Tell me all the trash music/artists you know from around the 50s to 70s.
No. Every era produces plenty of shit music, but as time goes on the better music is what is remembered. Also the songs that end up having lasting power decades from now are often not the “hit” songs of the day. Hell even the best artists of the era did bad songs, or songs the fans loved but the critics reviled. Google the reviews for “Kokomo”, it’s wild.
I don’t know about better, but it’s survival bias.
Only the good music is remembered
I see this said a lot and as someone who lived through the 80’s and 90’s I just have to ask: If that was true, why did people in the 80’s or 90’s not think music mostly sucked, but people tend to think that now about current music?
There was less options back then, only the better stuff really made it out to public consumption.
I could be wrong but it’s just my take on it all
I can guarantee you there were people in the 80’s and 90’s who thought music was better in the 50’s and 60’s and so on and so forth all the way back through time since Grog hit two sticks together rhythmically
People who think this about current music simply aren’t hearing/listening to a lot of current music. There’s great stuff out there being created all the time but you’d never come across it in ‘mainstream’ places. Take a genre I really like (I realise not everyone does), blues guitar/vocals. 3 brilliant current artists:
- Grace Bowers (will be 18 in July)
- Christone “Kingfish” Ingram (currently 25 years old)
- Muireann Bradley (also currently 17 years old)
Obviously with those ages, these aren’t golden agers coating on past glories. To take someone totally different, Ren isn’t ‘commercial’, even if some of the people he’s worked with, e.g. Chinchilla, are. I don’t expect to see any of these artists become ‘mainstream’ like e.g. Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift.
Not inherently, but I think there are some factors that can make it feel that way, including:
- There was a higher bar to getting air time back in the day. Having decent quality recording equipment wasn’t something a normal person could afford, so they had to rent studio time. There wasn’t an internet to put stuff out there with, so you had to get your music heard by the right people, who then had to decide it was worth playing. Today is a lot easier to get something out there.
- Though every kind of media has been subject to crafted and pushed personas for decades (e.g., The Monkeys), in these days so much of what we’re exposed to is what algorithms and corporations think we’ll buy. Way more true today than ever before.
- As someone else mentioned, when people compare “today’s music” to music from a prior decade, they’re usually comparing everything on the air today to everything that’s stood the test of time from the prior decade. Classic rock stations don’t play everything, just the stuff people still like. There’s a lot of junk that’s been forgotten.
- This is anecdotal, but from what I’ve seen, people’s musical tastes are based largely on what they liked in their late teens and twenties. Even if they like new music, it tends to be music that’s influenced by that same earlier music. As with any generality, there are lots of exceptions. But I think a society’s tastes evolve over time more than a person’s tastes, so it’s not unusual to get older and think everything new is crap.
Music from the past has been filtered through many people, and a concensus has developed on what is good music and what is not.
This means that we simply don’t hear the names of bands producing the crap of the day, and are just focusing on the top 20-75% of music from an era.
I have all of the Billboard Top 100’s for every year from 1950 to 2009. When i downloaded it i thought that litterally every popular song i’ve heard of would be on there.
Not only are there a lot missing, there’s so so much crap. It turns out bland generic love ballads have sold really well throughout the decades, and genuinely memorable songs are a lot fewer than 100 a year. Not even to mention all the ones that don’t chart. Sure 1957 had Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock, but you know what else it had? Elvis’s Loving You, Elvis’s Love Me, and Jerry Lewis’s “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody”. Cool. Thanks for that, Billboard.
Overall there’s a tremendous survivorhip bias. By definition we only remember the memorable songs, which gives the illusion that everything was memorable.
But also, having grown up in the 2000’s, i really think it’s one of the worst decades for music. So much so that i was into 60’s rock back then, and in the 2010’s i was into the new wave of thrash metal, literally one of the most regressive genres there are. I wasn’t alive for the 80’s, i didn’t like the video games or the movies and didn’t participate in virtually any of the 80’s nostalgia that was trendy at the time, but i did prefer the music to anything my current decade had to offer.
