Captain Ron

looks like we've got a negative nelly in sector 2

starrynight

90s was pretty bad. The pop was often awful or cheap, the rock could be just dirge-like.
But to say the 70s was without soul or emotion makes no sense. Disco came from soul music and had some great grooves during the 70s. Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder did stuff. And in another area like the singer-songwriter there was direct and affecting emotion. Many of the best ballads are from the 70s.

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Captain Ron

90s rock was way better than 80s rock. i'll take nirvana and soundgarden over poison and bon jovi any day

djchameleon

The 90s were only bad in some genres maybe but as far as R&B, Hip Hop and grunge it was pretty damn good imo.

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Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

Zer0

Mainstream rock yes, underground rock no. Also Nirvana released their best album in 1989.

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Captain Ron

in both the 80s and 90s the best music was underground and the radio played mostly crap like janet jackson or ace of base

djchameleon

bite your tongue, sir

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Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

Neapolitan

Underground can apply to any musical genre not in the mainstream conscientiousness. Prog, Punk, Thrash Metal, hip-hop/rap (even Old Timey within Country circles) was/are underground.

I would say that the early 80s was mixed it had pop artists and it had bands and artist from both Prog and Punk movements that slowly worked their way into the charts (in the US), so there was some representation of (formerly) underground bands at the time and even some R&B artist made a comeback.

But there was a shift at the middle of the 80's towards the Jacksons, Rap, & Hair Metal and Pop had a very commercialized overproduced plastic sound. But one can argue that Metal and Rap were underground and they also slowly worked their way into the Pop Charts too during the mid - late 80's.

They had to rethink the name for the ever growing popularity of "underground" (Rock) music and came up with Alternative Rock. There were Alternative Rock Radio stations in the 90's/OO's that weren't all about the Ace of Base. No doubt today there are "Nirvana/Ace of Base" format radio stations.

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starrynight

We don't all live in America here, so I think there can be other perspectives apart from the limited one of the 80s being bland AOR rock or bland metal and it being all about Michael Jackson and Madonna and a few critics obsessed bands like Husker Du or REM. If people want to think that is the 80s that is up to them, but I like to take a broader view.

And yeh hip-hop had some interesting things in the earlier 90s, though the roots of hip-hop were the 80s, and there were some good things then. Some of the best 90s stuff I actually find on the cusp of the 80s, very late 80s or very early 90s. The roots of trance were the 80s. And electronica in general had roots way beyond the 90s going back even to the 50s. The full indie scene didn't start in the 90s it started in the 80s.

So what are we left with that is specifically 90s? Grunge? blah Even the roots of that were earlier anyway. Britpop? blah Overrated.

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Captain Ron

i was lucky to live in DC in the early 90s cause there was a great station called WHFS that played alot of stuff nobody else would like the judybats, swervedriver, the boo radleys, the posies, frente, the connells, the milltown brothers, the soup dragons etc.
the early 90s was a golden age