Don, didn't expect you to be such a 90s rock guy! Those were the bands of my youth. I was 9 or 10 when the 90s alternative rock movement exploded. The 90s were such an amazing time for rock music of all types. Alice In Chains is my all time favorite band with Soundgarden a close second. Staley and Cornell had two of the most amazing voices in rock music history. I can go on and on though - so many great bands from that time. It's a shame that my generation and the youth of today do not look at 90s rock in the the way the 90s bands looked at and were influenced by the rock music of the 60s and 70s.
If I had to rank music by decades, I would put the '80s at the top of my list, closely followed by the '90s. The '60s and '70s would be well behind. Maybe it's because classic rock stations have played the same 40 or 50 songs from the '60s and '70s over and over and over ad nauseam to the point that it wouldn't bother me if I never hear any of them again, with some exceptions.
The '80s I associate with MTV and the mostly cheesy videos they played in their early years beginning when it came on the scene in 1981. The music from that decade has held up better than earlier rock, at least to my ears.
It's instrumental to trace the history of MTV with that of the Permanent Cultural Communist Revolution that started in the late 1960s. As hard as it is to believe now, MTV was mostly a "white thing" in the '80s. Almost all of the videos were of White bands, with exceptions like Billy Ocean and Sade. But then Michael Jackson became a mega-superstar and MTV (seemingly reluctantly) began airing his videos in heavy rotation and it was all downhill from there. By the 1990s MTV was airing not only lots of black videos but hip hop and rap, and at some point, don't know when exactly, phased out music videos altogether for the utter soul-destroying garbage they show now. But the rock that was there in the '90s, particularly the Seattle grunge scene, was really good, along with groups like Collective Soul, the Offspring, Gin Blossoms and others.
When I think of Alice in Chains I think of Jerry Cantrell, who was the real talent behind the group. Layne Staley was a good singer but was apparently a child mentally and died tragically from drug addiction and his failure to grow up.
