Chilling out, listening to the Allman Brothers, America, the Eagles, Bread, the O’Jays, the Isley Brothers, Santana, Christopher Cross, etc. Great music.
What the hell happened after 1979?
Moved to CS (from IMHO).
You stopped listening to music that didn’t sound like it was written before 1979?
Believe me, I love that pre-80s stuff as much as anybody, but there’s a vast, truly vast, amount of music written since 1979 that’s as good as or better than anything written pre-1980.
And that’s true whether we’re talking about pop music, or jazz, or classical music, or pretty much any genre of music.
Likely you got older.
Generally your musical taste is formed in a relatively short period of time. Things also change in your life that make finding new music harder to do. However, if you do go and look for it, you’ll find plenty of good music still being made.
Okay, fine, Pearl Jam. Yeah, good. But there’s so much shit out there.
The golden age of any popular art form is whatever year you were 16 or 17.
In my case, I was 5 in 1979. Music today is formulaic. It just sucks. They don’t make bands like Earth, Wind, and Fire anymore.
There is a looooooot between 1979 and today.
Being 5 in 1979, I suspect you haven’t been exposed to numerous piles of musical shit that were created before that year.
Only if you buy Sturgeon’s law and if so there was just as much garbage being produced in the 1970’s. Your taste just ossified.
I sympathize a bit. I’d like to say that I’m one of those perpetually hip people, constantly adapting to new music with each new decade. But I’m not. I was born in 1968 and my tastes slowly ossified as well. I had a garage rock phase, classic rock phase, a blues phase, a jazz phase, a classic soul and funk phase, a little bit of a folk/folk-rock phase, a wee bit of a disco phase, an unfortunate jazz fusion phase 
, a punk/New Wave phase, then onto post-punk. I still like most of that stuff. But eventually I slowed down. I probably stopped closely following new releases in the early 1990’s - I remember being excited when The Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde and Sonic Youth’s Goo came out. But I struggle to recall much pre-release anticipation past that - maybe a late White Stripes album or something. The most modern album I own in its entirety I think came out in 2005.
I don’t care much for a lot of recent popular music, but that’s because my tastes are no longer being catered to much and my tastes are of an era. It doesn’t mean modern music is crap. It just means I’m getting old 
.
I know what you mean, man. Kids these days. Their incursions on my lawn grow deeper and more numerous with every passing year. But now I’ve got the world’s meanest hound and a shotgun full of rock salt. They had best stay away lest my cane find their backsides!
Seriously, there’s a ton of great music since 1980. If you like metal, and I do, we are living in its golden age. And that’s just one example.
I was born in 1972, so about the same age group. Sure, not being in my teens and 20s anymore, music maybe doesn’t “speak to me” the way it once did. But I still enjoy finding new music to listen to.
Although modern music with it’s “digital streaming” feels a lot more transitory than the old stuff that we grew up with. I’d be curious as to what music released in the past decade people will be listening too 20 years hence as “classic”.
Really? How so? I sort of felt the 70s and 80s were the “golden age” of metal. Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Slayer, Anthrax, Motley Crue, Guns & Roses, etc.
I could have written most of the above – I was born in '65, was a huge fan of music in the late '70s and '80s, and in the early '90s, I suddenly found that what was on the radio no longer appealed to me. In fact, I have, more than once, said that “my musical tastes ossified in 1991.”
I have SiriusXM, and listen to the 70s station a lot. They run old episodes of Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40” every weekend, and it is amazing just how much stuff I hear in that, that not only don’t I remember, but is really pretty bad. So, we remember the good artists and the good songs (and still listen to them), and the lousy stuff faded away.
I have, over the past decade or so, tried to find newer artists that I enjoy, and I’ve happily found some. One of the awesome things about this era is that there’s a wider range of music that’s accessible to us – we’re no longer limited by what’s on the handful of radio stations in our areas, or a couple of record store chains.
Yes, eighties. Which are after 1979.
But there’s a lot of metal and metal-adjacent music which has come out recently, and the Genre has diversified. Arch Enemy, Behemoth, Epica, Mastodon, Clutch, Helmet, Tool, etc.
