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Comment by LanguageGamer | Hacker News Reader

We have a lot more historical distance between us and pre-20th century classical music, than we do with pop music. Just anecdotally, it seems people are biased towards the music of their youth. At any rate, I grew up in the nineties, and Nirvana is greatest rock band of all time.

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I grew up in the 80s and 90s (went to college in the early 90s, I remember well when Nirvana was new and Smells Like Teen Spirit was all over the place). I never liked 90s music that much, and prefer late-60s through early 80s music, even though it was either before I was born or I was too young at the time to know about it.

I'm sorry, in my opinion, music has just gotten a lot worse in quality over the years. And the other poster's post about ClearChannel taking over all the radio stations nationwide in the late 90s, I think, is good evidence that it's not just my biased opinion, the environment and the music industry has really changed for the worse. The industry was run in a very different manner back in the 70s and 80s, and it should be obvious that that's going to have a huge effect on the music.

I don't feel that any additional distance is really necessary to say with some confidence that, for example, 2015/6 is probably not the equal of 1966/7 when it comes to pop music in at least the English-speaking world; and I wasn't born by 1967. I can't think of any years in my youth to compare to 1966/7 either, for all that I too admire and fondly remember Nirvana.

But Nirvana was never a chart-topping band. Smells Like Teen Spirit peaked at #6, and never makes it on this visualization. None of their other singles came close to that.

The point is that The Beatles are better than Boyz II Men, not that Led Zeppelin is better than Nirvana.

I think it's not quite right to say that Nirvana wasn't popular, though. Being at #6 instead of #1 is a pretty minor difference in the grand scheme of all the music that gets made.

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