I definitely agree with the GP. Here’s a list of top ten songs by year:
http://www.billyjamesmusic.com/erasongs.htm
This is an old meme because it’s been arguably been true since the 90’s.
According to that list, the sixties, seventies and eighties clearly beat the nineties in my biased opinion.
Part of it might just be a genre shift: The only rock songs that made the cut in the 90s were one each from Meat Loaf, Aerosmith, Eric Clapton, and Nirvana.
I think there’s a paradox where more excellent music is being produced every year, but genre fragmentation and the sheer diversity of it means the stuff that bubbles to the top gets more and more generic.
It’s like we used to get brie and roquefort, but now we have a larger vat, and velveeta is what floats to the top.
