Best Rock Albums of each Decade

I am making my selection for the best rock albums of each decade (in my opinion). You are going to disagree with me; of course you are. All art is subjective, but music is the artform that everybody has the strongest opinions on. Everybody is an expert on their own favorite music. And everyone is right!

Rock and roll was born in the 1950’s, but I am going to skip the 1950’s because I wasn’t there and it is not quite the same thing to listen retroactively to music as it is to be brought up with it. The 60’s and 70’s are going to be hardest to pick because this was the music of my formative years. Do you ever hear music the way you did when you were growing up?

1960’s

Abbey Road -- The Beatles. If it is the 60’s, the best album has to be from The Beatles, and there are many to choose from, but I am going to give it to their swan song, an album that showed how far they had come from their beginnings.

Honorable Mentions:

Surrealistic Pillow -- Jefferson Airplane

Days of Future Passed -- The Moody Blues

The Doors -- The Doors

1970’s

Led Zeppelin 4 -- Led Zeppelin (If for no other reason than the fact that it has the greatest rock song of all time. But the rest of the album is no slouch either).

Honorable mentions:

Damn the Torpedos -- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

The Dark Side of the Moon -- Pink Floyd

In the Heat of the Night -- Pat Benatar

Rumours -- Fleetwood Mac

Dreamboat Annie -- Heart

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road -- Elton John

Equinox -- Styx

1980’s

Pat Benatar . . . yeah, just any album by Pat Benatar in the 80’s

Honorable mentions:

Escape -- Journey

The Joshua Tree -- U2

Synchronicity -- the Police

1990’s

Violator – Depeche Mode

Honorable Mentions:

The Black album -- Metallica

Nevermind – Nirvana

The Division Bell – Pink Floyd

2000’s

Fallen – Evanescence

Honorable mentions:

Hot Fuss – The Killers

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb – U2

2010’s

The Greatest Show on Earth – Nightwish

Honorable mention:

The Unforgiving – Within Temptation

What can I say? As I get older I become less aware of popular music. My listening practices have become sporadic and more niche. And the industry itself has changed. LP’s giving way to CD’s, giving way to Napster, giving way to streaming. These are albums that hit me in the right way at that particular point in my life’s journey. This list says less about what makes a great rock album than it does about what makes me, me.

Star Liner

Comments

Empathy

Websters defines Empathy as: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” Empathy is what makes us human, though lord knows there are many humans who don’t seem to have any. A person without empathy is like a caveman, only concerned for himself. Selfish. It is a lack of community and by extension, a lack of the need for civilization. The person who lacks empathy can have a bit of community, but only with others exactly like himself. It seems like societies go through cycles of empathy and less empathy. Sometimes a single event can change the course of society. Prior to America’s involvement in WWII, the general feeling in America was not very empathetic. We had our own problems. We were still dealing with the lingering effects of the Great Depression, and had been for years. That kind of stress makes it hard to think of others. Hitler was slashing through Europe. He and his fol...

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...

Polar Bears and Entropy

Extinction is a normal part of the evolution of life on our planet. You and I and all individual organisms eventually die. That is the way of things. Entropy happens. Entropy is a word from the third law of thermodynamics that basically means: things fall apart. The natural tendency is for things to become less orderly as time goes on: things break down, things erode, things rust, things wear out. Entropy is a measurement of how fast that is happening in any given system. Individual death is a natural outcome of entropy. But an extinction is where all the members of a species are no longer living. Millions of species have gone extinct over the lifetime of our planet. There are natural background extinctions that happen continually. But sometimes there are events that trigger mass extinctions, where vast masses of species go extinct all at once (all at once in geologic terms, which might mean over the course of hundreds of years). There have been 5 mass extinctions over ...

A speculative mind

Search This Blog