The Artist of the Decade(s)

A week or two ago, I dropped a spoiler about my pick for Artist of the Decade for the 2010s. At that time, I released that while I've posted my list of favorite albums for each decade, I've never posted an Artist of the Decade list. So here it is.

You'll notice that I started with the '60s. I was born in 1957, so given that I was only 3 at the end of the 1950s, my only choice for Artist of the Decade for the '50s would have to be somebody I'd seen on Captain Kangaroo. [Frighteningly, while I have no idea who any of those artists were, all of those songs are still firmly stuck in my psyche: "The Very Next Payday (The Banjo's Gonna Get Fixed)," "Poor Little Robin," "The Horse in Striped Pajamas" -- I couldn't blast any of these songs out of my brain with a blowtorch. I'll probably remember them all long I've forgotten my own name.]

I suppose if I had to name one, I'd just go with Frank Sinatra, since I never really liked Elvis. (A couple of his ballads were OK, but other than that, I simply don't relate to him.)

But the decade where I first became musically aware was the 1960s, so we'll start there. I'll give you the list first, and then break it down year by year (including my honorable mentions).

Artist of the Decade

1960s - The Beatles (Honorable Mentions: The Rolling Stones, The Who)
1970s - Pink Floyd (Honorable Mentions: The Who, Jethro Tull)
1980s - U2 (Honorable Mentions: The Police, The Go-Go's)
1990s - Stephin Merritt (Honorable Mention: Nirvana)
2000s - Paramore (Honorable Mention: Bayside)
2010s - Bayside (Honorable Mentions: Foster the People, Stephin Merritt)


1960s - The Beatles (Honorable Mentions: The Rolling Stones, The Who)

I'd say that at least until the 1990s, it was considered obvious by most music fans that The Beatles were the top band of all time. I've noticed, though, that awareness of just how huge this band was has faded from the public consciousness for people born after the late '90s. Nowadays, it's not at all unusual to get a blank stare if you mention the band's name, and occasionally, I've heard of older teens responding with "Wasn't that Paul McCartney's band before Wings?"

Nevertheless, these guys were a juggernaut for people of my generation. They were the band that all other bands were measured against (and found wanting). Their reign was relatively short, given that some of their cohorts have now been around for forty or fifty years. John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison started playing as the Beatles in 1959 (they'd begun playing under different names in 1957) -- and they broke up in 1970. (Ringo Starr joined as the drummer in 1962, just before they got famous).

But if looking back, we can see that their career as a band was short and sweet (well, short, anyway), it virtually all occurred in the sixties. The only studio album released after that was Let It Be, and while it's not a terrible album, if it had never been released, their reputation wouldn't have been harmed much at all.

They started out with a string of pop rock hits from the early-through-mid '60s, which led to them becoming teen idols who were followed everywhere by hordes of screaming adolescent girls. At this point, they became more "serious" artists, writing more sophisticated songs, and stretching the boundries of rock with concept albums like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and LPs that experimented with different genres like The White Album. They're credited as the main cause of the so-called British Invasion (Brit bands taking over the American music scene) of the 1960. And Wikipedia still lists them as the best-selling band in history, and as the best-selling music artists ever in the U.S.

While I've enjoyed a lot of The Beatles' music over the years, I can't say I've ever felt emotionally close to this band. I loved a lot of their early pop stuff -- I grew up with The Beatles cartoon show, which featured three or four of their songs on every episode. Unfortunately, while I owned copies of Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road, and a couple of singles, at home shortly thereafter, my parents banned me from buying any more Beatles music for most of my teens. I'm not sure if it was Lennon's declaration that The Beatles were bigger than God -- it could have been, although neither of my parents were especially religious. I think what really broke it for them was John and Yoko's nude stunt in the department store window. I remember my mother referring to Lennon as "an animal". To be fair, I don't entirely disagree.

