Phazael
Confirmed Beta Shitlord, Fat Bastard
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I would argue the 80s, honestly. There were some groups that have been decent in the decades since the 80s (Alice in Chains/Radio Head/Tool in the 90s, White Stripes/Wolfmother/Panic at the Disco in the 2000s, Queens of the Stoneage/Muse/Foo Fighters from 2000 on) but the vast majority of it has been shit. And samey shit at that. The 80s was the last decade where Jogger music did not drown out everything else and there were a wide array of different bands/styles all having success.
Outside a couple outliers, no one is going to remember much of any of the shit that came out past the 80s, at least not on the level of songs like Tom Sawyer, Bohemian Rhapsody, Running Down a Dream, Land of Confusion, Teenage Wasteland, El Paso, I Got a Name, or dozens of other songs people immediately recognize despite most of them being 30+ years old. There will never be iconic albums that get played repeatedly like Sports, Dark Side of the Moon, Night at the Opera, Goodbye Yellowbrick Road, Houses of the Holy, Back in Black, Sargent Peppers, Permanent Wave, Boston 1, Escape, or a ton of others I could rattle off. I think Queens of the Stoneage and Wolfmother have come closest to recreating that total LP experience, but I would struggle to list another 10 that are cover to cover listens since the 90s (and none since 2010). I think Let the Bad Times roll is the last album I actually bought and can recall listening to that way. You would have to go back to the last two QOTSA albums (both fantastic) before that, and then we are talking Black Holes and Revelations before that, and THEN we are all the fucking way back to the self-titled Alice in Chains album or Tool Aenima for albums I still play cover to cover in the present. I know I am not alone in this.
I would like to think we might be on the cusp of a type of revolution in music akin to what Grunge did to hold off the deluge of hip hop and rap. But realistically, the impact of the internet has basically killed the entire album concept for the most part. And the lack of a real equivalent to radio to expose people to different shit has not helped, either. These days I personally only develop interest in a group if I happen to come across them by accident on the internet or as part of a movie/videogame soundtrack. And the latter category is more and more reaching back before 1990 for source material, as if to hammer that point home. Shit has been stale since the 80s for the most part with no signs of getting better. And I think its why you are seeing a resurgence in popularity of older music forms/styles because Rock Music has nowhere left to go on its current trajectory.
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