ETA: I am 56 and hope I will never stop finding new music.
I’m surprised that someone born in the mid-70’s wouldn’t be more into 80’s and 90’s music. As previously mentioned musical tastes tend to form in the teens. But to each his own.
I was born in 1960. Which may explain why I like bubble gum rock/pop tunes. I was a teen in the 70’s and there was a lot of super groups I just couldn’t get into. Fleetwood Mac, Rush, Boston, Doobies. Never cared for them much and that’s all they played on FM radio at the time. I was more into Wings and Sweet though they have nothing in common to each other. I think 80’s music was lame yet catchy and fun at the same time.
For a guy my age 1990 is when music really started to suck. Though I love Collective Soul. My advice is to look harder for decent groups. Don’t limit to what is being played on the radio and boob tube.
I’m 66, and about the only time I hear pop radio is when I’m shopping at the supermarket. The things that strike me most about music nowadays are the repetition and constant wailing of female singers, often ad nauseam. It seems as though tonal exercises have replaced good lyrics that require talent to write.
Somewhere on line, there’s a very good numerical analysis of how pop music has changed in the last two decades. Unfortunately, I can’t find it right now, but there are a number of similar spots on YouTube (admittedly, they vary somewhat in quality).
I should mention that I like most kinds of music, regardless of era or genre. Back in the '90s, I co-hosted an adult contemporary show on an FM station and was impressed by a lot of the music that was coming out then. Nowadays I get most of my music on line, simply because I’m sick of commercial interruptions… (The same reason I rarely watch movies on TV any more, except on TCM.)
“The Golden Age of _____” is nearly always an artifact of “survivorship bias” and popular music is an unassailable example of this. The music of previous generations that continues to be played is by definition the enduring quanta and everything else is forgotten (including the good but obscure work that never got enough airplay to become popular to begin with.)
The big difference between music of the early ‘Eighties and before is largely a consequence of how powerful music distribution labels became and how they funneled their resources into a minority of artists or bands who were ‘promotable’ rather than good; in essence, they took the lesson of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones as being not promoting artists because they were groundbreaking in their music but because they drew stadium crowds on tour and got up to crazy hijinks that drew media attention. The early efforts at manufacturing popular acts were pretty laughable (so much that deliberate parodies like The Rutles or Spinal Tap were barely distinguishable from sincere efforts) but by the ‘Nineties big music labels were cranking out one hit wonders at phenomenal rates and giving short shrift to anyone who didn’t immediately platinum.
Major label music today is massively overproduced crap run through a creative sausage factory, but that isn’t because there isn’t good music out there; it is because the business of the big labels—primarily running endless ‘promotional tours’ that generates more revenue than actual album sales—is quickly becoming the only real revenue stream they have so they focus on “star power” instead of talent and ability, while online streaming and competition from small labels and independent artists who used to struggle for any public notice are actually on roughly equal footing. I doubt much of any of the chart-topping music today is going to endure but there will be plenty else that does.
For the o.p., there is arguably a greater diversity and quality of new music in virtually any genre you can name today readily available to the consumer than any time in history, and if you can’t find something you like it is probably for a lack of trying. And this is coming from someone with fairly niche musical tastes (I’ll take some Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins with a side of White Stripes and a bit of Neko Case to cool it down, please) although I’m open to give a try to pretty much anything that isn’t “electronic dance music” or a other fucking Florence + The Machine cover band.
What I’ve discovered is that no matter what your favorite era is, there is somebody making original music now that you could easily mistake for something from that era. I really dig 1960s Garage Rock, and there are literally hundreds of artists making that kind of music right now. You just need to search for it somewhere other than MTV or the radio dial.
I was 13 when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, the perfect age to ride along with the rise and change of 60s music (much of which really appeared in the 1970s).
So, do I think that the 80s were the death of that Golden Age?
Not in the least. MTV appeared in my neck of the woods in 1982 and brought with it a flood of great, exciting, fascinating music and groups. Maybe you had to be there to appreciate how wonderful the MTV years were, but that’s undoubtedly true of every decade.