Pop music is and always has been crafted specifically for teenage girls.
I shudder that adults should continue to cleave to it as the last remnants of a dying youth.
Also born in 1970 and definitely would not apply to me at all.
I listened to a lot of radio as a young child, and the stations I played basically featured hits from the last 10 years or so. A lot of what I listen to now, in terms of popular music, falls into that category.
So while I was born in 1978, my favourite music is from 1975-1987. I pretty much stopped paying attention to the Top 40 after that, but I also started buying more albums and less singles and delving deeper into particular artists and styles.
I was born in 1964 and don’t care for much of the music that was popular in the late seventies and early eighties. I generally have the music tastes of people 15-20 years older.
I’m another counterexample to the OP’s premise. I was 32 when Kesha became known in 2009, and she became my all-time favorite singer after a year or two. I definitely have eras in pop music that I like more than others (I like a lot of 1980s songs, but not a lot of 2000s-decade songs), but obviously I think 2010s music is the best for this one simple reason. I’ve also become more appreciative of music in general since I started liking Kesha so much. In this way, she’s analogous to a great basketball player who makes all the players around him better.
No, the popular music of my teens was dire (early 80s). I prefer the popular music of my 20s.(late 80s/early 90s) and late 30s/40s (last decade).
But I generally am not a huge pop fan, and the genre stuff I like is generally stuff that was around in my teens, but I only came to in my 20s, up to today.
I was born in 1964. For me, the bulk of my music comes from two eras:
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Around 1975-1983, which corresponds to around fourth grade through the beginning of college. My two favorite years for music are 1977 and 1983.
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Late '90s through mid-2000s. This corresponded to my discovery of industrial/EBM, which I’d never heard before going to a party at Gen Con that featured a friend of a friend’s band. I instantly fell in love with the style and spent the next few years fine-tuning my tastes and buying a bunch of CDs.
I barely pay attention to the top 40 and haven’t since the early 80s. The last two or three Weird Al albums contained parodies of songs that I heard for the first time as a parody, not as the real thing (though there was one that I liked enough that I had to buy the original: Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive.”)
I was born in 1977, and really started to get into music in the mid-80’s. For a short while I listened to the hits of the day, but then learned I much preferred music made before I was born, specifically stuff from the late sixties to the mid-70’s, or the decade of '66 to '76. Nowadays I still listen to the same music, but also some songs from the late 70’s, early '80’s etc. Even some '90’s stuff sounds good now, but I still hate most of the music my friends listened to when we were teenagers. Every once in a while I hear suggestions for some great new music, but am left disappointed almost every time. The sounds of today simply don’t appeal to me. Rock and pop is like a mighty old tree, already dead but still standing.
My pop music tastes follow that trend a lot too. I think that the OP is mostly right. The KIND of music you like in your youth is what you’re going to like your whole life. But if you’re open minded, then you’ll welcome newer music that has a lot of the attributes of music you liked back then. WHich a lot of modern pop does for me.
I grew up in the 80s and liked much of the pop music from that period, especially the upbeat stuff. Never really got into INXS or U2, but I loved dance pop and hair metal and new wave. So then the 90s come and I go into grumpy old man in my 20s mode. Then the Backstreet Boys/Britney/N’Sync era starts and I start to see at least a little bit to like again. Then pop music really starts to get lively again in the late 2000s and I’m a happy camper. Kesha being one good example. Now I’m starting to see some trends in pop music that I don’t like again, so maybe I’ll be returning to grumpy old man mode again. This thing where pop stars sing these slow and dramatic songs to a heavy, slow beat, like Dark Horse and Royals needs to be nipped in the bud. The best examples of that style are fine, but now everyone’s trying to mimic that sound and it’s not cool enough to become a trend for the next few years. Good upbeat dance music on the other hand, or a good raucous rocker never go out of style.
I have hardly any popular music from the late 80s or early 90s, although I appreciate Nirvana. Although I started getting into popular rock in the 2000s because it reminded me of early 90s college rock (emo and/or low-fi indie influenced stuff), which I did hear on the radio back then. Even though it wasn’t a pop station (and I was 19).
