Rock Music: 1951-1976 vs. 1977-2003

Rock has certainly grown to more professional levels if we measure v.s....

Look-up Jethro Tull throughout their career: They always grow and make a progress towards sophistication techniques and were becoming more and more interesting with every new album they made especially during 80's.

Same with King Krimson merged with Yes drummer Bill Brufford in 1976.

Interesting note can be found on Talking Heads started as punk band and than after David Byrne separated from them and merged with Brian Eno producing highly sophisticated and interesting records. Further-on David Byrne merged with Laurie Anderson realy starting a new era of experimental artistic and newly developed rock.

The almost same path took Phil Manzanera towards David Byrne and Brian Eno also with successfull intersection with Robert Wyatt from Soft Machine.

The very trivial example with Paul McCartney who begun to merge with Scoffield, Sanborn, Andy Summers(BTW another great rock evolution example) to produce a very serious level of music compared to trivial Beatles. Even Beatles albums became to be more sophisticated starting 70's due to more desire to progress certainly driven by Paul.

Along with american classic rock Europe developed in mid-70's their own Jazz-Rock less known in US but was different and interesting by its difference.

And that's realy where the v.s. difference lies IMO i.e. higher sophistication, blending with jazz and blues, involving more electronics even involving classical music as well. Also in addition there were Heavy Metal and Hard Rock that were less-sophisticated but was a good way too get the crowd up as I guess was the realy first meaning of rock.

As a 39 year old music fan who basically grew up in the later era and who is still as enthuasiastic about new music as he ever was....then I have to say clearly the early era is superior.
It isn't even close.
I do actually think most of that was down to the artists having pretty much a blank canvas to work on.
It's also impossible to imagine another set of musicians having the worldwide cultural impact The Beatles had.
What has happened in my mind as the rock/popular form has progressed and expanded into hundreds of sub-cultures.
I think that in the modern day things at least seem much more split into their own genres-that's a bit of a generalisation but I believe it mostly to be true.
Of course there has been some fantastic music since 1977 but in straight comparison the early era simply wins out not on music but also in terms of icons.
Marakanetz makes some good points but that is in specialised genres.
The big problem in modern music is the lack of the magical mixture of fantastic musicianship and charisma,mystique,star quality call it what you will.
The UK probably hasn't produced a great cultural icon with real musical roots since Morrissey at his peak with The Smiths-which is twenty years ago.
This will cause a riot but America's only crossover in these terms since Kurt Cobain is indeed Eminem.
Of course the world has changed and the music business is now a completely different animal on various levels-records now are CD length-a silly idea since the classic era meant records of 36 mins-not to mention a genre born out of single releases-there's been a bit of a backlash recently but still we have music releases now at CD length.
There still a lot of great new music being produced but you need to dig to find it and accept not many are going to pull it off over 70 mins.
I think you can safely accept that perhaps the golden era of rock music will never be repeated but if you can keep your enthuasiasm and an open mind then you can continue to find great music both new and old.
The great thing I think about getting older (for me at least) is that you can also expand your tastes into other areas you wouldn't have considered in your youth.
Didn't Bob Dylan (shot voice or not ) release a record a couple of years back that sits with some justification amongst the best of his fantastic body of work?
In fact Dylan to some extent has lived through all these era's and although his best work remains clearly pre-'77-I still enjoy listening through the debris of his terrible releases,shoddy productions,mistakes,returns to form and find gems of songs and about 6 great to brilliant albums.
Where there's life there is hope.

If we assume Rock Music as a musical genre then early examples of the genre are generally simpler and more accessible than later ones. Early adopters also needed to be more creative to push the envelope of the genre. Similarly with Jazz, Regae, Punk, Opera, Minimalist, ... whatever. Now my age dictates that I'm not very accepting of new genres, like rap, hip-hop, european dance music. And with our penchant for revisionist history it's always nice to revist the newly minted rosey past. On much better media in high-tech hometheater systems. But then again our penchant for revisionist history dictates that analog is the way to go !

As an aside I think the fact that we have the music on static media that does not wear out performed by the original artists has slowed down development of music because there's less incentive to cover well written songs to develop and morph them into newer genres. Unless the artists performance was terrible in the first place, but ...

Jafox: You hit it on the head. If i was stuck listening to only "rock" music from those years, i wouldn't be all that upset. Most newer music, at least what gets commercial airplay ( and that's not saying much ) is extremely repetitive and lacking in originality. Nowadays, it truly is a case of "one size fits all" if you know what i mean.... Sean
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Interesting post, onhwy61. Trying to decide which era produced the "best music" is tough. I can pick certain groups like Rare Earth, Yes, Little Feat and even the Monkeys and find gems of musicality from the 1951-1976 years. After 1977 I can again find great music from Morphine, Depeche Mode, Suzanne Vega and others. Based only on the music I cannot decide which era is best.

For me, the 1951-1976 era was my "growing up" era. I listened to music with friends and my world was being formed with music all around me. Songs and groups became associated with memories and those memories trigger a feeling of greatness for those songs. When I hear a lot of those songs I can remember where I was, who I was with, what time of day it was, etc. There aren't too many songs from 1977 and later which I associate with events, friends, new discoveries, etc. I believe, for most people, the "growing up" era produces the best music. As great as the "growing up" era was for music, today I need different sounds, something I haven't heard before. It's almost as if I thrive on knowing what's new and I am looking for different sounds to rock me. I find artists like Keller Williams, Radiohead and Beck very different and in years to come I will relegate them to the "oldies" bin and I will try to find new, fresh artists. With that said, I would rather listen to music from the 1977-2003 era.