Welcome to another installment of Ask A Music Critic! And thanks to everyone who has sent me questions. Please keep them coming at [email protected].
I have a friend who is completely obsessed with ’80s music. But his obsessions with ’80s music goes beyond just being his favorite decade of music over the 45-plus years of his life. It’s almost as if all music ceased to exist after 1989 and he will forever be content listening only to albums that were made during this period. This leads me to my question: If you were told that you could only listen to music from one decade for the rest of your life, what decade would it be? —Dan from Westchester, NY
Hey Dan, with all due respect to your friend: This sounds like an insane way to live! Many people reach a point in their listening lives where they stop following new music and stick with their comfortable favorites. This is sad and unfortunate, from a music critic’s perspective, but also common and relatively normal. But listening to music from only one decade — when it has never been easier to hear anything from any period you wish — seems severely self-limiting. I like the 1980s as much as the next Gordon Gekko wannabe, but at some point don’t the ears grow tired of gated drums, fake-sounding horns, and all the other sonic signatures of the period? How does one not yearn for a little adventure, and occasionally venture to, say, 1979 or 1990? Is it fair to assume that your friend loves Bleach but has not delved into Nevermind or In Utero? When it comes to television, does he swear off The Sopranos and Mad Men in favor of the first several seasons of The Cosby Show? Does he plan to cast a vote for Michael Dukakis in November? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Setting all of that aside: Your question is an interesting one, hypothetically speaking. For most people, the preferred musical decade question is easy — you go with the time period that coincides with your teens and early 20s. This is the music to which people tend to be instinctively loyal as they age. Isn’t it amazing and sort of miraculous that the epoch of musical achievement in the modern age always seems to coincide with the exact years when we are between the ages of 14 and 22? Just an incredible coincidence!
On some level, we all know this isn’t literally true. But the emotional veracity of this belief is widespread and unquestioned. And it’s not just “normal” listeners who feel this way. Each new generation of music critics comes along and is determined to displace the previous generation’s favorites with their own as the new “best” and “definitive” music.
Not this music critic, however. I am the rare rock writer with the unique ability to set aside my own personal biases and assess music with unassailable objectivity. For instance, being that I’m a 47-year-old man, one might assume that my choice for “best” musical decade is the ’90s. I was 12 when the decade started, and I was 23 when it ended. It was, obviously, the most formative decade of my life. But it is not the “best” decade, in my opinion. Now, I love ’90s music. And I love thinking and writing about ’90s music. (I wrote two books on two of the biggest rock bands of the decade.) And this era has inevitable nostalgic appeal for me, even the albums that evoke some of the worst years of my life. (I was in junior high from 1990 to ’92, a stretch of time I have often referred to as “Vietnam,” and there are some incredible records from that time.) But my personal affection for the ’90s doesn’t blind me to the weaknesses of the time. The late ’90s, for instance, were pretty awful, and no amount of revisionism from TRL-reared millennials will ever convince me otherwise. As we age, our brains edit out the bad stuff and leave only the good, at least when it comes to music. But as a professional music pundit, I have forced myself to remember The Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen” and Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch” and countless other crimes against art.
So, what is my objective choice for best musical decade? The 1970s.
To me, it boils down to variety. If you had to stick with one decade, you want to draw from a time with the widest variety of great music. And I don’t think any decade can touch the ’70s. Just look at rock music at that time. You had arena-level superstars operating at their peak: David Bowie, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen, the Rolling Stones, and the list goes on and on. And then you have scores of subgenres that were either coming into their own or being invented on the spot. That includes glam (T. Rex, Mott The Hoople, Sweet), prog (Yes, King Crimson, Genesis), metal (Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden), southern rock (the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd), jazz rock (Steely Dan, Traffic), punk (The Ramones, The Clash), new wave (Talking Heads, Blondie), and goth (Joy Division, The Cure).