The current decade is when the rock I am into firmly moved past the early 90s. While there’s still melodic indie around, I don’t hear a lot of it I like enough to buy. Most of the new rock I hear that I like enough to buy is posthardcore, which in the late 2000s started to be influenced enough by modern production and rhythm that it is no longer recognizable as extremely similar to the aforementioned early 90s stuff I liked.
I just looked at the albums in my MP3 catalog, and out of the hundreds of albums in it, the only ones from bands that I heard on the radio in the mid 80s to very early 90s on it are three albums: the best of The Cure, The Church, and OMD.
I’m 15 years old, and I have a bit of a Beatles obsession (OK, more than a bit). Apart from some modern indie stuff, almost all of my favorite music is from the 60s/early 70s. So while your theory works a lot of the time, it’s not all-encompassing - there might be something else playing into music tastes that needs to factored in.
I sort of fall into the phenomenon described by the OP, but let me explain.
What happened with my parents is that they grew up in the 60s. The popular music they liked was mostly 60s music (suppporting the OP’s theory.) So, when I was growing up (the 90s), the radio station we had playing in the house and car all of the time was an oldies station that played mostly 60s music, because it’s what my parents liked. I came to love that music too - it was the music that I heard growing up. The 60s remains my favourite decade of popular music.
I’m going to have to vehemently disagree with this. “Pop” music, maybe. But “Popular” music, definitely not.
For example, “King of Pain” is one of the best songs ever written, by one of the best bands ever to perform. The Police are in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, fer Chrissake. I liked it in 1983, when I was 13, and I like it in 2015, when I’m about to turn 45. That it was a popular, Top Ten hit doesn’t take away from it.
On the other hand, though, Bastille, Mumford & Sons, and Hozier are all popular today (and most definitely NOT crafted for teenage girls). Hell, one or more of them may wind up in the Hall in 20 years. But I can’t stand any of the shit those performers have put out.
Yeah, same here. I like a lot of 60’s and 70’s stuff specifically because Mammahomie and I sat at the record player and she sang it to me when I was a wee lad. I was probably the only kid in first grade who could sing “More Than a Feeling.”
I don’t feel this apply to me at all, but then again I’ve never been into popular music, and I’m a musician. I also grew up listening to a lot of different, often experimental music, so all popular music growing up blew straight past me. I always like to hear new stuff, but mostly very niche music. Now and again I hear a pop-song I like, but it’s quite rare.
I think OP is about right, but the time you stop appreciating current music might vary between 20 and 30 years old. I remember liking a lot of 90’s pop in my 20s but by the year 2000 I pretty much got sick of hip-hop and/or 90’s dance music, which is what almost everything was.
As far as Nirvana and grunge, I think they saved rock and roll from the glitz and big hair of 80’s “metal” bands. Nirvana, Guns and Roses, and Metallica were loud dirty rock and roll, not pretty boys with makeup singing ballads (with a couple exceptions from GnR.) Nirvana was also influenced by Pixies and Sonic Youth, both of which are great bands that never got all 80’s flashy.
I was a teenager in the disco years, came of age in the early 80s, so that music resonates with me in a way other time frames do not. But, at least as far as pop goes, there are certain new(ish) songs that I like–probably because they’re in the style of the stuff I listened to back then. “Locked Out of Heaven,” “Uptown Funk,” “Chocolate,” and “Love Liberty Disco” would be examples of this.
I appreciate other kinds of music, but pop is definitely the style I prefer.
If you grow up not liking pop music of your time, you’ll tend to find another outlet. for a lot of kids my age, heavy metal was the main alternative, before it got really popular(and the really heavy stuff never really cracked the charts much). But 60s music was another outlet, especially for those of us who grew up on Monkees re-runs. I like 60s music myself except for the psychedelic stuff. Never having used drugs, it sounds like weird noises and effects to me.