What was the worst year for popular music?

My sister has a great bumper sticker:

"I may be old, but I got to see all the cool bands when they were still cool"

 

On a semi-related note, I took my son to see the Dead Kennedys recently. I didn't see them back in the early 1980s (I was a bit too young), but I was into punk and saw a lot of shows during my time.

On the one hand, it was great to be able to share this experience (and not for the first time, having taken him to the Zero Boys a few years earlier). He also got to meet the guitar player and bassist after the show, which was very cool. But the experience also was a little depressing, because...

1. Lead singer Jello Biafra has been a long-running dispute with the rest of the band since they sued him (and won) over royalties, so he wasn't there. That sucked about 95 percent of the personality out of the band.

2. With a pretty lame singer to replace him, and a crowd of old punks such as myself (and new ones trying to look like what the old ones used to look like), the show had the feel of a bunch of people play-acting. (That wasn't the case with the Zero Boys, which had basically the original band back, though subsequently there was a dispute and a critical half of them left.)

3. When we met bassist Klaus Flouride (cq), he noted he was 65 years old. Holy shit! That's three years older than my birth mother. It made ME feel old.

4. However, my 17-year-old son had a great time, discovering he liked divey bars with a great beer selection and Mario Bava movies on repeat on the TV screens. (No, I didn't get him a beer.) I encouraged him, especially once he got to college, to check out shitty bands in basements and places far worse than where we were, and that will be the fun part, even though the music might suck. So, in the end, a very positive experience.

 

Where is this Mario Bava dive bar?

 

I hope for your son's sake they didn't play "Too Drunk to Fuck."

 

Bubbler, it was the Bottom Lounge at Lake and Ogden, a stone's throw from the United Center. And of course they played "Too Drunk to Fuck." And "Nazi Punks Fuck Off."

 

This excellent fatherly advice. I couldn't agree more.

 

2003 is your only answer.

50 Cent, Sean Paul, Chingy, and "Picture" by Kid Rock...AND THAT'S ALL IN THE TOP 10.

Although, I guess in its defense, it also gave us the beginnings to solo Timberlake, and "Lose Yourself."

Wait, it gave us Clay Aiken. All positivity is out the door.

2003 is the worst.

 

Greatest song released during the 80s. Is East Bay Ray still the guitarist for the Kennedys?

 

Woodstock '99 totally summed it all up: An awful lineup (Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock the headlining acts), together with rampant price-gouging and commercialism. If the original Woodstock was a classic act, then paying $10 for bottled water at a shuttered Air Force Base -- 150 miles from the original site, no less -- made the whole thing a cheap cover band.

I was a sophomore in college that year, disgusted as ever. Not even the release of the Marshall Mathers LP could save the year in music from -- like Woodstock '99 -- going up in flames.

 

Also released in 1999:

 

Head scratcher: Name someone more popular than Phil Collins who is more terrible than he is.

 

One of my college friends went - it was going to be the high-water mark of his life. It was his pilgrimage ... and he came away thoroughly disgusted and disappointed with the event.