🎵 Which decade of Hindi film music do you think actually holds up best today?

Got into a fairly long debate with my father over dinner last week about which decade of Hindi film music has actually aged the best, and we ended up firmly on opposite sides without either of us really budging much by the end of the conversation. He is convinced the seventies and eighties produced music that still sounds genuinely fresh today, while I kept arguing for the nineties, mostly based on what I personally grew up listening to constantly on the radio as a kid without much conscious comparison to earlier decades at the time. What made the argument more interesting than a typical generational disagreement was that neither of us was purely defending our own era out of nostalgia alone. He actually pointed out several specific songs from the nineties that he genuinely likes and listens to occasionally even now, and I do the same with a handful of older songs from decades before I was even born, ones I discovered later through my grandfather's old cassette collection rather than growing up with them directly myself. Where we genuinely disagreed was more about which decade's music, taken as a whole rather than just individual favorite songs, actually holds up best if someone with no nostalgic attachment either way heard it fresh today for the first time. He argues the older compositions had more genuine musical complexity, I argue the nineties had a wider range of styles packed into roughly the same stretch of years than either of us initially gave it credit for. We did not actually resolve anything by the end of dinner, which is honestly fairly normal for how most of our music debates over the years tend to go regardless of the specific topic each time. Which decade would people here actually pick if judging purely on how well the music holds up today, completely separate from whatever decade you personally happened to grow up listening to yourself?

Discovering older songs later through a grandparent's cassette collection is such a specific and genuinely lucky way to actually experience music completely outside your own generational bias for once. I did something similar with my own grandfather's old records, and it gave me a real appreciation for that earlier era that I never would have actually developed just from casually hearing those songs secondhand on the radio.

My own father makes almost the identical argument for the seventies and eighties, and like you, I have noticed he genuinely does enjoy a decent number of nineties songs whenever they happen to come on unexpectedly during a car ride together. I think a lot of this debate quietly comes down to which decade's music simply happened to be playing during someone's own most formative specific years growing up.