Tell me all the trash music/artists you know from around the 50s to 70s.
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.
That is exactly why I asked for the trash that was filtered out. Some people posted trashy old music examples here
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?
These days any asshole can put their shitty music on soundcloud and buy a spambotnet to post it a thousand times a day. Back then only assholes with the right connections and money got their shitty music on the radio.
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
I was always more partial to Kroog banging stones together in a pattern.
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
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.
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.
Department of war math represent.
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.
🏆 Official most helpful comment
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.
The best music sounded better, I’m not a fan of the harsh, over compressed and brick wall limited digital stuff these days. It’s tiring to listen to.
I’ve heard a saying, and I really like it.
The best music is the music that was popular when you were a teenager.
Basically whatever was popular in your formative years will be your favorite. Because that is the time where you start experiencing all that music can be and expanding your horizons. And every generation says the music if their youth was the best. And everything after that is garbage.
None of it is true.
Just because there are more crap music these days, doesn’t mean music is worse these days.
I love 60s and 70s music, heard a lot growing up from my boomer parents. So many classic, timeless hits. Then my mum found some “Fab No. 2s of the 60s” CD, a compilation of songs that didn’t quite make it to number 1…
It was truly awful, all clichéd cheesiness and triteness, so many lame songs that sounded like other, better songs. Just sucko-barfo all round. I think there are arguments for why music from the early stages of a genre (like 60s pop and soul) are particaurly good… But there’s also a hell of a lot of selection bias going on.
There’s a new classics station in my city, playing music from the 90s, 00s and 10s. I’ve been listening to it almost exclusively. Based on that I’m going to say it wasn’t, but we’ve forgotten about the stuff we didn’t like.
Well the 50s was
Captain Beefheart. I get his performance was part of an act, but if you don’t take it all as a joke the music is pretty terrible to listen to. As a joke though it’s hilarious.
Nice one. I’d assume much of today’s trash is also not the best they could do if they wanted to, but just what works on the internet? That is, for music that is actually made in some professional setting
It was at least real on real instruments and the singing not auto tuned etc
The Shaggs come to mind
Perfect!
Not really. The thing about oldies stations is that they play songs that have become popular not just then, but now as well. People forget a lot about the mediocre and bad, like Disco Duck: https://youtu.be/i_WEMCUhF0E
Thank you, it’s wonderful!
