Was there ever a worse period of music than the 80s?

Cinderella were a good band tho, anon.

>one shitty band=an entire decade

>>73545517
>Cinderella
What's wrong with cinderella?

>>73545517
Cinderella has the best metal ballad of all time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28UEoLXVFQ

But, to answer you question, I think the 70s were the worst period. Lots of garbage - John Denver, The Eagles, Meat Loaf, KISS...

>>73545517
The 80s had a lot of bad, but also a lot of good. Synthpop, for example, became popularized like Depeche Mode. Towards the end of the decade, the acid house scene was rapidly changing electronic music as a genre. Hip-hop, although not really my thing, was basically invented in the 80s. The greater focus on "indie" bands had a profound impact on the way music worked as an industry.

Post-punk saves the 80s from being the worst.

>>73545593
>not liking The Eagles
Tryhard normie meme

Popular myth: Nirvana saved humanity from an endless sea of giant hair, pink Charvel guitars, and power ballads.

Truth: Glam metal was already dead for some time. In fact even if you look at the glam metal albums out in 1990 like Cherry Pie and Flesh & Blood, they were showing a definite shift away from the stereotypical 80s hair metal sound with shredder guitars and big, loud snare reverb drums up at the front of the mix and towards more of a blues/traditional hard rock sound. The bands by that time were also dressing in more sedate outfits with leather and muted colors rather than the Day-Glo spandex crap. Of course, alternative rock was already on the rise to the mainstream by early '91 with albums like Goo and Facelift.

t. it was a natural, inevitable musical shift--the neon spandex/snare reverb/whatever stuff was mid-80s and it would have been out of fashion by 1990 for some time.

>>73545703
So what changed after Nirvana, exactly? Well, the haircuts, maybe. And within a couple years, radio and MTV were overrun by such innovative new bands as Collective Soul, Candlebox, Live, and Silverchair. The more things change…

>>73545517
the 50s

>post-punk
>new wave
>gothic rock
>formations of hip-hop
>formations of metal subgenres such as black, death, thrash
>golden age of the synthesizer in popular music
>Japan doing its own thing with anything from progressive electronic to noise rock

>bad

No. Every decade in music has something redeemable in it.

>>73545703
GNR actually did more to kill off poodle rock than Nirvana because they made dirty, raw hard rock mainstream again and (among other things) helped propel thrash metal to the mainstream. After Metallica, Megadeth, and alternametal groups like Jane's Addiction blew up, the hairspray guys all started ditching their clown costumes and wearing more leather and spiked bracelets.

By the fall of 1991, glam rock was long over. Actually, one could argue that the rapid rise of grunge helped kill off other avenues for creativity since record labels all hitched their star to grunge bands and were rushing to sign as many of them as they could, causing a rock monoculture that was a lot different from the wide-open 1989-91 period when glam rock, thrash metal, and alternative bands all competed for the airwaves.

>>73545896
Nirvana was a fashion thing. They were hip and everybody went with it. What made so many imitate it was that anybody could buy a guitar, detune to D and then play along to Nirvana with one finger on the fretboard. Like punk rock for a year or so late 70s. Music that anyone could play along to.

Metal never went away and your post is pretty much spot on. What really happened was that all the crap bands that just pretended to be stars were wiped away by Guns who did not need to pretend and were just really badass, take it or leave it. Who wants the parody band once the real thing is there?

The laughable thing was all the old 70s veterans like Aerosmith and Cheap Trick who came back in the late 80s, sold out, and became balladeers. Then you had the Big Four thrash bands gradually sell out as well during the early 90s.

>>73545517
80s mainstream pop was solid

So why was grunge so damn depressing? The answer can be found in its place of birth, in Seattle, an isolated city far from other major American metropolises, where it gets dark at 5:30 AM and rains nonstop between November and March. Needless to say, Seattle is a lot different from the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles that brought us Motley Crue and Poison. Seattle's geographical isolation and mostly blue collar populace also for years prevented any chance of local music acts going mainstream, people had less money to invest in guitars, amps, and other equipment, and since the entertainment industry is based in Los Angeles, that was a more natural place to look for bands than Seattle. This started to change when Sub Pop began signing Seattle groups like Mother Love Bone and The Melvins.

Problem was, the Seattle scene also had a strong loathing of success, that if you got on MTV, you were a sellout. Some of this mindset came from years of being ignored by the record industry which caused many bands to have a low opinion of them. Quite different from glam metal, which as Joe Perry put it, "was just the American rock-and-roll dream taken to the extreme. Money, limousines, cocaine, groupies, etc." So being a rock star who chased fame and pussy was perfectly normal for Los Angeles bands, much less so Seattle.

>>73546318
The other obvious thing you notice is that glam metal was, well, overproduced. Recording budgets (and, lyl, costume budgets) were huge because, hey, it was Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world. The whole thing was as Hollywood as it gets. Compare that to Seattle bands who just wore flannel and jeans and liked making everything sound as raw and low-fi as possible--Kurt Cobain famously disliked the production of Nevermind for being too commercial.

>>73546409
>>73546318
The US was in a recession in the early 90s, nobody wanted to see some faggot in a wig and tights singing about how many hookers and mansions he owns. Grunge simply reflected the spirit of the times better.

>>73546318
>blue collar Seattle
Ahh the good old days.

>>73546463
Yes and by the time the economy was booming during the Dot Com Bubble, people wanted good time fun music again so pop punk bands like Blink 182 and Sugar Ray took over.