[Mr. Bird]

"...stank on ice in the 80s (didn't everyone, very bad decade for music) "

I completely disagree. Music of the 80's is trashed because the prevalent music (MTV, pop radio) sucked. However, many outstanding bands (of all stripes) produced memorable music during that decade.

[discostu]

Well the 80s is what gave birth to a real underground music scene, because the frontline of music blew chunks. When the frontline consists of primarily bad Stones, crappy flock of Seagulls "dance music", and Enya there's nothing to do but go underground. There was some pretty good stuff in the 80s, mostly in that funky African beat crowd (not the Paul Simon junk, the real African beat crowd like Talking Heads and Oingo Boingo), but overall it was a pretty crappy decade filled with largely synthetic sterile boring "music".