That's me in the 90s, but I still equally appreciate music from far before I was born. It's in a different context, yea, but the common denominator here is that the reason I don't like most 80s music has nothing to do with not being old enough to have been swept up in it.

I think we're saying the same thing though... that the credit 80s music gets, as good music, is [mostly] tied to people being ripe for that time period.

I was just coming at it from a different angle, I think.

As Il Duce said not that much is up with that, you were a teenager and so probably into current music in the 90s. Still, you might have had some songs you heard off the radio from the 80s that you remember, although that music was better in the first half of the 80s which being only a baby then you would have hardly remembered.

Of course 80s music has become fashionable because the teenagers of that generation have grown up and are championing it and have nostalgia for it. I also think though that the music quality can back that up. People will have the same remembrance for 90s music soon as well. But I agree with the earlier comment that all decades have good music, you just have to look more to find it. I do feel some people (not saying you) just use the fact that they don't like a particular style of music (often just meaning they haven't tried much with it) to just damn a period.

i can't vouch for the quality of 80s music but things were so much more fun then, as opposed to the dour 90s and the virtually faceless 00s

Personally don't like much from the 80s but the 90s weren't much better.

Would you elaborate more on this?

Honestly, the face of the 00s at least on the most mainstream level is just a cheap imitation of he 80s.

However, on a non-pure-top-40s level it's far more diverse due to Internet diversity. I would say though pitchfork's shamelessly lo-fi garage-blues-psychadellic-noise type music is 00s specific. Albeit, that's mostly just imitating the 60s and/or the 90s.

there's no identifiable dominant new sub-genre or any "new" fashion sense

I hated the 80s, I'm glad I'll never have to go through that again. When I think of the 80s I think of a cheap & tacky plastic decade with no substance.

As for the music, well pretty much all of the good stuff from that decade I discovered in the 90s when I went looking for it.

Basically if you didn't live through the 80s you didn't miss much.

The 80s were great! I'm sure I'm extremely biased because I was child during that time, but to me the 80s were a time when everything just seemed so fresh and new and sleek. It was a time when there was both catchy, super-poppy pop music and an incredible explosion of underground music in such a wide variety of styles.

In 30 years time people will look back at the music from now and say it is laughably dated, because most people don't make the effort to understand earlier styles.