Most innovative period for music… 1926-1976 or 1976 to 2026??

Certainly most of my favorite music came in the last 50 years, but this is a tough question.

1926-‘76:
-Jazz went off the hook
-Advent of r&b/stax/soul/ etc
-early electronic music
-roots of punk
-start and blossoming of rock n roll
-country, folk, metal, etc all lay groundwork
-the great American songbook and broadway musicals flourishing

‘76-2026
-punk, post punk, indie, new wave
-hip hop starts and dominates
-electronic music proliferates
-‘delivery’ of music (cassettes, cds, ipods, streaming, etc) goes nuts

I think I got to give it to ‘26-‘76. Convince me otherwise. I’m talking innovation in music overall.

FWIW, the roots of hip-hop pre-date even 1976, when it was mainly a live community experience found in clubs and block parties - all the more reason to say 1926-1976 was indeed more innovative!

Considering that innovation in popular music seemed to have ended at least 25 years ago for endless rehashes and mashups at best, the 26-76 covered much more ground, I think. Innovation tended to speed up on the cycles of technology that it was riding on, but at a certain point, which I tend to mark as the onset of digital audio techniques and sampling by 1979-85, it seemed to stop dead. Innovation in music became an issue of digitally manipulating existing things rather than synthesizing new ones. Playback itself became the instrument as foreshadowed by hip hop turntablism.

But even in the early 80s I would consider what I was accepting as music and think of how radical some of it could be to anyone born a generation or two earlier. What might be considered avant garde eventually is doomed to become mainstream at one point or another.

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/03/2026 11:11AM by Post-Punk Monk.

DJ Kool Herc is usually credited with inventing hip hop back in 1973, so that occurred between 1926 and 1976. Also, electronics changed everything in music, many of the leading composers of the 1920's foresaw it and knew it would lead to a supernova of new music like none they had ever seen seen. And, of course, that pre-dates the 70's .

I agree that music innovation has stalled in the past 20-25 years, pop music hasn't changed that much in that period of time.

Music made outside the Anglosphere seems much more innovative. Maybe this is because I haven't heard its roots, but it's hard to listen to dembow, gqom, amapiano, bruxaria and other forms of baile funk, or Afrobeats and feel like nothing new's going on.