I think it was something in the air.
Think of 250 years of the equivalent of the Billboard Top 100 piled up for those kids to wade through before they even get back to the 1960’s.
For someone who lived in that period, none.
I’m an old fart too then.
Almost my entire collection is from the mid-60s to mid-70s.
I hear what my teenaged kids listen to these days and I don’t find it particularly melodic. That’s what I find missing; I like a good melody. I’m not a musician and can’t explain it any better than that. There are some new acts with melodies, but for the most part it just sounds “noisy.” And I suppose that’s what a lot of parents also thought about The Beatles back in the day, etc. So I appreciate the apparent contradiction I’m making. The thing is, I know what I like and it almost always comes from the Beatles era to perhaps the Van Halen era. That would probably be the 3 sigma distribution of my musical tastes.
if you can’t find melody in modern music, then you’re actively trying not to. seriously, I may not like some forms of modern music but to say there’s no “melody” is preposterous.
I can’t find melody in rap but the rhythm’s fine.
I think it’s possible to have a melody, but not be melodic.
Paul McCartney’s Beatles stuff is the gold standard. Maybe Burt Bacharach too.
It all depends on what you’re used to. My dad would say that that the Beatles are garbage; the gold standard of melody is Verdi.
To answer the OP for myself, there has been plenty of music just as good from both before and after the period in question.
I didn’t say that (I have some grunge type stuff but not a lot). What I said (implied) was the grunge didn’t really bring anything new to the table that hadn’t really been done before. And that its presence on the charts and such greatly reduced the diversity that had heterofore characterized alternative music.
I was born in the 70s, so McCartney’s Beatles stuff was already old music by the time I started developing my taste in music. I appreciate and enjoy music from that period – but it certainly doesn’t grab me as is does with individuals who came of age during that time.
The problem with the OP’s poll is that this question comes down to a matter of taste, and that it turn (according to some researchers) depends on the type of music you were listening to in your late teens to your 20s. By the time you’re 35 years old, your brain’s openess to novelty has generally waned.
Homer Simpson would agree with the OP: “Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974, it’s a scientific fact.” 
I don’t see where that is indicated, either in the OP, or the poll itself. At any rate, I’m of the opinion that music was already as good or better than the music of the late 60s/early 70s by the mid-70s. But, then again, I wasn’t so much raised on the Beach Boys and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton as I was on Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder and Parliament and James Brown and the Isley Brothers.
I prefer the Chris Rock Theory of Music Appreciation: whatever music you were listening to when you first started getting laid is going to be the music you love for the rest of your life.
whatever.
I’m sure I’m just being overly sensitive here, but that seems to me like an unnecessarily antagonistic response to what was basically just me doing a poor job of telling someone else’s joke. 
Awesome!
That certainly wasn’t true for me.
In any case: “Man, my whole life, people have been cramming this classic rock crap down my throat. Do you really think I give a shit about the Beatles?” - From the film “Airheads.”
I don’t think Chris is totally off-base, but I think the sex aspect is just coincidental. Personally, the music that came out in '93-'95 carries a special significance to me because this period coincides with my coming of age as an independent person. First job? Check. Driver’s license and first car? Check. Upperclassman in high school, no longer a lame scrub? Check. Buying my own clothes, not having to ask for permission for every single thing, being rebellious in my own minor way? Hell yes. If I had been a typical teen, I could throw losing my virginity and falling in love on the pile. But it would be a big pile of other things.
I love 80s music, but it doesn’t have the same power as 90s music for me. When I was a little kid and I’d get birthday money, I spent it on stupid shit like candy, peach Nehi soda, and skeeball tokens. Music was just whatever played on the radio. But when I became a teenager, all my extra money went to music (and orange Crush). Every time I listen to Sinead O’Connor’s “I Don’t Want What I Haven’t Got”, I feel like I was there in the studio when Sinead recorded the damn thing and that she was singing just for me.
Agreed. I will always love that music.
I stopped arguing with kids who say heath’s joker is better than jack’s, or depp’s pirate is better than hoffnan’s, or that scarface is way better than the goddather. What will you get out of arguing?
It would be easy to make a case that the music written during the 1920s to 1940s period in America - that is, the peak years of the so-called Great American Songbook - was harmonically more sophisticated, and the lyric-writing was of a higher caliber, and the songs generally more interpretable (less tied to one performer’s rendition) than the music of the period you tout.
Also, it would be easy to argue that we had the finest popular singers of the last century making their finest recordings during the 1940s to early-1960s. I’m thinking of names like Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Sara Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and so on.
To claim the late '60s to early '70s as the best era betrays a bias toward a particular musical idiom - namely, the various strands of music that followed from the R&B/Rock boom of the '50s and the modes of expression associated with all of that.
A guess that is wholly accurate. Kudos for thinking of an impartial judge. Well, some of those middle age pwople then are still around and they all say the same thing, “I thought the Beatles was bad.”
I’m guessing that a teenager in the late 60s would better appreciate a song like “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” than one from today.