Of course I'm generalising.
Of course I'm generalising once again
The entire thesis of this conversation is fundamentally about generalizations. We're talking about taking an entire decade, and compressing its cultural output down to a binary function: good or bad. Not only that, we're talking about decades of history as though there's a clear line of dilatation between them, which is fucking silly as balls. Every decade flows seamlessly into the next, and it's not until years after the decade has ended that we begin to form a real idea of what that decade was like.
There's no need for us to take ourselves too seriously here.
All right, the 60's and 70's had the best music to me. Mainly because they used real instruments. It was a lot more authentic talent back then.
We can agree that the '60s and '70s was great. (By the by, if you care, the apostrophe is correctly placed before the decade to indicate the missing millennium and century. The decade is not possessive, and thus does not have an apostrophe before the suffixed "S"). However, we disagree on why.
With the rise of the Radio in the 1920s, popular music began to become a monolith. Music was no longer something you listened to first-hand, with the musician actually within the hearing range of your ear. Music was something you could experience with the entire nation. And so, music started to flatten itself out into something that would be palatable to the entire nation. Aiming for broad appeal + fundamentally capitalistic motivations = the death of art. We slowly started to resist the force of this trend in the '50s. Buuuut IMHO the music of the '50s is bland as fuck. The renaissance of popular music really reached fruition in the '60s and '70s, when it undeniably produced some of the best popular music of our age.
TL;DR: the music of the '60s and '70s is good because it's the work of artists doing the kind of weird experimental shit they wanted to do, not because it uses authentic instruments.
Disclaimer: Please refer to my original post, and to the beginning of this post, before you take my views on any of this too seriously. I barely know what I'm talking about at all.
The reason I can't stand most 80's music is the over use of synthesisers. When I listen to the 80's music I try hard to hear real instruments, it becomes like a mixture of today's music and maybe the earlier music. Of course I'm generalising. There are some bands and artists/songs I like from the 80's, same with today's music.
It just seemed that the 80's tried to be 'futuristic' with their music and it ended up sounding just fake.
We're going to have to chalk some of this up to a difference in taste. As evidenced by the "Favorite NES Tunes" thread, I have a love for electronic music. I don't think it's about sounding futuristic. I think we discovered a way to make entirely new kinds of sounds. Sounds nobody had ever heard before. And the 80s were a gloriously popular exploration of those new sounds.
But even ignoring electronic music, the 80s has my love for giving rise to metal. Most of metals roots are in the '70s, but the genre didn't really come into its own until the '80s. And unfortunately, the '80s was also the peak for awhile, as metal would start to get real shitty in the '90s.
Then the 90's came around, and early 90's punk popped up. Back to being guitar, bass, and drums. Real instruments, real sound. I'm not a huge fan of grunge, but there was nothing synthesised about that. It was a bunch of guys or girls, playing instruments and making music again.
Of course I'm generalising once again, and there are bands from the 90's that I don't like. Though I feel the majority of the popular music from the 90's tried to bring it back to 'real' instruments.
As I discussed above, instrumentation doesn't impress me overmuch. Unless it's really really weird.
I'm struggling to think of a really good band from the '90s. I suppose you could count Nirvana. But I tend to think of them as going against the grain of what was being produced at the time. They're not really emblematic, in my mind, of the music of the '90s.
Would you mind giving me some samples of good '90s bands?
Also I'm not saying it doesn't take talent to produce music through synthesisers, I just think the sound is fake and I prefer music that's relatively left untouched by machines.
After the 90's, it started to get all auto-tuney and synthetic again. So with a few exceptions, I don't like much of the popular stuff today.
My general rule of thumb is that if it came out between 1989 and 2007, I probably won't like it. That's hardly a hard-and-fast rule, there are TONS of exceptions. But when I sit down to watch/listen to something and I see a date within that range, I brace myself.
I think things are getting a whole lot better right now. Popular music is kinda fucky, but it's also much less relevant than it was before. Because Internet.
