[info]james_nicoll

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A question that stumps me
[info]james_nicoll
March 21st, 2010
Why is 1990s popular music so inferior to the music of the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s and 1950s?
( 109 comments — Leave a comment )
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[info]ailsaek

2010-03-21 07:21 pm (UTC)

That too. Or the wrong ones.
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[info]dd_b

2010-03-21 06:27 pm (UTC)

Because we're too old?

And how could anything be inferior to 1970s popular music?
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[info]james_nicoll

2010-03-21 06:34 pm (UTC)

I will in the spirit of international goodwill freely concede nothing of worth may have emerged in the American pop music scene of the 1970s but up in Canada a lot of very interesting music was produced in the 1970s.
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it isnt inferior

[info]pigeonhed

2010-03-21 06:37 pm (UTC)

The 90s had Nirvana, Blur, The Spice Girls, Tupac, etc. A whole range of interesting and popular acts.
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Re: it isnt inferior

[info]bwross

2010-03-21 07:04 pm (UTC)

Woah... you took a mighty steep dive there after Blur, which doesn't really leave me with much hope that that "etc." contains anything of note.

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[info]t_guy

2010-03-21 06:37 pm (UTC)

As Jack McCoy et al would say: assumes facts not in evidence.

Unless you typed 'popular' while meaning 'rock.'
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[info]burger_eater

2010-03-21 06:39 pm (UTC)

Because 90s music isn't far enough in the past to see its finer qualities.

Edited at 2010-03-21 06:41 pm (UTC)
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[info]lilairen

2010-03-21 07:05 pm (UTC)

Yeah, I was going to say "Insufficient culling time."

But time wasn't sufficient to prevent "Going to the Chapel" from getting installed in my skull, despite the fact that I was born some fifteen years I'm guessing after its release, so clearly the 60s are still insufficiently culled.
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[info]chrysostom476

2010-03-21 06:50 pm (UTC)

I find your premise flawed.
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[info]pompe

2010-03-21 06:51 pm (UTC)

Eww, 1970's music. Wasn't that just pretentious dinorock and ABBA?
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[info]pixelfish

2010-03-21 07:31 pm (UTC)

And in the late 70s, Fad Gadget. Frank Tovey was AWESOME!
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[info]agrumer

2010-03-21 06:51 pm (UTC)

Well, you know, these kids today are good for nothing, not like when we are their age.
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[info]martianmooncrab

2010-03-21 06:53 pm (UTC)

1990s popular music so inferior

the rise of hip-hop where they sampled all the good music...
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[info]pigeonhed

2010-03-21 08:40 pm (UTC)

There's no difference between hip hop sampling and musicians borrowing riffs or chord sequences. It can be imaginative and original or derivative and mundane. Pop hip hop has often been successful in part on the back of easily recognisable samples eg P Diddy using The Police for Missing You. There are lots of hip hop acts who use samples as creatively as any rock band uses chords.
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[info]brownkitty

2010-03-21 06:57 pm (UTC)

Nostalgia. Not that the music was better, but that we feel as if we were.
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[info]happyinmotion

2010-03-21 06:58 pm (UTC)

Obviously, it was entirely due to the aftereffects of the 1980s blight that was the home taping of music. Home taping did indeed kill music.

(Yes I am trolling)
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[info]vito_excalibur

2010-03-21 07:00 pm (UTC)

You know I love you, but it's because you're old.
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[info]viktor_haag

2010-03-21 07:01 pm (UTC)

I think it's more likely that you just don't recall the massive dollops of drek amongst all the "wonderful" music of past decades, and haven't yet been able to sift out the quality from the crap of the recent decades.
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[info]matgb

2010-03-21 10:11 pm (UTC)

Exactly. Look at the charts for any given week in the decades James thinks were good, guaranteed huge piles of shite.

The 50s and early 60s, specifically, was full of easy listening and crap covers, but we remember The Beatles and Chuck Berry, etc.

I was a late teen in the early 90s, and would also like to assure James that there was much very good stuff at that time (especially in the UK), but that he was just far too old to appreciate it.
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[info]kaffyr

2010-03-21 07:04 pm (UTC)

The fantastic thing about decades is that you'll find something earth-shakingly good in each one. Makes it fun to look back and exciting to look forward.

(We seem to be talking popular music under the huge and amorphous "rock is what I point to when I say rock" tent. I'll venture that there were huge honking boat loads of great jazz, classical, hip-hop, house, R&B, ambient, reggae, country and what-have-you music popping up all over hell's half acre, every half hour of the day of every year for god knows how long. I don't know 'em, but more power to 'em.)

Off the top of my pointy head ... the '70s? The Clash, Patti Smith Group, XTC, Blondie, Springsteen, Talking Heads, Television, Roxy Music, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Tom Petty, The Pretenders, for a start.

The 90's? Nirvana, Wilco, Smashing Pumpkins, Sleater-Kinney, Pearl Jam, and more. Yeah, I'm being lazy now. (I almost put Blur and Radiohead in the 90s, until I checked and saw that Blur formed in 1989 and Radiohead in 1985 or so. So there's two good bands from the 80s. Oh, and REM, too.)

OK, now I want to find an album - any album - and turn it up to 11.

