The year of all good music

According to my husband, this year is 1996. Many times a song comes on the radio that we both move to turn up, and he will tell me it came out in 1996. It happened again yesterday when I heard The Verve Pipe twice: on the way to church and on the way home again. I remember their song "Freshmen" from 1997 but it must have come out the year prior. Our music discussions always lead to talking about what was going on in life at the time. Usually our conversations run something along these lines: (William): "I was in my second year of college in Wyoming playing rubgy!" (me): "I was in 8th grade struggling to pass Algebra!" or (William)"I was teaching in Jersey!" (me) "I was getting my driver's license!"

Ok maybe it's not quite that bad... but William is older enough than me to have always been a couple stages of life ahead of me until we met in seminary. Now it doesn't matter that we are from different generations, but to think how old (or in my case young) we were back in the day is kind of funny. We have very different ideas on a lot of things, culturally, politically, and on some peripheral theological issues. I don't know how much this has to do with the fact that he is from the 70's and I am from the 80's. (Which means he knows more 80's music than I do and I know early 90's til now, plus what my dad listened to, hence the Zeppelin.)But music is one of the areas in which we find enough common ground that we can find something we both like on the radio or on our itunes. (Confession: I don't know that I will ever love They Might be Giants as much as he does.)

Though there are a large amount of songs that are great that were made in '96, I don't know that it is the year of all good music. There must have been some stinkers in there. The local oldies station has an idiotic tagline that they operate on the assumption that all the good music is already made. While I think that most new pop songs are schlock, there are plenty of current bands and musicians that are awesome but get no mainstream attention. I posted a couple of these on my brother's facebook page, so I won't go on that tangent here. Mostly I'm wondering what everyone else's year of all good music is. And why?