Thread by @RadioFreeTom

Today when we were picking arbitrary "best 10 or 20 years of pop music," we all disagreed of course, but I don't think it's just that you pick the years of your youth. Rock was born in the 50s, and has had life stages. Not an expert, but will opine for a sec.
cc @dcherring

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https://twitter.com/DavidGohl/status/1386126842353102853

@dcherring I totally get that people might point to 1955 to 1965 as the greatest period of ferment and change, going from Perry Como to the Beatles in just ten years. It's an amazing time. "She Loves You" still sounds ...revolutionary to me, as music. Dylan. Elvis. I get it. /2

But that music is still tentative and commercial and produced in mono by old guys. From 1965 onward rock goes from a youth yawp to a no-shit art form. Soon the acts that are big are guys who wanted to be the Beatles or Elvis when they were kids. It's the next generation. /2

There's also technological innovation by the early 70s that just wasn't around in the 60s. Stereo. FM emergence. Synthesizers, etc. Rock is no longer just packing the halls, it's a studio art form. To me, that makes the early 70s different and heading into a Golden Age. /3

I am not a music connoisseur and my taste kinda sucks, but music after about 1974 sounds "different" to me. It's not Bill Haley's kids, it's something else. Artists. Something like Becker and Fagan can't exist in 1967, imo. Yes, the 70s were awful, but also better in a way. /4

If you want a more textured view of the 70s, can't recommend the book highly enough by @davidfrum on this, who captures how the 70s, good or bad, become a deeper cultural experience. And the 80s, to me, with new wave and Brit Invasion 2.0, is immensely creative and interesting /5

So I'd say popular music comes into its own in the late 70s and early 80s; yes, I turn 18 in 1978, but I didn't much like the time I lived in and I don't associate the music with good times. At all.
I just think it was the "maturing" of rock into something different. /6

And that doesn't mean I think good music ends at 1985. (No, @jheil, I really don't!) But capitalism eats everything sooner or later, and the MTV video era - which drove a LOT of creative change - by the late 80s sort of collapses in on itself. Things, to me, feel derivative. /7

I think what happens going into the 90s, despite the upheaval of grunge and a new-new-wave and hip hop and the mainstreaming of urban is what other people have written about as a time of cultural stagnation in *many* forms of popular culture. /8

I still remember the young son of a friend telling me how much old music sucks and how much better songs like "Millennium" and some other song I can't remember and I had to point out that the riffs he liked were cannibalized from old songs. /9

To me, this was of a piece with a movie culture that was dredging old shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and managing to cast A-listers in them, and then making sequels about sequels. I think that period of stagnation has lasted a long time and I'm not the only guy to notice. /10

Anyway, there's lots of great music out there from 1961 and 2021. Just seemed to me if I had to pick the time rock matures into the thing that makes it a lasting world culture rather than a flash in the US/UK pan, that to me is from the early 70s to the mid-80s. /11

But that's just an impressionistic view from a consumer, rather than a cultural historian. On this, I could be wrong. :D
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