In any event, I've told you all before that when I got my first transistor in the mid-'60s, I was firmly on the side of The Monkees in the great Beatles/Monkees grammar school debates. And in the years after this band broke up, while there where some songs I liked in each of John, Paul and George's post-Beatles years, I like Harrison's output much better than either of the other two's. Paul's work was too often mawkish and insipid, and Lennon's was too full-of-Yoko. I also found John and Paul both annoying as people. I'm sorry that John was killed so young, but to me, he was a petulant teen who never grew up, and McCartney and his wife's militant vegetarianism that they forced on all of their road crew was goofy and offensive. This was one of the reasons I enjoyed it when Howard Stern declared to Ringo fifteen or so years ago that he had outlasted the others and was now "the best-looking Beatle".

But in spite of some of my personal feelings about the band, I think that any objective assessment would have to name them the Artist of the Decade for the 1960s.

I'd loved to have named The Who. I've shared many times in this blog that I consider them to be the greatest band of all time. But while I enjoy many of their early songs, their first work of pure genius didn't occur until 1969 with Tommy. And the rest of their best output all happened in the seventies.

I therefore gave my first honorable mention for the decade to The Rolling Stones. While they also split most of their best work between the sixties and the seventies (and my favorite Stones album, Sticky Fingers was released in 1971), an overwhelming number of what most people would consider their "greatest hits" occurred in the sixties. This includes tracks like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", "Paint It Black", "Sympathy for the Devil" "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Street Fightin' Man", among many, many others. It also includes some of my personal (quirkier) favorites like "Ruby Tuesday", "Dandelions" and "Lady Jane".


1970s: Pink Floyd (Honorable Mentions: The Who, Jethro Tull)

For me, the two greatest runs in rock music history were the three-album run by The Who from Tommy (1969) through Quadrophenia (1973) and the four-album run by Pink Floyd from The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) through The Wall (1979). If Tommy had been released in 1970 instead of 1969, I'd have given the very narrow nod for Artist of the Decade to The Who. (And lest you get at all swayed by the number of albums by each band - four Floyd LPs to three by The Who -- I'd remind you that Tommy, Quadrophenia and The Wall were all double albums, so we're really talking five vs. five discs.)

But Tommy wasn't released in the seventies, so the decision goes to Floyd. (And I should mention that Pink Floyd also released Meddle in 1971, which sweetens the pot and tilts the decision in their favor even more.)

When I wrote about the history of Pink Floyd in depth last year, I pointed out how they went through several distinct periods, starting out as Syd Barrett's weird little psychedelic band in the mid-sixties, then entering a period of transition as the Waters-Gilmour duo tried to find their voice (through some really weird-ass albums like Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother), before turning into the Pink Floyd that most of think of today.

What can I say about that amazing four-album run? I've already stated that I believe Wish You Were Here to be greatest album ever released. Meanwhile, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall are two of the best-selling LPs of all time (Dark Side has charted on the Billboard 200 chart for more than 900 weeks total). And Animals weren't too shabby either.

The Who clearly deserves my top Honorable Mention spot for reasons already stated. (They also released The Who By Numbers and Who Are You during this decade, and while neither of these albums are favorites of mine, Who Are You in particular was loved by many.)

As for Jethro Tull, they've always been one of my most-loved bands. (Maybe even my favorite.) Their seventies output included such popular releases as Aqualung, Thick As A Brick and Songs from the Wood, as well as a few others I particularly admire, Heavy Horses and War Child.

Fans of other bands will cry out for their favorite artists, and I get it. For me (due, in large part I'm sure, to my age,) the 1970s was the greatest decade for music, followed by the 1980s and the 1960s. But these were my guys.


1980s: U2 (Honorable Mentions: The Police, The Go-Go's)

I really wanted to give this decade to The Police. And I would have if their first two albums hadn't been released in the late seventies.

But in all honesty, U2 was the supergroup of the 1980s. Like the Beatles in the '60s, virtually all of their best work was released during this decade, with the exception of Actung Baby, which came in 1991. I'll be the first to tell you that I consider their biggest selling album The Joshua Tree (1987) to be the equivalent of Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. -- somewhat overrated, and largely popular due to the general public finally catching up to them slightly after they'd released their best work. But I consider The Unforgettable Fire and (to a lesser extent) War to be underrated LPs. And while I don't really feel that any of their other album releases during the '80s passed the threshold of greatness overall (their first one, Boy, probably came the closest), they yielded a number of well-known and much beloved songs, including "I Will Follow", "Gloria", "Desire", "Angel of Harlem" and "All I Want Is You".

