Songs that introduced a decade's sound

1960s:


In particular, Miles Davis' Kind of Blue album was critical in introducing modal jazz to the mainstream, making it the dominant sound to movie and television soundtracks in the 1960s. Jazz may not have been pop anymore by this point in time, but songs like "So What" were still critical in shaping the '60s atmosphere.


For an example of more traditional '60s pop music finding its presence for the first time, I would point to this song, released in mid-1962. The first single by the Beatles came out a few months later, but Peter, Paul & Mary's rendition of "If I Had a Hammer" was really the first major single to embody the loose, folksy, socially conscious, counterculture spirit that came to really define the 1960s. Plenty more songs came out this decade with more than a faint resemblance to "If I Had a Hammer", and Peter Paul & Mary even scored a huge hit at the end of the decade with "Leaving On a Jet Plane".

1970s:


This type of hard rock, which first appeared on Led Zeppelin's debut album from the very beginning of 1969, was thicker and harder than anything that came before it and ultimately influenced lots of music from the '70s.


This came out in late 1968. In my opinion, it was really the first funk song to progress beyond the genre's primitive '60s origins with artists like James Brown and to actually really hold a slow, slick, tight groove and wasn't austere like its predecessors. Lots of music from the early '70s sounded like "Soulful Strut", and plenty others from later in the decade retained at least a decent link to its juicily funky sound. When I first heard this track at a young age, I was genuinely surprised to find out it was from the late '60s, since it very much clashed with what '60s music was in my mind.

1980s:


Some have described this as disco, but there's no doubt it had a futuristic new wave flashiness that really stuck out for 1978 and early 1979. There were other songs from earlier in the '70s that employed synthesizers, but in those, they were either used extremely sparingly or were for primarily ambient, non-pop compositions.

1990s:


This is from 1989. It was the first song to say, full on, out with the hard, cold, echoey '80s sound and in with the soft, smooth, lushly hip hop-oriented style. '90s pop in general owes quite a bit to this song, in my opinion.

2000s:


This was Timbaland's breakthrough production, and it was also the first really big song with a distinctly 2000s flavour. The smooth funkiness of '90s r&b was completely gone, and in its place wre hard, shuffling, heavily-syncopated club beats with a more confrontational swagger, emphasizing rhythm more than melody. "If Your Girl Only Knew" was a huge anomaly for 1996, yet it came to influence countless pop songs from the early 2000s. Even a lot of late 2000s r&b, though sonically evolved, can at least trace some of its methodology to this song.


This, more or less, was the beginning of post-post-grunge. The genre was no longer trying even remotely to capture the spirit of its '90s predecessor and was instead employing the instrumentation and vocal style purely for arena-filling commercial extravaganza.

2010s:

I guess "Just Dance", although to be honest, it sounds pretty dated today. For mid-2010s music specifically, I'd probably say "Royals" by Lorde.

That's a good point. I think the song has production similarities to songs released in the 2000s, however it does sound distinctively '90s/Y2K.

The thing is, Y2K teen pop did not start with Britney Spears at the turn of 1999. Rather, it took off roughly with the Spice Girls in mid-1996 in Europe and in early 1997 in the US. Right around the same time that the Spices blew up, a whole bunch of other significant late '90s teen pop music acts became really popular, such as the Backstreet Boys, Savage Garden, Hanson, 911, *NSYNC (they were already popular in Germany and Switzerland in 1996, but even elsewhere they still beat Britney Spears to fame), 5ive, 98 Degrees, Human Nature, Robyn, and several others still. Early Britney Spears was more the late climax of '90s pop than the start of something completely different.

I'm not sure if I would really regard Savage Garden as being a teen-pop group, to be honest. I know the lyrical themes of their songs are similar to Y2K teen-pop acts, but they were generally more of a pop-rock band. 

I see your point, but were they ever marketed or even perceived as being a teen-pop band? Maybe they were/are perceived that way in America, but based on reviews I have read from music critics and journalists alike, they are more often categorised as being a pop-rock band. I can't say that I have ever heard anyone group Savage Garden with Y2K teen-pop artists such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

I'm not doubting the fact that "I Want You", "Truly Madly Deeply", "The Animal Song" and "I Knew I Love You" are pop songs. I just personally don't think the four songs (or any of Savage Garden's songs, to be honest) were marketed to the same demographic that songs such as "Genie in a Bottle", "Bring It All Back" and "Oops...I Did It Again" were targeted at, even if the lyrical themes of the songs have similarities.


Is "Baby One More Time" really all that different from "Genie In a Bottle" though? I wouldn't really say that one is distinctively more '90s than the other, considering the fact that they have similar production and were released in the Y2K cultural era. They were both marketed to the same demographic. 

I can definetly notices the differences between "Baby one more time" and "Genie in a Bottle", although tbh "Oops I did it Again" has a similar beat to the former imo. So I think the confusion might have been even though "Baby one more time" may not have been all that different sounding to previous late 90s pop, simply Becasue of the impact that it had and all that would come after it, it's more of a transition point into 2000s culture than the 2000s 'sound'. 

What I meant before was that I couldn't imagine 1999/2000 pop songs like "Genie in a bottle", "Bye Bye Bye" or "(You drive me) Crazy" being released in say, 1997.

I figured that's probably what you meant, but I still see most people associate "Baby One More Time" with the late '90s and not the 2000s. It was released only in 1998, after all.

I agree with the former two, but "(You Drive Me) Crazy" I don't think would sound that out of place at a couple years earlier because it's a post-new jack swing Max Martin production, sort of similar in that regard to "I Want You Back" and "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)".It's not precisely the same thing, but in general, it still targets a similar demographic. The Spice Girls were not technically teen pop, but they still tend to get categorized alongside other acts who do count as such because of the way they were marketed and the specific type of appeal they had.I certainly don't recall Savage Garden appealing to the same people who listened to Sarah McLachlan, Jewel, The Wallflowers, or Sheryl Crow. Even if some of their songs were more rock-oriented, they were still more targeted towards a pop audience.