One of my friends, when he was in college, took a class on the 60's where the professor defined the 60's as 1964 up through 1975.

Looking at when the major changes in musical taste happened, I'm starting to think it might have been better to define our own decades instead of just using the digit that happens to be in the tens place of the year.

Like, perhaps...

1964-1976: Classic rock
1977-1987: Punk/New wave/Guys with unnecessarily complex hairstyles who scream
1988-1995: Noisy rock, grunge, post-grunge, electronica, and basically all the messy depressive stuff people listened to because they were tired of the glossy overproducedness of the 80's
1996-present: Dominance of rap and dance-pop over mainstream music

The exact boundaries, obviously, are up for debate.

I don't think you can divide pop music history into connecting sections, it makes more sense to have them overlap. For example you consider electronica as having ended in 1995 with the end of Nirvana, but Moby, Crystal Method, Fatboy Slim, Chemical Brothers, etc. all had major hits around 2000, hits that trumped everything that came before. You also say rap came directly after grunge. Rap has been littering the charts since "Rapper's Delight". Licensed to Ill was a #1 album. Public Enemy, Run DMC and Wu-Tang clan were huge, and well before '95. There are all sorts of music audiences out there. Saying that everyone listened to classic rock, then punk rock, then grunge is wild oversimplification. What about U2? REM? Springsteen? They weren't hair metal and they were hugely popular in the 80's. Iggy Pop? Stax? Motown? Spector? You can't call that classic rock.

1960 - Death of Eddie Cochran
1970 - Death of Jimi Hendrix
1980 - Death of John Lennon

I don't think we'd get any kind of consensus on the time frames. Digits seem to work pretty well.

1955-1964: The Early, informative years
1965-1969: The years of expansion and experimentalism, the Summer of Love and reaction to Vietnam
1970-1979: The dream is over, rock goes corporate, punk is the reaction to that
1980-1990: Punk implodes, going deep underground, New wave, rap, MTV and hair metal take over
1991-1998: Nirvana changes face of radio, 'alternative' music has no meaning anymore. Other underground styles of music and rap hit the mainstream
1999-present: The cross-pollination of genres leads to a melting pot of music with fewer distinct styles

And I'm sure everyone here would have their own version.

P.S. It's '60s, not 60's

Does anyone else consider '84 a crucial year? If I had to declare an official date for the end of punk - and I know I don't, but I like to - it'd be the year that Double Nickels, Let It Be and Zen Arcade dropped (given a slightly wider timeframe, and genre-width, one could also include Murmur, The Smiths, Meat Puppets II, and Power, Corruption...). There were harbingers of the end - Mission of Burma, Flipper, etc. - but I think that triple-bomb was really the sign that punk had morphed into something else.

54-58
59-63
64-73
74-76
77-82
83-87
88-93
94-98
99-02
03-08

Guess what's to file under those era.

Well I guess I'd do it like this...at least for Pop Music.

pre-1954 = pre-Elvis (regardless of if you like him, he changed the musical landscape)
1954-64 = Somewhat naive, happy pop music
1964-1969 = British invasion + Motown + Bob Dylan: a golden age
1970-1976 = Death of the hippie era, relatively commercial rock
1977-1982 or 1983 = Punk, New Wave, disco
1984-1991 = Awesome music underground, shit-ass music mainstream except for Prince, U2 and BRUCE!
1991-1997 = Golden age of mainstream rock, indie rock, hip-hop as a reaction to late 80s crap
1998-2001 = Shite. Music gets way too produced and boy bands/Britney Spears take over...unless you go underground where a lot of gems were produced.
2001- = The rise of exposure. I personally think we're living in a a golden age because of the ability for everyone and their mother to make music. Plus, access is unprecidented. I hate the radio and now I never have to listen to it and, generally, people now can listen to what they want when they want. I think trends have somewhat waned because there's always someone making some sort of music somewhere that appeals to someone else. If I wanted to listen to great Latin Gospel, I'm sure I could find it thanks to new means of access. I'm sure this also occured as a backlash to the crap on the radio/MTV in the late 90s.

There was plenty of pop music before Elvis. Swing, Modern pop, Cool Jazz, Blues, Folk Revival, Bluegrass, Tin Pan Alley, R&B, Ragtime, etc.

That's a pretty good summary of periods Rocky!

2009 –

A relatively unknown singer-songwriter from Alberta, Canada releases his debut album to much fanfare and critical acclaim. Immediately hailed as a "classic", the album quickly gains a large and devoted worldwide following from fans and well-respected musicians. Combining the diversity of Buckley’s “Grace”, the experimentation of Steven’s “Illinois”, with the tender, country poignancy of Young’s “After the Gold Rush” and the intimate, late-night feel of Drake’s “Pink Moon”, the album single-handedly revives the music-industry and within a year, climbs to the top of several greatest-album-of-all-time charts, and in a miraculous turn, brings world peace. The musical landscape is forever changed.

Anthony, are you talking about Chad Kroeger's upcoming solo release?

-> Slush
LOL

Yeah, I agree you can't clearly cut rock history into decades without overlap. But for the purposes of rock criticism sometimes it helps to, and it's clear that there's a huge sweeping change around 1976 or 1977, one that started in the late 80s and culminated in 1991.

