Which decade's music most resembles the music of the 60s (and how and why)?

Going by the twenty-year-revival law, it would seem to be the eighties. The first thing that comes to mind here is the Paisley Underground (and all that stuff on the Children of Nuggets Box) — since this was a marginal movement, it might not seem like a substantial argument, though.

I also feel like the eighties were more of a singles decade than the seventies, even if album sales were actually greater. The seventies seems more like a decade full of big album statements (prog for instance), whereas in the eighties MTV arguably reasserted the primacy of the single. But this isn't necessarily a musical observation.

I'll also casually throw out the idea that authenticity had more value overall in the seventies than in the eighties, and that both in the sixties and eighties there was more emphasis on studio-crafted music. I'm thinking of the way records by, say, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell changed in the eighties, although neither made their most successful/canonical music during that time. And some of Young's sixties work (judging from Decade) is also more produced. It might sound wacky to assert that people were unconcerned with authenticity in the sixties, and I'm sure a lot of folks were, but maybe the sense of newness music seemed to have back then would have made it harder for someone to argue about what counted as authentic. In the '80s, it might have been less about experimentation than studio perfection, and in that sense I might draw a (really crude) comparison between Phil Spector and Stock-Aitken-Waterman. Of course, a lot of the '80s music I'm thinking of grew out of disco, which was blasted for inauthenticity.

As for the '90s and '00s, I haven't really got a handle on to generalize about either of these decades yet — it feels like the '90s achieved a new peak of retro fetishism (which has perhaps increased since), but I came of age in that decade so I actually understood that things were being referenced or borrowed from in a way I wouldn't have as a kid in the eighties. I suppose the folk revival and flirtations with tin pan alley in the sixties have their own retro aspect, too.

I bet everything I've said here has been said by someone else already on this board (and subsequently dismissed), but I'll hit "Submit Response" anyway.

The 70s. Particularly when the 50s is no option.

At least until punk, the 70s were mainly about building on the heritage from The Beatles and all those psych/hippie bands. Several of the biggest acts of the first half of the 70s also had a background from other popular 60s acts.

Surely there was a Motown revival in the 80s and Britpop in the 90s. But the 70s it is.

I voted the 80's because I think those '80's Sonic Youth records are pretty groovy.

plus wasn't there a garage rock revival in the 80's?

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