Posted on 07/23/2019 6:59:49 AM PDT by C19fan
In an excellent essay making the case that pop music was at its zenith in 1984, Julie Kelly writes that the era represented a patriotic swoon. She might also have mentioned that the same year, Lee Greenwood released God Bless the U.S.A., the most patriotic song of the year though it was not, strictly speaking, a pop song.
The year 1984 may have been the high point of pop and rock, but that is not saying much. The entire decade is more notable for the musical malaise it created. As a music director for radio stations during that decade, I should know. It was during the 80s that radio stations began to tighten their playlists all to the happy applause of corporate music execs. The rapid creativity of the 1970s radio stations died, to be replaced by preplanned and survey-tested radio formats. The most significant of these were the songs stations received from the radio syndication company Drake-Chenault.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
Ed Driscoll at PJMedia wrote a rebuttal piece:
https://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/did-music-in-the-80s-suck/
80’s music was great compared to today.
Agreed. Old people who hate rock altogether and think it’s the devil’s music hate 80s rock.
SMH
Van Halen! Rest my case. Better then stupid 70s disco.
Pop music has always sucked (unless you were/are one of the ones making it).
Ah ha! Duran Duran was pretty cool.
True.
There was a LOT of music being put out in the 80s, and a lot of diversity, and it’s easy to pick out play-lists now that make it easy to romanticize about 80’s music, but if you got into a Delorian and went back to 1985 and had to listen to the crap they played on the radio over and over and over and over, you’d swear there were no music choices at all.
Euryithmics.
You could enjoy some many different genres back in the 80s. You had rockers like Billy Idol, The Police, and Van Halen, New Wave groups, more pop sounds, for example, Huey Lewis and the News, and the emerging rap genre.
From a baby boomer who brought the world peter Paul and Mary. Yeah add that the 60s music sucked if we are going to pick and chose.
I won’t comment on music in the current century, since I’ve not really listened to it, but in terms of the 50’s 60’s, 70’s 80’s and 90’s....the 80’s was a horrible decade for music, with some exceptions. But in the aggregate, most music in the 80’s was stupid and creepy.
Although that is what made the tape cassette great. One was free to create your own playlist and play it in the car, at home, and on a Walkman.
I wouldn’t say “sucked.” It wasn’t complex or artfully composed, but 80s music was fun, whimsical and often silly. If you were looking to meet a girl at a club by asking her to dance you’d have a much more happy, upbeat start after dancing to ‘Rock Lobster’ than you would have a few years earlier trying to dance to ‘Free Bird’ or ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ 80s music was different no doubt, but it didn’t “suck.”
Crap.
What are we really talking about here?
Are we talking about the types of music that were popular in the ‘80s, or are we talking about corporate operations of radio stations, which restricted the ability of radio stations to introduce listeners to various new musical acts and types of music?
It depends on what you listen to music for.
I don’t listen for lyrics much because I really don’t care about what they think. Story songs are a different matter but you don’t here those much anymore ‘Gently On My Mind’ comes to mind.
Most music critics suck.
To be fair, 1984 is indeed the drop off. The big bands had hit their zenith. Definitely Leppard peaked with Pyromania, Van Halen with Mean Street, Ozzy with Bark at the Moon, Iron Maiden with Power Slabe, the Scorpions with Love at First Sting, Rush with Moving Pictures.... You could go on and on. The corporates took control in 85 and its sucked since.
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