The decades that rocked!

Bah, music these days eh? I tell ya, it wasn't like that in my day, we had REAL music back then!

 

Well, not really. In fact, if you listen to modern dance music, chances are you’re actually listening to an old song with a few whooshing sounds thrown in by the producer and a large thudding noise in the background. Since the emergence of modern pop music, each decade has had their wheat and their chaff, but what decade is the wheatiest? Yeah, you saw right, wheatiest. Let’s take a look at the first few decades of the modern era, from the fifties to the seventies…

 

The Fifties: The first decade that wasn’t dominated by big bands and twenty-three skidoos, the 1950’s were also the first to really produce what we would now know as “teenagers”, even if they would be unrecognisable by today’s standards… Elvis was of course the main man of the fifties by far, changing the shape of modern music near single-handedly, but he was far from the only significant musical entity of the fifties: Carl Perkins, Bill Haley, Little Richard and Buddy Holly to name but a few truly legendary names who laid the foundations to the modern scene. That said, it still had the musical shadows of previous decades hanging over it, and as much as there was huge change it was also in retrospect the squarest decade of them all, to coin the phrase. Overall: 7/10

 

The Sixties: After a decade of buttoned-up, straight-laced behaviour, people were bound to break out eventually, and break out they did in the sixties. It’s probably the most icon and imagery-laden decade of them all: JFK, mods and rockers, hippies, Martin Luther King. Just as Elvis was the dominant force in the fifties, The Beatles reigned supreme over the sixties, and not only decided the whole agenda for the decade (their particular phases seemed to dictate the “in” genre of the time), but influenced a litany of copycat bands who were vastly varied in their quality, which is the ultimate accolade, really. Apart from the Beatles, the sixties also produced the likes of Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, The Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Kinks…shall I go on? For all-round quality and diversity, the sixties puts up a strong case. Overall: 9/10

 

The Seventies: Back to relative normality after the helter-skelter sixties, the seventies were the equivalent of a sugared-up child in many ways, moving frantically from one passing fad to another: Roller-disco, regular disco, fondue pots, hula hoops, bell-bottom jeans, afros and TV shows set in the fifties (Happy Days and M*A*S*H* being amongst the biggest). In music, some of the sixties biggest stars carried on at the slope, but the seventies witnessed rock music taking a turn for the pantomime. “Glam Rock” predominated for the first part of the decade, with bands like T-Rex and Slade leading the way, and in “Prog Rock” musicians who loved amazingly long and pretentious guitar solos had a genre all for themselves. Meanwhile ABBA were doing rather well for themselves on the pop front and BTO and ELO were the top acronym bands of the age. By the end of the decade the glam era had been subsumed by the angry, angry young men of the punk movement led by The Clash and The Sex Pistols, and the just plain mental men of heavy metal like Motorhead and Black Sabbath. Overall it was pretty good, but there wasn’t half some crap as well. Three words: Bay City Rollers… Overall: 8/10

 

By: Paddy Duffy

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