ETA: I'll amend the lists to say those years are the years in which bands either formed or came to the fore, since the Pumpkins actually formed in 1988, but debuted on record in 1991, and Nirvana formed in 87 and debuted in the next decade as well.

Edited at 2010-03-21 07:15 pm (UTC)
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[info]pigeonhed

2010-03-21 07:26 pm (UTC)

I wouldn't class Wilco, Sleater-kinney, etc as popular music. I don't think they came close to mainstream awareness and success.
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[info]jonquil

2010-03-21 07:17 pm (UTC)

Because 20 years haven't passed yet.

Seriously.
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[info]jamiam

2010-03-21 10:46 pm (UTC)

Yeah, I was going to say because Gen Y isn't old enough yet to have formed tribute bands.
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[info]paraleipsis

2010-03-21 07:19 pm (UTC)

Because 1990s music was largely released when you were in your thirties, making it permanently inferior to the music that was popular in your twenties, teens, childhood and before you were born.
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[info]ailsaek

2010-03-21 07:20 pm (UTC)

Nah, the popular music released before I was born and around the time I was born (1963) was crap.
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[info]ailsaek

2010-03-21 07:19 pm (UTC)

Because kids these days are degenerate and don't have the good taste in music we did.
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[info]carloshasanax

2010-03-21 07:31 pm (UTC)

The fragmentation of the pop charts, causing extreme sampling bias, which shifted programming and acquisition decisions. It's the corporate music version of fan service.

In terms of quality, there was probably as much good stuff (for reasonably catholic tastes) out there. It just became much harder to publicize and locate.
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[info]mmcirvin

2010-03-21 07:55 pm (UTC)

I think I was completely out of the pop loop for most of the 1990s. I have a much better handle on what's getting radio airplay in 2010 than I did in 1995. I blame graduate school, and the fact that I have to drive around a lot now, which I didn't do then.
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[info]montoya

2010-03-21 07:33 pm (UTC)

I was just thinking the other day about how amazing it was that the popular musics finally developed far enough to make legitimately good music in the '90s before, in the 21st century, slumping back into the morass of crap that marked pre-90s popular music.

My theory is that this has to do with the part where the '90s were basically the best decade of all time ever, and that you're insane.
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[info]movingfinger

2010-03-21 07:46 pm (UTC)

I think there's a lot of garbarge in the '50s too.

Looking over this list of the top 100 from the '90s, I agree with you on the '90s, though. Something lacking.
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[info]amberdine

2010-03-21 08:12 pm (UTC)

I think recording companies reached their peak power in the 90s, before technology allowed indies to take off. Once the internet came into play people could find, share, and locate music they liked so, payola no longer had any effect.

There was plenty of good music produced in the 90s, but it was less common than it should've been.

Coincidentally, around 1990 I gave up popular music to focus on classical. Didn't get back into modern stuff until around 2000. Only took a dozen CDs or so to fill in the gap. :p
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[info]nelc

2010-03-21 08:02 pm (UTC)

I think I have to reject the premise of your question. My iTunes has a number of popular artists from the nineties: Alanis Morrisette, All Saints, Björk, The Cardigans, Catatonia, The Corrs, Dido, Dreadzone, Eddi Reader, etc, many of which are as good as a lot of the stuff from earlier decades. Now, there may not be as much iconic stuff from the nineties, but icons get better with age. Give it time.
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[info]pigeonhed

2010-03-21 08:18 pm (UTC)

Oh no not Dido, coffee table music.
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[info]jwgh

2010-03-21 08:02 pm (UTC)

This question reminded me that the way that music's popularity was measured changed in 1991, and that this change had major effects on what appeared in (for instance) the Billboard top 100. The technology that brought about our dystopian future was Nielson SoundScan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_SoundScan

According to a show I heard on 'On the Media', the genres of country and hip-hop benefitted substantially from this change. Garth Brooks and NWA were specifically identified as acts whose popularity had previously been underestimated. The transcript of the show is here: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/03/12/04
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[info]directordale

2010-03-21 08:25 pm (UTC)


Define popular music. Do you mean what got played on Top 40 radio stations? I think in the 1990s the music industry became so niche-driven that the concept of popular music changed radically and was not as uniform as it was for most of the 20th century.

Plenty of great bands started in the 1990s: Sleater-Kinney, Belle and Sebastian, Blur, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, The Magnetic Fields, and many more.

Plus I dislike a lot of music from the 1970s and include in that era some of the worst songs ever written. I really dislike Wonderful Tonight and Hotel California and most of disco. Though plenty of great bands did start in the 1970s from David Bowie to The Ramones to Elvis Costello to the Talking Heads, etc.

Though I will admit that music from 17 years ago makes me much more happy than the stuff played on radio today like Ke$ha. Ugh. Not liking a certain era's most popular music is either a scene of discerning taste, old age, or both.
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[info]dancesontrains

2010-03-21 08:28 pm (UTC)

To be blunt, it's because you are not John Peel rather than any quantifiable difference in quality. I hope I still care about new music as much as he l did all his life.
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[info]realinterrobang

2010-03-21 08:46 pm (UTC)

It isn't?

1991 was a great year for popular music; comparable in tenor and tone to 1968. If I could record only one thing that sounds as good as Soho's "Hippychick," I could die happy.
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( 109 comments — Leave a comment )
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