The Police released three studio albums in the '80s. Zenyatta Mondatta was certainly one of my favorites, with tracks like "Don't Stand So Close to Me", "Canary in a Coalmine", and "De Do Do Do Do, De Da Da Da", and the band reached full supergroup level with Synchronicity (1983), which went 8x Platinum. [And while I personally didn't love Ghost in the Machine (1981) as much as the other two, a lot of other people did, thanks in part to tracks like "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" and "Spirits in the Material World".] Unfortunately, at the height of their popularity, when Synchronicity pushed them to U2 levels of popularity, they called it quits as a band. Yeah, Sting finished out the decade with a pair of successful solo releases, and Andy Summers did some tasty team-up work with Robert Fripp. But it doesn't count for The Police. So embrace this chant, guys: "We're Number 2! We're Number 2!"

I know The Go-Gos are kind of an idiosyncratic choice for an honorable mention here. But Talk Show (1984) and Beauty and the Beat (1981) were two of my favorite albums of the decade, and while I found Vacation (1982) to be a more uneven album, the title track is certainly an iconic one.


1990s: Stephin Merritt (Honorable Mention: Nirvana)

I've made no bones about the fact that I thought music started declining in the mid-'90s. Call it the "American Idol Effect", if you will. But that doesn't mean there wasn't still some great stuff out there.

To me, far and away the best songwriter of the decade was Stephin Merritt. He's a throwback to the songwriters of the early 20th Century like George Gershwin and Jule Styne, albeit with a much darker sense of humor. I named Merritt solo because he was involved with four separate projects during the nineties. But however much people might have enjoyed The 6ths and The Gothic Archies, the heavy lifting for this decade was done by his two main projects, The Magnetic Fields and Future Bible Heroes.

Both of these bands contain both Merritt and his manager/friend/social director Claudia Gonson. There have been various other people involved with The Magnetic Fields over the years, while Future Bible Heroes has always consisted of Merritt, Gonson and synthesizer madman Chris Ewen. FBH actually only released one LP in 1990s (and three LPs to date overall), but what an LP it was -- Memories of Love (1997), which was my #1 album of the '90s. (They also released one EP during the decade.) Magnetic Fields released six LPs and one EP, the standout of which was Merritt's opus, 69 Love Songs (1999) [although Get Lost (1995) was also pretty great.] They should also be noted for their single, 1991's "100,000 Fireflies", which was something of a cult hit on college radio (and is still one of those songs that earnest kids post cover videos for on YouTube -- my favorite is by some nameless girl who uses an Omnichord (OM-84)*. (Actually, her name might be Joanna Newsom. Or it might not be. I'm not sure.)

Merritt's music is very lo-fi and under-produced. He says it's not even rock, and who am I to argue? But for me, he was the most meaningful artist of this particular decade.

My one honorable mention goes to Nirvana. Their output was sparse, consisting entirely of their masterpiece, Nevermind and their follow-up near-masterpiece, In Utero. (Plus an odds-and-sods kind of comp called Incesticide). Following these, of course, Kurt Cobain put  a shotgun blast through his own fool skull (or was murdered by wife Courtney Love, if you're a conspiracy theorist). But the two studio albums were both great, and they were largely responsible for the (again, short-lived) grunge music rage and subsequent fawning over Seattle by the music industry.

2000s: Paramore (Honorable Mention: Bayside)

With the advent of American Idol, and the dawn of prefabricated pop stars like The Spice Girls, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, I spent much of the late '90s and the early 2000's rummaging through first college and independent music and then, my own local music scene, to scratch my musical itch. Paramore was the band that brought me back to the national music scene.

