I’m a child of the '80s. I’ll gladly listen to the pop of '80-'85 over most '70s pop, which is infested with terrible glurge.
While the late '80s were pretty dire for pop as well, so many great albums were released in the decade overall that, on balance, the '80s wins:
Peter Gabriel (1980) Zenyatta Mondatta (1980) - The Police Remain in Light (1980) - Talking Heads 10…1 (1982) - Midnight Oil Hounds of Love (1985) - Kate Bush Brothers in Arms (1985) - Dire Straits Rain Dogs (1985) - Tom Waits Graceland (1986) - Paul Simon Sign ‘O’ the Times (1987) - Prince Full Moon Fever (1989) - Tom Petty
IMHO, both decades had great music and great, classic albums, but the '80s was less one-sided.
In truth, I probably listen more to '70s rock than anything else, but really, it bears repeating: so much '70s pop was just terrible.
Shoot, most all dance music since the '70s is more or less directly indebted to disco, if not literally disco itself under a new name.
There were more great different things happening musically in the '70s than in the '80s. Most '80s stuff I like relates to something I like from the '70s, but the reverse is not true.
I vote for the '80’s, largely because of the four P’s: Prince, the Police, the Pretenders, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. All are awesome acts. Although I wouldn’t call them a great band, I love the Go-Go’s. Bananarama and the Bangles weren’t bad either. Springsteen put out some pretty good stuff.
Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the most influential album of the last 30 years.
The '80’s also had a lot of great one-hit wonders like Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science,” the Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Stars,” and Big Country’s “In a Big Country.”
It was the decade of MTV, also. Those videos changed the entire music industry.
As for the '70’s, the period 1970-1972 is part of what people think of as Sixties music (my own personal definition is the period the Sixties is the span from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Stairway to Heaven”). After 1972, there were some good acts – Steely Dan, the Boss, outlaw country, Jackson Browne – but there was way too much shit played on the radio. “Seasons in the Sun,” “Afternoon Delight,” “Muskrat Love,” etc. I wish I coud selectively target my brain cells with brandy so I could expunge the memory of that shite.
Disco and punk both sucked canal water.
Also, I’ve read (though I have no cite) before that at the beginning of their career, in order to get gigs, they had to dumb down their instrumental prowess, because punk rock was all the rage then, especially in England.
On production values alone, the '70s in a landslide for me. I like a lot of stuff from the 80s, but I cannot stand the fake handclap/reverby drums/artificial-sounding effects that were so common then. Throw in the foofy hair and retarded videos and it’s a lead pipe cinch.
70’s for me. Close call, but ultimately most of my favorite music coming out of the 80’s was rooted thoroughly in either the punk/post-punk stuff of the late 70’s or the country rock of the early 70’s.
Another vote against 80’s production values, too.
Ah, but to counter that: the 70’s had… the Police, Talking Heads, The Cure, Peter Gabriel, and Oingo Boingo!
To be sure, the 60’s and 90’s have it all over both decades in both style and execution!
The 80’s was my coming of age wheelhouse, but I did not listen to much of what was popular at the time. I was into the hard rock and metal of the era. Not the cheesy hair bands, but stuff like Maiden, Priest, Rush, AC/DC, Ozzy, Sabbath, and towards the end of the 80’s, the advent of thrash. I also got into the neoclassical shred guitar genre for a few years. I have warm memories of the music of the 80’s, but very little of it was on MTV (except for Headbanger’s Ball).
I love good, 70’s guitar rock too – Clapton, Zep, Ozzy era Sabbath, Skynnard, Queen. It was kind of the glory years for rock in a lot of ways, but don’t think the 70’s didn’t have its share of utter crap, and high charting crap at that. It wasn’t Led Zeppelin topping the Billboard top 100, it was bilge like Debbie Boone and the Partridge Family. The worst of the 70’s was every bit as wretched as the 80’s, 90’s or any other decade. I can still remember “You Light Up My Life,” and “Afternoon Delight” dominating the airwaves.
'80s. R.E.M., Husker Du, The Replacements, Prince (his 2 70s albums were merely OK), The Housemartins, New Order, The Pogues, The Smiths, Violent Femmes, Sonic Youth, Billy Bragg, The Feelies, The Go-Betweens, Robyn Hitchcock, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Pixies, The Primitives, U2 (before they sucked), The Wedding Present, X, not to mention the first albums of '90s-identified artists like Pavement, Nirvana, My Bloody Valentine…
ETA: Also when some '70s acts did (arguably) their best work: Rush, Talking Heads, The Police, The Pretenders, The Cure, Peter Gabriel…
The 1970s had some truly awful hits, like “Seasons in the Sun” and “Billy Don’t Be a Hero”, as well as the abomination that was the disco craze. But the bad stuff doesn’t matter–the timeless music now known as classic rock really blossomed in the 1970s. Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen, Jethro Tull, Rush, Supertramp, Yes, Genesis and a slew of other inventive and dare-I-say progressive bands all did their best work in the '70s. A lot of great straight-up rock and roll too–Tom Petty, Boston, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Aerosmith, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles and a slew of others. And acoustic rock froms the likes of Cat Stevens and James Taylor was in its heyday.
A lot of these bands broke up or just got bad in the late 70s or early 80s. A few new or carryover bands put out good work–The Cars, Dire Straits, the Police, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, U2, Elvis Costello–but the overall trend of the '80s was dance-oriented music, computerized drums, rap and miscellaneous dreck.
If I put together a list of 100 best albums, at least half of them were released between 1970 and 1979, and a bunch more would be early '80s which I consider part of the '70s era (to be fair, “Let It Be,” early Zeppelin and some other great albums from the '70s should really be considered 1960s music holdovers.) Maybe 6 or 8 albums from the 1980s would make the list (definitely “So” and “Joshua Tree,” maybe a couple of Kate Bush and Police albums.)
So much of the 80’s stuff percolated under the radar (in the US at least); American rock radio was a complete wasteland by then. This makes any comparisons where I can point at this or that 80’s artist as a point of reference problematic (as few may have ever heard them anywhere). I’m partial to the UK postpunk/psychedelic scene: Echo & the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes (+ Julian Cope’s solo albums), The Sound, Cabaret Voltaire, Comsat Angels, and allies in other countries like Australia’s The Church. I might be more partial to the 70’s stuff if most of it wasn’t so frikkin’ overplayed.