And I would definitely call 1998-2006 an era where the indie scene is quietly building up but rock disappears from mainstream and is replaced by only dance-pop and rap. 1998 is also the year MTV went from having 60 videos on their playlist to only having like 20, which is kind of a symbolic shift in attitudes.

You could say right now is the beginning of a new era where other genres like Country start to gain more popularity and the internet makes indie rock more accessible to people.

Impossible. Every single year has it's trends and it's rebels and it is completely impossible to define music by eras. I don't have a problem with genre lumping but you can't do it by years. You could say that so and so years were the best years for music but that's probably because there were so many styles doing different things. If the 60's were just about the Beatles, Motown and Dylan I don't think anybody could claim that the 60's were amazing for music.

I'd say the Beatles, Motown and Dylan were pretty amazing. Still are!

I think the problem with all this is that it assumes the whole world gets their music from the same place. There's more than one channel on TV! Sure, punk was a big deal for a lot of people, but for most of the world, it wasn't! Heck, for most of the POP MUSIC world it wasn't! Think Joni Mitchell threw away her piano and started writing 3 chord rockers? Or that Bruce Springsteen went bankrupt because of the Ramones? Nashville probably still doesn't know who the Sex Pistols were! We like to exaggerate the importance of certain trends to make mainstream music fandom more comprehensive but history is much messier than that.

There have been more than a few trends in rock music. History has proven so far one their has been one group or act on it's own that changed the musical landscape overnight and that was the Beatles like em or not.

For Rock Music

1955-1962- Rock and Roll Music, Bill Haley had the first major rock and roll hit, Elvis, Berry, Richard and Holly.

1963-1970- The Beatles and the British Invasion, = Folk Rock, Byrds and Dylan, rock and roll becomes rock music.

after that there has been a few trends like Punk Rock, Hair Metal, Grunge or Alternative Rock.

Motown is not rock music by the way

No one said it was.

Was it "rock" when the Beatles covered Motown songs? If not, then what was it? If so, what's the difference between The Beatles and Smokey Robinson singing the same song in pretty much the same way?

Rubber Soul

Was it "rock" when the Beatles covered Motown songs? If not, then what was it? If so, what's the difference between The Beatles and Smokey Robinson singing the same song in pretty much the same way?

The difference IS HUGE, listen to the original Twist and Shout, Money That's What I Want to the Beatles versions. The Beatles versions ROCKED much harder and more guitar orientated. Similiar to what the Rolling Stones were doing to Chuck Berry songs.

The Beatles invented Motown hard rock

Oh boy, not another discussion on what the Beatles "invented".

I always understood rock and roll to be on a 12 year cycle, with much bleeding over its edges. In extremely general terms the ages were as follows:

1955 - birth of rock and roll
1967 - balkanization of rock, heavier music (metal, hard rock), and softer music (singer songwriters)
1979 - punk, hip-hop
1991 - grunge, electronica

Of course, 2003 should have seen the emergence of a huge new movement or movements - someone remind me if there has been one. I've heard plenty of retro sounding rock and hip hop styles, but nothing that feels completely fresh, like Elvis, The Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix, Ramones, Clash, Nirvana, Beck, or Radiohead sounded when they burst onto the scenes. And I'm READY!!!

Of course, trying to delimit pop music in decades is always simplifying it. There had always been so many styles simultaneously and so many curious musicians jumping from one style to another that it’s impossible to delimit it properly. But, making an exercise of simplification in ten years periods, maybe it could be more precise beginning at the middle of every decade. These periods include the appearance of a new style, its development and even its decadence.
1955-1964: rock ‘n’ roll was born from country & blues, achieved its peak with Elvis, Berry, Holly, etc. and began its decadence with Sedaka, Boone, Fabian, etc.
1965-1974: the development of the psychedelia gave place to prog-rock that supposed its decadence, the British blues-rock gave place to heavy-metal and the American folk-rock to the 70s bland singer-songwriters.
1975-1984: a neatly British period in which the punk revolution broke the scene in thousand fragments, new wave, ska revival, goth rock, synth-pop, but in the mid-eighties all the Brit-stars became superficial and unsubstantial.
1985-1994: the US dominated this period, with the birth of indie-rock with Hüsker Dü, R.E.M., Sonic Youth and Pixies, the peak with Nirvana and Pearl Jam and the trivialization with Creed or Offspring. And, of course, hip-hop.
1995-2004: a phase dominated by electronica and its fusion with Brit-pop and space-rock, with “OK Computer” as the peak of the period. The formula of electronica showed his exhaustion during the first 00s.
2005-2014: the atomization of styles will make difficult to establish a dominant style yet but the easy access to music due to the internet is going to provide us an exciting period for sure.

And, talking about decades, I’ve seen the other day a TV Program from Catalonia TV Canal 33 that explained an interesting theory about revival in pop music (but again simplifying it). Their theory is based in the fact that the musicians often react against the generation immediately previous but get inspiration from the generation of two decades before. So here it is (if I remember it correctly):
- The 60s Pop British bands got inspiration from the heroes of 40s rhythm & blues because of their “authenticity”.
- The 70s Punk musicians looked back to the 50s Rock ‘n’ Roll singers because of their “rebelliousness”.
- The 80s Synth-Pop went back to 60s Pop because of its “hedonism”.
- The 90s Alternative bands got inspiration in 70s Punk because of its “nonconformity”.
- The 00s … (non predominantly style defined yet) got back to 80s Pop because of its “unconcerned” attitude.