What decade would you consider the weakest for music? starting from the 60's to present

This is a tough one. Each era, let alone decade, presented something great. I’d have to say the 2000-10s. Creativity started to take a downfall.

I have a special dislike for the 80's for some reason. Just don't care for the whole hair metal thing and whatever else was going on in the 80's. Most of the 80's stuff I like was only technically in the 80's, like Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails's first albums which were both released in 1989.

@SoNin360:

For me, I always felt the 80's had something for everyone, Rock had splintered into many different ways. I didn't like the hair bands much either, but I appreciated bands like Guns and Roses and Motley Crue. Thrash made a big impact in the 80's with Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer in fine form. Bands like REM, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Pixies, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, The Bad Brains, The Replacements, The Minutemen, The Cure, Violent Femmes, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, The Jesus and Mary Chain helped alternative music to flourish. The Talking Heads, U2, and The Police made some good music here. Honestly, I think the 80's were underrated. Rap also was very good this decade with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, NWA, Public Enemy, Run DMC, Beastie Boys and LL Cool J leading the charge. Say what you want about Prince, but to me he was a major talent with some major albums this decade.

@AFBrat77: I like a few bits and pieces from the 80's, but I'm probably pretty much alone in my dislike for the decade. I'm definitely not being objective or anything, a lot of it just isn't for me.

No Black Flag, Jane's Addiction, Dead Milkmen OR Suicidal Tendencies?

Basically its safe to just say, since 60's music got worst and worst. 60's to 90's had tons of great music from all genres. The last 20 years on other hand, well, even the best rock groups lost their edge by mid-00s.

Half the stuff I've heard from popular bands are just too catchy. I can't think of their names, I'd say 90% of the people I've seen on SNL in last 10 years are garbage to me. Half the stuff girls listen to these days sound like elevator music. Rappers turned to Mumblers. Metal and Rock exist but their popularity feels all-time low. And everyone is going after vinyl and OST's rather than listen to new stuff.

Of course I'm always willing to listen, I just don't have use for elevator music.

@br0kenrabbit:

Haha may as well throw in Dead Kennedy's, Circle Jerks, and X as well.....the latter 2 I slam danced (what we used to call it) to at concerts back in the early 80's, never saw DK but had their albums. I thought I mentioned Jane's Addiction but guess I didn't. My best friend loved Suicidal Tendencies big-time but I didn't listen to them alot. Dead Milkmen were local, but I didn't delve in much. I loved Black Flag, Rollins was one angry dude...."got a 6 pack and nothing to do, got a 6 pack bitch and I don't need you!" My best friend loved hardcore, I was more post-punk/alternative but we over-lapped.

90s to me was the best era for music - Big L, Big Pun, KRS-One, Eazy E, Onyx + Atmosphere (Rap Groups), Sum 41, Blink 182, The Offspring, MF Doom + Nas.

2000s were good but in the early 2000s - while they were Immortal Technique, Eyedea & Abilities and Lupe Fiasco. Now since I.T. retired, and Eyedea died - music hasn't been up to par as it used to.

We have officially reached rock bottom with Ed Sheeran.

There's nowhere to go but up.... right...? :/

But then with instant classics like 'Break up with your girlfriend, i'm bored' from the best recording artist of all time (citation needed) Ariana Grande perhaps I'm being too harsh...

135 million views. Nuff said.

It's easy to overlook alot of good artists that came out in the 2010's though, Grimes is objectively OK. If we are talking exclusively about pop music, which I assume we are.

...I take it back about Grimes. She sounds like a 3 year old and her songs are boring. The more I look at Grimes the more I actually hate her...

I think since about 2005 melodies just went out of fashion and it became all about production. Using the exact amount of carefully chosen arrangements to not offend or challenge with anything recognisably melodic.

Take a bassline pop tune like Somewhere In My Heart and compare it to Grimes and you can see all the popular themes being used on both cases. Synth pads accompany guitars in most 80's tracks and 2010's tracks almost exclusively use analogue style snyth arpeggios and rapid 808 hi hats. Combined with almost no melody. Modern pop music is almost completely artistically bankrupt and has no new ideas.

