Aishah Bowron wrote @ February 21, 2009 at 4:49 am

The Worst Decade Of All Time
By : Aishah Bowron

The worst musical era of all times were the Eighties. I disliked that decade. The only good bands and artists that I liked from the Eighties are Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Europe, Guns N’Roses, Michael Jackson and Prince and that’s about it.

All the best rock bands came out of the Seventies. The Seventies produced proper pop and rock bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Trapeze, Free, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy, Whitesnake, Motorhead, etc (but not Evil Glitter). The Seventies were about the music, not about marketing and that was a good thing. Bands from the Sixties and Seventies cared about and were enthusiastic about the music. The Eighties were about synthesizers and poppy little sounds. Synthesizers were boring instruments because you couldn’t jump around with it like you would do with a guitar. Even worse there were all these horrible bands like the Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Depeche Mode, OMD, Kajagoogoo, Thompson Twins, Howard Jones and many similar acts in the Eighties. Then you got the Stock Aitken and Waterman nonsense, which drove me bleeding mad. They were responsible for producing cheeseball hits like Never Gonna Give You Up and I Should Be So Lucky..

The musical scene in the Eighties was a joke. You had record companies and managers who were more important than the artists. These managers acted like dictators telling you what to do like polishing your music and looking a bit. You had to live by the strict Draconian rules forever doing TV shows , playback performances and photo sessions. It was too nice and too tame. You had no control over your music because you had to play the way the manager wanted you to sound. The Eighties were backlashed against the guitar because the producer toned it down to make room for the synths. That is amongst the reason why I think the Eighties were awful.

The Eighties seem to forget that the foundation of the music business is music. The Eighties were so corporate, uncaring, insensitive and thoughtless about the origins of music. You had graduates from business colleges who happened to favour commerce than art and I don’t think it was a very good thing. The Eighties is a decade not worth remembering .

  Musicmaster wrote @ April 28, 2009 at 12:37 pm

The only people who you list were the biggest corporate sell outs of all. They were the ones with moguls taking them to dinners.

Except the bands you mentioned, the early 70s was made up of super dull hippie music (i.e. America, Crosby Stills and Nash, Guess Who, Seals and Crofts) and mod leftovers from the 60s. Everything else was pretty much AM stuff (this is before FM) like sappy ballads like Carpenters, and corny jingles from Carole King. Then there was

What THE HELL WAS DISCO? That is what dominated the mid to late 1970s. Next you’re going to tell us how un-corporate Saturday Night Fever was because someone back there was playing a real piano instead of a synth.

Reality check: it doesn’t matter if it’s all synth or all piano, POP is pop. You mention New Kids on the Block. You mention all these pop teeny bopper bands. Well thanks the 60s for that. In the 70s we had tuneless crap like Bay City Rollers and Leif Garrett, but you forgot those and others because you simply don’t know better.

And no one in the 70s was “dangerous”. They were all writing pop songs – whether they were Bad Company (or Free, even Rod Stewart re-made “All Right Now” because it’s POP!) or Led Zeppelin (Dyer Maker??). You are just too young to understand. Genesis with Peter Gabriel did not have the resonance and power that Phil Collins gave them. Gabriel’s solo stuff in the 80s was very good and well received. Forgot that? And sigh, do your homework. Motorhead’s and ACDC’s best known stuff was from the 1980s. It’s understood fact: Metal reigned in the 80s. Everything before that was protometal.

The 80s had the healthiest mix of styles EVER. Reggae, pop, metal, ska, funk, it all shared the Top 100 charts here and in the UK. They proved that with a synth you can produce memorable music as powerful as any guitar riff. It’s all about the note selection and there was more of it than in the 70s.

The 80s was the last decade of real good music. WHen people weren’t afraid to still use a saxophone. The current decade is the worst in my opinion, as there’s no variety and poor songwriting.

Depeche Mode, Talk Talk, and the synth movement bands all have haunting songs that are more on the dark side than the bright folksy, poppy sounds of any of the pop from the 70s. The late 80s were faltering but the 1980-88 period shined as superior to anything in the 70s.

  Frozenfire wrote @ September 7, 2009 at 11:16 am

“The 80s had the healthiest mix of styles EVER. Reggae, pop, metal, ska, funk, it all shared the Top 100 charts here and in the UK. They proved that with a synth you can produce memorable music as powerful as any guitar riff. It’s all about the note selection and there was more of it than in the 70s.

The 80s was the last decade of real good music. WHen people weren’t afraid to still use a saxophone. The current decade is the worst in my opinion, as there’s no variety and poor songwriting.”

Amen, Musicmaster… i couldn’t have said it better myself. I remember growing up in the 1980s, and remember what a remarkably diverse musical environment it was. Prince, for example, was influenced by funk, the Rolling Stones, “Sgt. Pepper” era Beatles, the smoothe soul of Sly and the Family Stone, Joni Mitchell, and so many others. And he shared the charts with roots rock (Springsteen, John Mellencamp), quirky alternative music (REM), soaring idealistic rock (U2), catchy quirky pop (Cyndi Lauper), all the sythy New Wave and New Wavish groups (Eurythmics, til tuesday, Soft Cell), soft pop (Lionel Richie), hard rock (Guns N Roses)… and on and on.

And the music was also fun to listen to… a trait which often gets forgotten in evaluating music.

One disagreement I have with musicmaster, is that i find the ’80s to have been the worst musical era. The decade began hopefully, with the explosion of “alternative” music in the wake of grunge… but it soon became apparent that the “alternative” label became an excuse for people with minimal musical talent to create awful “music,” and to pass it off as “minimalism.”

  Dougrad wrote @ May 3, 2010 at 9:26 pm

I also think the 90s was the worst musical era for pop music, even though it was a great decade for rock music. Sure, there was crappy pop in the 80s too, but it seemed like pop stations back then played a wider variety of different musical sub-genres. In the 90s, all you would hear on pop stations was disposable dance-pop, lovey-dovey pop ballads, and mellow pop-rock, with a catchy alternative rock song thrown in every once in awhile. And then, of course, there were those terrible third-wave ska bands, pop-rappers, boybands, pop princesses, and Latin popstars that flooded pop stations in the late 90s. The 80s also had a lot of catchier, timeless pop songs that still sound good today and get played at virtually any dance or club you go to. I can’t really think of any 90s pop songs that you could consider to stand the test of time, or that get played at any dance or club you could go to.