Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Linear Nature of Time

    Go Go back Go back to the time before Before you did it Before they did it Before it was done to you Before the toast fell on the floor Before the catastrophe Before the mistake Before time’s scars Before   Go Go back Redeem it Rework it Fix it Go back   No you cannot Go back Star Liner
Post a Comment
Read more

The Screaming Silence

  As I have mentioned, I worked for two seasons on the Spotted Owl Survey for the US Forest Service back in the day. This involved setting up stations around areas that were scheduled for timber harvesting to see if there were owls nesting there. We would look at a topographic map and see where we needed to put stations (usually along logging roads) so that we could get complete coverage of the area to be harvested. We would go out during the day and mark these stations with ribbons, then at night we would go to each station and “hoot” for ten minutes. If we did not get a response, we would move on to the next station and so on until we could be sure there were no spotted owls in the vicinity. This meant we were working at night in the woods. There is a lot of wildlife activity at night in the woods. It is not just owls, a fair number of wildlife are nocturnal. We saw coyotes, bobcats, cougars, bats, frogs, deer, elk, among other things. But it was not just seeing the wildlife, ...
Post a Comment
Read more