I think The Beatles was the beginning of the end for popular music with their trite ditties dressed up as symphonic masterpieces and branded with the counter-culture (itself a marketing exercise) markings of colour clash and psychadelica, which is marketed-surrealism.

It was in the 80's garage synth music of Gary Numan that saw the first genuinely new musical style emerge and then in the 90's with the Manchester scene with the Stone Roses and the Hacienda nightclub.

I would argue that hip-hop is not a genre as much as a political standpoint that became subsumed and packaged into a product into the later part of the 90's. The strong sampling and looping styles using bass piano riffs like Wu Tang became iconic but as a genre is completely open to influence, sampling Sting is just as fine as sampling Oliver.

But you know what I do like? 10 hour synthwave mixes on youtube. Oh the laziness. Now I don't have to keep choosing music every 40 minutes. I blame Hotline Miami.

2000 just rubbish it's getting even worse which I didn't think it could.

You know what's funny is that approximately 50-60 years from now. If we are still alive, we would complain about how the 2000's play real music with Ed Sheeran, Maroon 5, Travis Scott, etc. But so far at the moment the 2000's plays the most rubbish music.

@realistic44: I don't see pop moving in a linear fashion. Pop music is like a magpie and any era is fair game and the only objective is profit.

Crap is in all time periods but I (and alot of other I think) stopped listening to the radio ages ago which didn't happen in any other generation. I'm only 38 and if it was 20 years earlier (1999) I would still be listening to commercial radio stations.

There's is just nothing mainstream commercial worth listening to these days.

When money rules over everything and businesses become more consolidated, the music producers (publishers) become more disconnected from their audiences and more obsessed with financial reports.

Disney, Sony and EMI I think have a alot to answer for.

PS. Watch out kids. 20 years passes by like a fucking DeLorian doing 88mph.

**Let me start by saying I was born in the 2000s**

I largely perfer 70s-90s music over anything in the last decade. To me it keeps getting worst and worst the older I become and the more its advancing.

@Litchie: My words exactly. In fact the quality of music has slowly declined since 1791, the death of Mozart.

@pmanden: I really don't rate Mozart. He is the bubblegum pop of the 18th century.

Yeah there was quite a bit of overlap in the mid-late 80's between punk and alt, and then the grunge bands came and took all the fun out of it and made it sad.

Punk was complaining but you know what the **** ever (to quote Suicidal Tendencies: "I'll probably get hit by a car, anyway"). By the time grunge evolved it was all "my life sucks, life sucks, dude, life just sucks".

The best thing about punk was you felt better for it. That shit that came after just wanted you to suffer with the artist.

Not sure any decade is really all that strong.. Music is the churn abd burn stage of capitalism that never ends... for some reason.

Beethoven came after Mozart. And he was better than Mozart.

Mozart was essentially the popstar of his day.

@Jag85: I know I won't convince you, but in my book Mozart is superior to Beethoven. Yes, Beethoven was the revolutionary composer and a very skilled one indeed, but Mozart was God.

The decades where I have the least number of songs are the 60's and 70's. I'm also a simpleton and not so-called "cultured." I'm not that fond of classical music either.

@pmanden: Fair enough, we can just agree to disagree. But it sounded like you were downplaying Beethoven when you said music quality declined after Mozart's death.

I just used Mozart for reference because everybody knows him, even those who are not interested in classical music. Of course there were many great composers after Mozart. I Particularly love Brahms, Schubert and also Beethoven of course (his 5th and 7th symphonies, the Tempest, Piano Sonata 15, Piano Concerto 3 in particular).

Maybe it would be more fair to say that the musical quality declined around 1900. The Romantic Era was over, and I feel that composers had to try too hard to come up with something new. Then again, there are some gems, like Scriabin's piano music and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Crazy, dissonant stuff but I love it.