AkJay said:
In music, it was the SHITTIEST decade.
That would in fact be the '70s.
In fact, apart from all the other awful, terrible decades of this and the last century (1909-1919, '30s, '40s) the '70s count as godawful. Terrible music, mediocre technology, oil crises, the Vietnam War's tail end, the Cold War, etc.
But you know what? They weren't even that bad. More than that, this decade was downright balmy by comparison. Terrorist attacks, expensive wars, a bowel-shaking recession (let's not kid ourselves, it's been nowhere
near Great Depression style, but still as bad as we've seen), and the dot com bust are pretty much...it.
The music was good, and the amount of it exploded in the wake of digital distribution as smaller bands suddenly found new outlets, the movies improved steadily, and consumer technology exploded in an almost unprecedented way. Your ordinary person suddenly found themselves just a few keystrokes away from almost anyone else on the planet, and are now able to access more information than has ever been available to a regular civilian...ever. As populations grew, the number of poor held steady or only somewhat increased, meaning the proportion decreased, and we're on the brink of some stellar breakthroughs.
Wasn't all that worth something? It wasn't a fantastic decade, maybe--and almost definitely a bit boring, if the excitement of epidemics and world wars is what you crave--but it held its own with the '80s.