Best decade for music?

[dAVe80]

Watching The Stax Vault Revue from 1967, on BBC4, and thinking how amazing it would have been to see Otis, Sam & Dave, Wilson Picket, The Mar-Keys, Booker T & The MGs, etc all on the same bill. Can't forget that the 60s were an amazing time for music, and changed the game.

Edited May 31, 2013 by dAVe80

[bickster]

Watching The Stax Vault Revue from 1967, on BBC4, and thinking how amazing it would have been to see Otis, Sam & Dave, Wilson Picket, The Mar-Keys, Booker T & The MGs, etc all on the same bill. Can't forget that the 60s were an amazing time for music, and changed the game.

To be honest though you could apply that logic to the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. After that well the only changes were mainly political, the 90's is when music began to eat itself in terms of diversion

[leviramsey]

Punk was fine for the first year or so - good, raucous, two-minute, rock'n'roll singles - until the music press and the industry decided that anything pre-punk was verboten and uncool. And the sheep bought the concept, bigtime. Baby thrown out with the bathwater.

 

What followed (new romantics, synth bands, white funk, post punk, rap and all that) was dire beyond my worst nightmares. How anybody can describe the prog bands as boring and then champion the likes of New Order is beyond me.

I like Neil Peart's theory that popular music has cycles of complexity. When a bunch of kids starting out can't convincingly cover the hits of the day, they'll create a new genre of music which they can play. Some of those kids, though, continue to learn to play their instruments and write songs and evolve that genre into something more complex (having some number of masters of the previous complex vogue being able to adapt to the new fashion also helps) and thus the cycle repeats.

Of course, as a Rush fan, I think there was simultaneously no better rock band in the 70s and no better pop band in the 80s...

I vote the 90s, simply because it was the strongest decade, on average, for Rush albums:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utkLVQYv3tE

(especially from "Between Sun & Moon" on

[Rugeley Villa]

I liked rush I must admit, wernt one of my favourite bands but what I fount with them that they were very consistent and their longtivity you can't knock, I read somewhere that rush was john paul jones( led zep) favourite band

[mjmooney]

I think Levi's theory is correct. Punk was akin to (in the UK) skiffle and the Merseybeat era - simple, three-chord stuff, coming from the streets.

 

What was new though was that a significant number of the punks set their faces against any form of progression, thus sowing the seeds of their own destruction. You can only go on playing "Rock Island Line", or "Some Other Guy", or "New Rose" for so long before people start to hanker for something a bit more nuanced. 

 

Even the post-punk bands that were prepared to let themselves grow were still uptight about letting in any influences from the bands that had been declared uncool. So if you drew on the 60s, it was OK to use James Brown or The Velvet Underground, but never the likes of Bob Dylan or Jethro Tull. Funk was politically correct, but blues, folk and country weren't.

 

Paul Weller later admitted that for years he refused to listen to any music made by men with beards - until one day it dawned on him how utterly stupid that was, and how much good music he'd been denying himself. 

 

Thankfully, that attitude seems to have died out, and today's music scene (at least in the 'alternative', rather than 'pop' area) seems far more open to experimentation. I may not like much of it, but I approve of the trend. 

[PussEKatt]

Watching The Stax Vault Revue from 1967, on BBC4, and thinking how amazing it would have been to see Otis, Sam & Dave, Wilson Picket, The Mar-Keys, Booker T & The MGs, etc all on the same bill. Can't forget that the 60s were an amazing time for music, and changed the game.

Im into 60s instrumental myself.Imho you can`t beat ( no pun intended ) the beat of Duane Eddy,Sandy Nelson,Cozy Cole,Acker Bilk etc and tunes like Pipeline,Stranger on the Shore and Theme From A Summer Place etc ..............All good stuff.

[dont_do_it_doug.]

New Order > Joy Division.

[mjmooney]

New Order > Joy Division.

 

See, this is what I don't get. I can't say I loved JD, but I could see that they had something special and unique. But I can never hear New Order as anything but dull and plodding. Workaday Mancs. 

 

Blue Monday in particular makes me want to scream. 

[rendelc]

 

New Order > Joy Division.

 

See, this is what I don't get. I can't say I loved JD, but I could see that they had something special and unique. But I can never hear New Order as anything but dull and plodding. Workaday Mancs. 

 

Blue Monday in particular makes me want to scream. 