It happened innocently enough. I heard of them somewhere, and picked up Riot! (2007) shortly thereafter. I'd heard "Misery Business", and liked it enough in a fairly casual way. I have to admit, the album didn't make an impression initially, and I don't think I even listed it in my Best of 2007 list. I'm no longer sure what it was that made me go back and give the album a second listen. I suspect it was one of the follow-up singles, possibly "Crushcrushcrush," but more likely (due to the timeline -- it wasn't released as a single until 2008) "That's What You Get". Right around that same time, the Twilight soundtrack came out, which featured both "Decade" and "I Caught Myself". I went back to Riot!, and it clicked for me like no other album had since Memories of Love.

At that point, I literally couldn't get enough of this band. I went back and purchased All We Know Is Falling (2005), and snatched up Brand New Eyes (2009) as soon as it came out. I was passionate about this band like I hadn't been for any other artist in a long time. They were even somewhat involved in my children's adoption, although that's a story I'll save for another day. But this was my new favorite group.

At the time, I would have told you it was all about Hayley Williams, a little bit of a girl with a great big voice. Unfortunately, I later learned it was almost equal parts Hayley Williams and guitarist/songwriter Josh Farro, when Josh and his brother Zac (the drummer) left the band. (Zac later returned.) With Josh Farro, Paramore was a driving pop-punk that could also slow it down for ballads. Without him, they've become an above-average pop band - not bad, but not great either. Their last two albums have been nowhere near as good as Riot! or Brand New Eyes. (And maybe even not as good as All We Know Is Falling.) But hey, nobody stays great forever. So, on the strength of those three albums in the 2000s, Paramore is my Artist of that Decade for the 2000s.

My honorable mention here goes to the Queens, NY-based band Bayside. Their output consisted of four studio albums in this decade, Sirens & Condolences (2004), Bayside (2005), The Walking Wounded (2007) and Shudder (2008). (Of these, the self-titled album and Shudder were my favorites.) Equal parts pop punk and emo, this band features driving guitars, powerful vocals by lead vocalist and somgwriter Anthony Raneri (with strong backing vocals by Jack O'Shea and Nick Ghanbarian), and painfully honest lyrics by Raneri. These guys survived a horrible van accident in 2005 that killed their drummer and severely injured Ghanbarian. My favorite songs of theirs over the course of this decade included "Existing in a Crisis (Evelyn)" (one of the best f.u. songs to an ex- ever written), "Devotion and Desire," "Winter" (a tribute to their late drummer John Holohan, released on a live acoustic album), "Choice Hops and Bottled Self-Esteem", and most of Shudder.

2010s: Bayside (Honorable Mentions: Foster the People, Stephin Merritt)

To be continued with more about Bayside. These guys have continued galloping on in the 2010s, releasing four more amazingly consistent albums. I'm still getting to know their newest, Interrobang (2019), but it's clear that this one is another winner, to go along with their other releases Killing Time (2011), Cult (2014) and Vacancy (2016). Killing Time is my least favorite of their 2010 studio albums, but it did include one of their best songs, "Sick, Sick, Sick". Other primo tracks in the 2010s include "Stuttering" and "Mary", plus a pair from the new one, the title track "Interrobang" and "Walk It Off", about what it's like to be raised as a boy. (This last one is an answer to all of those "whiny chicks singing about their feelings" songs that my daughter always accuses me of listening to).

First honorable mention goes to Foster the People. This alternapop band's debut Torches (2011) was one of the best albums of the decade, and featured the immensely popular hit "Pumped Up Kicks". Their two follow-up LPs, Supermodel (2014) and Sacred Hearts Club (2017) weren't quite as strong as that first album, but they were both very solid efforts.

The second honorable mention goes, once again, to Stephin Merritt. After a somewhat lackluster decade to kick off the century, he came back in the 2010s with two albums poised to make my Best of the Decade list, Future Bible Heroes' Partygoing (2013), and The Magnetic Fields' second opus, 50 Song Memoir.

So that's my list of Artists of the Decade from the 1960s through the 2010s. We'll see how the 2020's kick off next year.


* Since I mentioned that "100,000 Firefly" cover, let me give a shout out to my other favorite YouTube cover, an extravaganza put together by a young woman named Fernanda Alba covering Nightwish's "The Greatest Show on Earth", which features her collaborating on the song with young musicians all over the globe. Nice one, Fernanda.