimental. Pushing at the boundaries, trying to take what was there and going that one step further into unexplored territory. It seems to me that, regardless of whether one likes the music of the 60s or not, it’s hard to deny that it was a period during which music changed very quickly and radically. Unfortunately, the longer that goes on, the harder it is to find boundaries to push at. It happened again in the 70s with punk/New Wave, but after that, it seems like the tendency has been more towards fragmentation than the establishment of orthodoxies that then get overthrown.
I really do think it’s down to the fact that people gravitate towards the music they listened to as teenagers.
Personally, I listen to a very broad range of music. And if you asked me to nominate the decade where music was the most creative, sophisticated, and progressive, it certainly wouldn’t be the 1960s. I’d nominate the decade 1925 to 1935.
But I grew up in the 1980s, so that’s my natural home. It’s very strange for me to hear older people dismiss that decade as all superficial pop with annoying synths, because from my perspective, that’s not at all what it was like. The 80s was the decade where you first got that deep divide between superficial mainstream music (which was churned out by giant corporations run by baby-boomers), and the undeground music.
It was all very well for ditzy teenage girls to pine away after Boy George and George Michael, but if you were seriously into music, you listened to the underground stuff. It included the punkier side of the New Wave thing, with bands like Joy Division and Talking Heads. In Australia, we had this whole tribal thing going on, which was a kind of mashup between punk, surf, and early goth. Then you had the Manchester scene in the UK, and the New York avante garde in America. And at the end of the decade, there was the punk revival. None of that music had anything to do with cheesy synths.
I suspect the real music of this coming decade will be even harder to pin down, because the mainstream music industry has pretty much destroyed itself through its own stupidity and corruption. What’s left in its place is an online culture which is very diverse and creatively fecund, but also splintered and diffuse. There’s a lot going on, but it’s almost impossible to keep up with it all. Eventually something will emerge out of this creative primordial soup, and for most people, it’s going to seem like it comes out of nowhere and have no obvious relationship to any kind of music that’s come before. The new computer based tools for creating music make pretty much anything possible, and musicians are only just starting to explore all those possibilities now.
it’s true that people will gravitate towards what is contemporary regardless of the quality because that is what they are exposed to.
i have heard stories of young people who get into music (listen a lot or play) in this decade or last get into 60s rock because of its quality. from what i’ve heard it is people who got full doses of contemporary music not people who were tied down to a chair by their parents or grandparents.
This is practically a definition of 60s music. By the end of the decade the gulf between Top 40 and album music was enormous, with a healthy independent industry churning out records for cult fans. The 70s were even more so, with probably the worst pap of all time being AM radio hits and underground and college music stations programming 24 hours a day things that couldn’t be played on AM.
I’d say the divide was actually less in the 80s than in the 70s, though after about 1967 (maybe even 1965) the rock music industry had this huge split and your personal tastes could make it as wide as you wished. In the 50s, if you look at the difference between black-oriented music and white-oriented music. Jazz made the split even earlier, probably with the rise of be-bop in the 40s.
There was certainly more creativity and originality in music in the sixties and seventies.
There seems to be alot of “saminess” in the music of recent years, and a lack of experimentation both in individual tracks and musical genres.
And before anyone condemns me as an old git with a “Bah Humbug” attitude to all music made after my teens, I have actually followed and enjoyed new styles well into my old git years.
Here’s proof that the answer to the OP’s question is NO:
- Kesha songs are being played frequently on the radio and on people’s mp3 players.
- Kesha music was unkown in the 1960s. In fact, she hadn’t even been born yet.
Therefore, today’s music is superior to 1960s music.
Q.E.D.
You’ve got an unstated premise there, and it’s one I think a lot of people here would disagree with.
Oh, I don’t know. I think most people can agree that Ke$ha’s music was unkown.
It is an undeniable fact (well, you could go ahead and deny it I suppose) that there is a phenomenon called music imprinting. Meaning that whatever happens to be the popular type of music when someone is around 12 to 16 years old, that will more often than not be considered by that person to be ‘the best’ kind of music. For the rest of their lives. But it has little to do (almost nothing in fact) with any technical aspects of the music itself. Rather, it’s simply due to that music being linked to that person’s memories during that crucial part of their life (going from child to adult).
Anytime I hear someone who grew up in the 60s say something like, “You don’t understand, music *meant *something back then” I just smile and shake my head. No, that music meant something to you because you were 14 or 15 or 16 and going thru an important and sometimes difficult and painful time in your life, and that music happened to be the ‘soundtrack’ of it. Any of the popular songs from that time instantly bring back a tidal wave of emotions and memories for you, but not because music was somehow ‘better back then’ but simply because it was playing on your stereo when those memories were formed! It really is that simple.
However a few people, myself included, take more than a casual interest in the music itself. Music is important enough to us that we do think about the technical aspects of what we like about a particular type of music and therefore remain open to liking new bands that match that type. My ‘imprinting years’ included the 1970s, but about the only groups from that time I still listen to are Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, and Jethro Tull. Part of it was imprinting, because my older brothers played them incessantly throughout my childhood, but more importantly when I grew older I continued to like newer bands that fit their mold (i.e. Hard Rock). In the 80s I liked Def Leppard, Billy Squier, Guns n Roses, Ozzy Osbourne, Aerosmith. The 90s continued with Nirvana, STP, Soundgarden (grunge-schmunge Hard Rock is Hard Rock), Metallica, Foo Fighters etc. By the 2000s it started to get a little lean. For every Rob Zombie or Velvet Revolver there were 10 Britney Spears clones, or worse, Rap singers. Oh, and in terms of the OP, the *only *60s pop music I like is The Beatles. All the rest seems so much Herman & the Hermits, Freddy & the Ferrets, Andy & the Aardvarks silliness.
The point is I identify with a **type **of music, not with a **time **of music. The vast populace however, does the opposite. And of course everyone, myself included, can’t help but want to think of their kind of music as being the ‘best’ because for you, it is! But most any argument into the nitty-gritty about what constitutes one music being better than another should really keep all this in mind.
(But seriously, except for The Beatles, 60s music sucked!) 