On The Other Site, I saw a viral post asking people what their favorite albums from each decade are! It was a very fun thought experiment, and I love thinking and writing about music, so I wanted to bring it here!
What's your favorite album from each decade? Going from the 60's to the 2020s. (You can go earlier if you're REAL into 40s and 50s music lol)
I'll put mine below~
I'll put my choices here, but I generally don't like picking a single "favorite" to capture all my tastes and feelings so I have a lot more to say beyond this.
50s - Kind of Blue, Miles David (1959)
60s - Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys (1966)
70s - Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd (1973)
80s - Double Nickels on the Dime, The Minutemen (1984)
90s - Flood, They Might Be Giants (1990)
2000s - Mm..Food, MF Doom (2004)
2010s - To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar (2015)
2020s - I genuinely don't think I've listened to enough music from the last 4 years to find a single album that I love. I guess Gorillaz latest album Cracker Island was pretty good.
60s and 70s are easy choices because my two favorite albums are Pet Sounds (1966) and Dark Side of the Moon (1973). However, most of my favorite music is from the 70s, and Dark Side of the Moon just stopped me from picking any of them.
If Dark Side of the Moon didn't exist, it would be a tough pick between a lot of great albums. As a few examples from the 70s in no particular order:
- Tea For the Tillerman, Cat Stevens (1970)
- All Things Must Pass, George Harrison (1970)
- Let It Be, The Beatles (1970)
- Workingman's Dead, The Greatful Dead (1970)
- Loaded, Velvet Underground (1970) (what a good year for music!!!)
- Yellow Magic Orchestra, Yellow Magic Orchestra (1977)
- 77, Talking Heads (1977) (the debut album of my favorite band)
- The B-52's, The B-52's (1979) (at least they have other stellar albums in the 80s, but my favorite song of theirs is on this one)
- Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie (1972)
- Wisdom Through Music, Pharoah Sanders (1972)
- Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder (1976)
- Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen (1975)
- Apostrophe ('), Frank Zappa (1974)
- I am stopping myself here or I will list albums forever
If Pet Sounds didn't exist, it might be tough to pick from the 60s, but honestly I'd probably pretty quickly land on Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) by the Kinks (1969). But there's also a ton of great jazz from the 50s and 60s, and A Love Supreme (1964) from John Coltrane would be a strong contender. As much as I like the Beatles (and I do like the Beatles!) there are simply other albums I like more than almost anything they did.
I unfortunately don't feel like I know enough jazz to pick a favorite 50s album. If I had to pick I'd probably go with Kind of Blue (1959), but Miles Davis has a lot of music I haven't really listened to much. That's just his one album that I know I've heard many times. I'm sure Coltrane has some stuff from the 50s I'd absolutely love, but I just haven't gotten to it. And the Raymond Scott album I listen to, Manhattan Research Inc., is comprised of songs mostly recorded in the 50s, but was compiled and released in 2000.
The 80s has Stop Making Sense (1984), but it feels unfair to include that, because it's a concert album of a lot of the best songs by my favorite band. The 80s also has True Stories (1986) (also Talking Heads), which is a movie soundtrack, and has a lot of songs I love. Little Creatures (1985) is another favorite TH album of mine, but only because of how high the highs are. The songs on it that I don't love I think hold it down a lot for me. Talking Heads are very much a band that I love for a lot of songs they did, but those songs were really spread out across a lot of albums. If I won't let myself pick Stop Making Sense, 77 is their only other album I'd rank close to as high, but it came out in the 70s. I'll try to redeem my Talking Heads fan status and say that my favorite individual song from the 80s was This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody), off of their album Speaking In Tongues (1983).
Also, the album I was about to pick for the 90s, I checked the year, and it actually came out in 1989. That one is Three Feet High And Rising by De La Soul. There's a lot of other great music from the 80s I haven't really gotten into. One friend of mine is a massive R.E.M. fan and I haven't really heard any of their music. Punk and hip hop really got big in the 80s, but I've heard relatively little of both. If anybody is curious to hear more about the album I did pick, I will gladly talk about Double Nickels on the Dime at length at any time.
I also want to give a special mention to Beasts of No Nation (1989) by Fela Kuti. It's an extremely political Afro Beat album that Kuti made to protest the Nigerian government that had jailed him for a few years. There's other music from Fela Kuti that I like, but this one is really just one of the best pieces of music I've ever heard. It's also half an hour long and a single song.
There's a lot of music from the 90s that I like, but I think relatively little that I love. Dookie is my second favorite Greenday album, but I like American Idiot quite a lot more. I listen to Beck's stuff from the 90s sometimes, but I would never call one of his albums a "favorite" of mine.
There is also a ton of hip hop from the 90s I haven't heard. I've listened to Low End Theory (1991) from A Tribe Called Quest a few times but haven't really been able to get super into it. But I haven't heard a single album from Wu-Tang Clan, from Biggie, from Tupac, from Public Enemy. The list goes on. It may be surprising considering what two decades of my favorite albums look like, but I have this massive gap in my music history education here.
After doing a thorough think on the 90s music I listen to regularly, I landed on three albums that I think are sticking with me for the long run. Flood (obviously), The Soft Bulletin (1999) by The Flaming Lips, and Operation Doomsday (1999) by MF Doom. I very nearly picked Operation Doomsday as my one favorite of the 90s, but I think Flood just barely ekes it out for me. But honestly shoutouts to MF Doom for making my two favorite albums of the 2000s (Mm..Food and Madvillainy, both in the same year) and also a top album of the 90s. Rest in peace, Doom.
Post 90s is where I really start falling off of music knowledge. I like Gorillaz a lot. I like Daft Punk a lot, and Discovery and Random Access Memories are both top albums for me. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is my favorite Flaming Lips album. But beyond that, there just isn't all that much from 2000 onwards that I listen to regularly. I also have a bad habit of only listening to one or two albums from a great band or artist, and MF Doom, despite making three of my favorite albums of the time, is an example of that. Those are his only three albums I've heard.
However, I don't want to make it look like To Pimp a Butterfly is just winning the 2010s by default. I'm In Your Mind Fuzz (2014) and Be the Cowboy (2018) are both excellent albums. Every Gorillaz album from that decade is fantastic. But I would genuinely be surprised if I hear anything from the 2010s that I like more than To Pimp a Butterfly. It is one of the strongest albums on this list. As much as I love music from the 70s, To Pimp a Butterfly is very comfortably in my top 10 favorite albums of all time.
Anyway this post is way longer than it needed to be, but I don't have many people to rave about music to, so I guess I'm letting that all out here lmao
I just wanna add that writing this post got me to make more of an effort to fill in my music gaps, and I listened to a 2pac album for the first time tonight. Me Against The World (1995) is a pretty good album. 🙂
I didn't find it super interesting instrumentally, which is usually what hooks me on first listens, and I pretty much always have trouble following lyrics on first listens regardless of genre, but the vocals here seemed good. I'll give it more listens, and try out one or two more of his albums. Even if I don't end up loving him, at least I'll have tried, lol.