Ever wondered why 60’s music sounds so much better than music from the current decade? Or why there’s so much more good to excellent music from the 70’s compared to the 90’s?
It’s not that complicated. Moving popular, fashionable but otherwise mediocre music to the dustbin of history is a gradual process. The further we remove ourselves from the decade in question the better the music that survives this process. The 60’s, 70’s, even 80’s are pretty much cleansed out by now. All horrible music effectively erased. What’s left is an impressive list of great songs and albums, a canon so to speak.
Also, people are emotionally most attached to the music they listened to (and adored) between their 15th and 25th birthday. Baby Boomers favour music from the 60’s and 70’s, Generation X-ers naturally gravitate towards music from the 70’s and 80’s, and Millenials by and large love music from the 90’s and the 00’s. Whenever we read an article comparing decades, we need to ask ourselves: how old is the writer?
As humans, we cannot judge what’s right under our nose; we need the purifying quality of time to do its magic. Critics might disagree, but let me tell you this: somewhere in the 80’s it was already decided that the 80’s were a bad decade for music, not nearly as good as the 60’s and 70’s. Now, almost 40 years later, I don’t think any serious critic can still claim that to be true.
Putting together my own top 5, I have no difficulty with the first two spots, but after that it quickly becomes arbitrary, based on the mood of the day, or what I happen to listen to. So…my list of the day is:
- 70’s
- 80’s
- 60’s
- 00’s
- 10’s
Now guess my age…
Tweet