 

Try listening to Brutal . Love Vigilantes .  Vicious Streak .  60 mph .          Totally different .    Be interested to see what you think :-)

[Hev]

I'm shocked that anyone else has even heard of Camel.  My ex-husband absolutely loves them - I spent years listening to their music which I always found a bit dull . He is thrilled that someone else likes them.  I couldn't pick a single decade as I have such wide ranging tastes.  Love all sorts of music from all decades (except not so much from the 50's)

[chrisp65]

I'd have to confess that back in the day I was very much a creature of my time.

The older lads in school, the sixth formers, would have the names of bands written on their bags and satchels. Invariably the bands would all be similar (similar to me), they would be Camel, Rush, Yes, Floyd etc.. Which in my opinion, back then, was laughably shite and out of date. These guys were only a couple of years older than us and their taste was so out of time, they liked the same bands as my dad! I mean, they liked Queen! Queen! We seriously thought these people were sooo stupid. We would make their life a misery on the school bus (we substantially outnumbered them even if they were bigger and hairyer than us).

 

To this day (not unlike the Weller story above), I simply wouldn't listen to that sort of stuff as I presume Rush to be shite. I wouldn't know a Rush song from a Barry Manilow song, I think they had an album called 2020 or 2112 or something like that, but I'm not clicking play on Levi's youtube link.

 

It's a bit pathetic, and I have softened in recent years. i will now listen to Tangerine Dream. But its a bizzarely slow process. I have absolutely no desire at all to listen to Eno or Genesis. To my knowledge I've never heard a single piece of music by Rick Wakeman. There's time, I'm sure I'll get around to it.

[Designer1]

New Order > Joy Division.

 

This. But in reverse.

[bickster]

mjmooney, on 02 Jun 2013 - 2:06 PM, said:

Blue Monday in particular makes me want to scream.

Blue Monday is important and a joke in equal measure.

Its an atypical New Order tune, in that it bridges the gap between the early post Joy Division period and the second more sequencer based next period. It doesn't really represent their music in any meaningful way, it was conceived as a joke by way of experimentation with a new toy. NO notoriously didn't do encores and depending on what mood they are in they'll tell you different reasons for that but Blue Monday was born out of the band trying out the new equipment and realising with it they could play an encore by pressing a button and leaving the stage, hence it's a joke. The fact that it became the worlds largest selling 12" single ever and bankrupted Factory reords just adds to its allure.

But in reality it doesn't really represent the band musically, it is just a joke after all

[PaulC]

I'm shocked that anyone else has even heard of Camel.  My ex-husband absolutely loves them - I spent years listening to their music which I always found a bit dull . He is thrilled that someone else likes them.  I couldn't pick a single decade as I have such wide ranging tastes.  Love all sorts of music from all decades (except not so much from the 50's)

 

I've heard of them. My brother was a fan.

[dAVe80]

 

Watching The Stax Vault Revue from 1967, on BBC4, and thinking how amazing it would have been to see Otis, Sam & Dave, Wilson Picket, The Mar-Keys, Booker T & The MGs, etc all on the same bill. Can't forget that the 60s were an amazing time for music, and changed the game.

To be honest though you could apply that logic to the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. After that well the only changes were mainly political, the 90's is when music began to eat itself in terms of diversion

 

 

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I think there is a special aura around 60s music. Music was entwined in a cultural revolution, and began to expand beyond the more conventional music that presided it (not to dismiss what came before it, I must add). The decade seemed to bring an explosion of new music, and sounds that had not been considered in popular music before. As per my earlier post, my favourite decade is a toss up between the 70s and 80s, but I think the 60s is probably the most important decade for music, as it set the foundations of popular music as we know it (again with the up most respect for the music that was an influence on it) . 

[mjmooney]

 

I'm shocked that anyone else has even heard of Camel.  My ex-husband absolutely loves them - I spent years listening to their music which I always found a bit dull . He is thrilled that someone else likes them.  I couldn't pick a single decade as I have such wide ranging tastes.  Love all sorts of music from all decades (except not so much from the 50's)

 

I've heard of them. My brother was a fan.

 

 

And I have. Obviously. 

[Xann]

Blue Monday in particular makes me want to scream. 

 

 

 

Edited June 2, 2013 by Xann

[rjw63]

Ha!

Levi is WRONG!

 

Rush were much better in the 70's. A Farewell to Kings, 2112, Hemispheres...superb

[Rugeley Villa]

I prefer rush in the 70s than the 80s

[mjmooney]

I prefer Rush out of my earshot. Good musicians, but the combo of the Ayn Rand thing, Geddy Lee's "fingernails down a blackboard" voice, and then the switch to awful 80s pop is just too much for me.