How did 70s rock music transition into 80s music?

The new bands of the late 70's and early 80's had much to rebel against, whether it was disco, bombastic prog rock (ELP, etc)  or what was being labeled as corporate rock (Boston, REO, etc). Many will argue that rebellion of some kind is essential for good rock music.

Here's some more late 70's and early 80's bands that I don't think have been mentioned yet:

Be-bop Deluxe, Billy Bragg, The Blue Nile, The Bongos, The Church, Concrete Blonde, The Connels, The DB's, The Divinyls, Don Dixon, Thomas Dolby, Echo and the Bunnymen, Everything But The Girl, Fetchin' Bones, Grapes of Wrath, Hoodoo Gurus, House of Love, Hunters & Collectors, Icehouse, Joe Jackson, Robin Lane & the Chartbusters, Midnight Oil, The Pretenders, The Railway Children, The Replacements, The Shoes, The Silencers, The Smithereens, The Spoons (Canadian band), The The (my vote for the greatest band name), Translator, The Waterboys and Was Not Was.

I'd agree with some of the posters mentioning stoner burnout. For boomers early 70's beginning of drug usage years, still lots of energy in youth culture, early 70's rock reflected this. By mid to late 70's, years of drug use was beginning to show it's toll, less energy and vitality in youth culture, again reflected in the music.

 This state of affairs led to many rebelling against the same old, same old, we turned to new genres like disco, punk to provide energy, vitality. This morphed into more genres like modern rock, hard core in the 80's.

Think about correlation between drugs and music, more depressant oriented drugs in 70's, stimulant oriented in 80's, very much reflected in music.

Seems like a lot of fancy talk here when it seems pretty simple to me.

The ‘80s we’re just kind of weird, trend-wise.  Garish, ostentatious, tacky, with arguably the most pungent visual and aural signifiers of any era.

Like any era, it’s not necessarily defined by its worst stuff.

Popular-wise, the late-90s early ‘00s were dreadful.  But there was some great stuff from that time also that holds up extremely well.

The hair got bigger..........

Say, am I alone in noticing the contradiction in Mike’s argument? First he cites the decline of album-orientated artists/bands in the 1980’s as the reason for that decade being a musical wasteland, then predicts that the decade will be forgotten because of it’s lack of classic singles that will be played on the radio. Schizophrenia, anyone? ;-)

So his yardstick for determining the quality of any music made is by whether or not it gets played on the radio?! There was a lot of great music made in the 1970’s which never received any airplay (the 60’s too), music now considered classic. The same with the 1980’s (just look at all the names posted above). Geez, what a weak, weak argument. Unless of course one’s only source of music is the radio. But that would make one pathetic, right? No one here like that, right?

A lot of the "best" music made in the 70’s and 80’s (as well as other decades) was known and appreciated only by cult-sized audiences. Pet Sounds was a flop when it was released in 1966 (I didn’t buy it), and is now considered one of the greatest albums of all time (Paul McCartney cites it as his favorite). The same is true of the audiences for Jazz and Classical. Why is the popularity of only Rock bands being used to examine any question about a given decades musical quality?