re: Which decade was the best music decade in the last 100 years (across all genres)?

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70’s hands down.

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Yeah, this is pretty easy for me.

I would rank my top 5 as:
1. 1970's: hard rock, psychedelic, jazz fusion, funk, folk, just a great all around decade full of bangers. Not the biggest fan of disco, but compared the pop music that would follow it in later decades, it's basically Mozart.

2. 2000's: it probably actually shouldn't be this high, but I love this decade. The rock music was very good with garage rock, metalcore, pop punk, nu-metal, post grunge, stoner rock, post-hardcore, and many other subgenres all having really solid bands operating at the same time. I was a Warped Tour kid, so this decade was heaven for me. The pop music wasn't the best, but there's some gems in there, and the swag era hiphop has aged well.

3. 1960's: this should probably be number two, but how absolutely balls to the wall incredible 1969 is can't make up for how boring the first few years of this decade was. The late 60's are incredible with bands like The Beatles, Zeppelin, The Who, Jimi Hendrix. CCR, Sly & the Family Stone, James Brown, etc. The late 60's are so great that people forget the early 60's being defined by "The Elephant Walk" and :"I Wanna Hold Your Hand".

4. 1990's: Every genre put out good music in this decade, though very little is great and very little is garbage. Gangsta rap was solid, boy bands were silly fun, country was good, grunge was good, skate punk and college rock were good. The 90's had so much experimentation and weird alternative music that blew up and became cool. The biggest issue with this decade is that while there's a lot of good music, there's very little that is truly 10/10 gems that I absolutely love. I also HATED the direction metal took in this decade with bands like Pantera and Korn defining tastes (at least here in the South) for decades. This decade also was when music production switched from analog to digital as the birth of quantizing and gridding music went into full swing and auto-tune an time dilation became industry standard.

5. 1980's: They have the opposite problem of the 90's. Every genre was producing straight crap in this decade but also crapping out gold. So much great music, and so much garbage music at the same time, but when it was good, it was near the best it's ever been. What holds this decade back the most, in my opinion, is its widespread adoption of gated reverb on snares and the crappy synth tones on everything. Most 80's country was bad, but you still had bands like Diamond Rio and Alabama making hits. A lot of the pop was crap, but when it was good, it was great. Metal was pretty awesome in this time with Metallica, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden. For all its cheesyness, hair metal still produced a lot of banger songs, too.

6. 2020's: This decade is getting sneaky great. Maybe it's just because the 2010's were THAT bad, but I'm kinda digging current pop music a lot more than I have been in a while. K-pop is a fun throwback to 90's boy/girl bands with a little more edge, silk sonic is pretty much the coolest r&b in at least 30 years, and I don't even hate what I'm hearing from mainstream artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappel Roan. Hip hop is FINALLY moving away from trap, metal is the best it's been in a VERY long time, and Hardcore is having a serious moment with heavy bands like Turnstile, Sleep Token, Bad Omens, and Knocked Loose all getting serious mainstream attention in a way heavy music hasn't since the early 2000's. Country is dogshit this decade, but it usually is.

7. 1950s: Early rock n roll ain't bad, but it's just a little too formulaic for my tastes every day. Elvis is a legit superstar worthy of anchoring this decade. Very little in pop music or rock and roll is bad, but very little is what I want to seek out to listen to regularly. Cool jazz and modern jazz are arse compared to what came before AND after. Nowhere near as fun as swing/big band and nowhere near as interesting as fusion or bebop. Hard bop was cool, though. 50's country is some of the most boring music ever produced.

Last place, no matter what measure you use, is the 2010's: seriously, F&%k this decade for music. It was awful. Mumble rap and trap completely ruined rap and hip hop, the pop music was complete garbage, every rock band was either a black v-neck wearing djent band with no melodies or a bunch of bearded bores who looked like civil war reinactors playing tired stoner metal riffs. The "alt rock" scene was dominated by "clap, stomp, hey!" folk garbage, and country was mostly bro-ified nonsense. The first couple years still had some good warped tour bands putting out their last gasps of decent content, but the decade devolved rapidly into a cultural wasteland by 2016. I know that in 10 years, gen alpha will be waxing nostalgically about the lumineers and hyperpop, but this decade was musical arse. The rock sucked, the metal sucked, the country sucked, the pop sucked, the hiphop sucked, literally every genre was lost in the wilderness putting out just garbage music. Taylor Swift stands out in this decade because of how bad everything else is, that her generic music is pretty much the tallest midget in the lineup. Chris Stapleton was similarly a bright spot in the country scene. BMTH was pretty much the only band innovating in the 2010's, but all the bands chasing and failing to implement the sounds of their various albums pretty much ruined every metal subgenre even worse then how bands emulating Nirvana f&$ked up rock n roll as a whole.

70's

The 60's....The Beatles changed the world.

60s

The list of classic albums released from 1966-1975 is mind blowing.

After 1997? Maybe, 1995, rock really has not been all that inspired. Maybe you can say the only decent band to come out after 1995 is the Foo Fighters who gained a wide appeal.

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70’s hands down.

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Gets my vote too

90's