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Pop can’t escape the Eighties We all desperately yearn to escape the mundane

Consensus didn’t mean homogeneity (IMDB)


January 24, 2022   6 mins

Last year, the Canadian musician Tamara Lindeman, who performs as the Weather Station, explained to Uncut that her new album Ignorance was influenced by pop, but not just any old pop: “Eighties pop music, which was, I think, the best pop music.”

You know what she means. The pop records made between 1980, the birth of synth-pop, and 1987, when hip hop and house began to reconfigure the sound of the Top 40, have a lasting glow. At wedding discos, they unite revellers who grew up on them with kids born decades later. Advertisers also use them as generational glue: McDonald’s recently went for Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now while John Lewis staked their Christmas campaign on a breathy cover of Together in Electric Dreams by Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder.

It’s not just that old hits are doing gangbuster numbers on Spotify. When artists such as Taylor Swift, Angel Olsen, Laura Mvula and Mitski want to pivot to pure pop, they turn to Eighties signifiers. You can hear it, too, in the glittery ebullience of Dua Lipa and Jessie Ware. There are even meticulous Eighties fetishists who create multiverse remixes of recent hits: Initial Talk made Lipa’s New Rules sound like Tiffany and Dead or Alive, while Louis La Roche turned Adele’s Easy on Me into the Madonna ballad that never was.

Top of the pile right now is The Weeknd, whose latest album Dawn FM is framed as an oldies radio station playing in purgatory. It’s the dream hybrid of new wave, electro and Thriller-funk that the Canadian has been working towards for a few years now: his neon-bright 2019 single Blinding Lights is the biggest Billboard single of all time. Among Dawn FM’s blatant homages to the mega-pop era are a monologue by Quincy Jones, a song named after Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero, and a very peculiar English accent. The Weeknd has long aspired to be the kind of pop colossus who bestrode the Eighties, so why not explicitly sound like one?

What’s significant here is not that the Eighties are back, but that they have been back for so long that these influences have seeped into the bedrock of popular music. The self-conscious Eighties revivalism of the electroclash scene is now 20 years’ old, as distant from us as it was from the heyday of The Human League. In 2016, Vulture had enough material to produce a solid list of “the 50 best modern songs that sound like the Eighties”, including Bon Iver, Chvrches, Mark Ronson and Haim. An ongoing Spotify playlist called “Modern indie songs that sound like 80s music” is currently 44 hours long. Guilty pleasures are now simply pleasures. Music that was once regarded as shallow and impermanent has proven itself eternal.

Pop is the trickiest genre to pin down. In theory, it simply describes music that is popular but in reality it is defined by the absence of obvious genre identifiers: if it’s not squarely rock, country, hip hop, R&B, then it’s pop. What happened in the Eighties was a paradoxical combination of diversity and consensus, with disparate artists coming together under the friendly, giant umbrella of pop. “The Eighties were a great decade for pop in America,” writes Kelefa Sanneh in Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, “because musicians from different genres — R&B, various strains of rock’n’roll, the dance music underground — were all experimenting with electronic production, and converging upon similar styles.” When I asked my 15-year-old daughter what she liked about Eighties pop, she said that it sounded “united”.

The Eighties pop hegemony followed a deeply fractious period when the rockers hated the disco fans and the punks disdained both. The great unifier was the fast-evolving synthesizer. While the stigma suddenly attached to disco forced Prince, Michael Jackson and Nile Rodgers to invent new forms of dance music, members of the punk generation who preferred Kraftwerk to the Sex Pistols hatched synth-pop and the New Romantic movement, driven by a refreshingly impertinent hunger for mainstream success. In 1981, the pop polemicist Paul Morley celebrated a move “away from rock, grey independence, submission, austerity” towards “pop, disco, colour, lights, action”.

The New Pop Jacobins derided rock’n’roll as stuffy and earnest but songs such as Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark and Van Halen’s Jump used brash synth fanfares to revitalising effect. Sonically curious art stars of the Seventies, including David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, became mainstream phenomena by way of Fairlight synthesizers and gated drums. To be big, bright and, most of all, new was a common cause. “The world’s Top 40 is like an audio shot in the arm for everybody,” said Van Halen’s Dave Lee Roth. “We’re all different and we’re all being consumed by the radio for no other reason than we’re all 128 beats a minute and damn good looking.”

As Michaelangelo Matos describes in Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Become Pop’s Blockbuster Year, this was the triumph of consensus pop; the zenith of music as a monoculture. Technology helped. The Sony Walkman made pop music portable while MTV made it visible. In I Want My MTV, Rob Tannenbaum calls the new network “the sun around which pop culture rotated” — an ultra-modern star-making machine which rewarded those artists who fully embraced pop’s potential for sensory overload and outrageous spectacle. Music videos often conspired with movies, as Hollywood producers sought synergistic hits. Can you think of The Breakfast Club without hearing Simple Minds’ air-punching Don’t You (Forget About Me) or Top Gun minus the slo-mo throb of Berlin’s Take My Breath Away? (The title of the Weeknd’s Take My Breath can’t be a coincidence.)

Consensus didn’t mean homogeneity. In terms of race, gender, age and sexuality (not that most gay artists were out yet), pop was remarkably diverse. The top of the Billboard Hot 100 had room for a mysterious polymorphous genius, a balding prog-rock drummer, a cross-dressing reggae fan from Kent, New York punk pioneers and a dancer from Detroit. Pop was even more transatlantic than it had been during Beatlemania: one week in 1983, almost half of the Billboard Top 40 was British.

The critic Lester Bangs once wrote that “we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis”, but then he didn’t live to see 1984, when just five albums, the fewest ever, topped the Billboard 200: Thriller, Prince’s Purple Rain, Springsteen’s Born in the USA, the Footloose soundtrack and Sports by Huey Lewis and the News. Three of the UK’s 10 bestselling singles of all time — Last Christmas, Do They Know It’s Christmas and Relax — came out that year. Nor did these represent competing constituencies: it was not unusual for a single record-buyer to own all of the above.

Critics such as Bob Stanley and Simon Reynolds like to draw a line at Live Aid in the summer of 1985, separating the playfully subversive drive of New Pop from studio-drunk MOR decadence, the career of The Eurythmics being the perfect case study. I don’t think it’s quite that neat (Exhibit A: the Pet Shop Boys) but very quickly the ambition and hi-tech sheen of Eighties pop came to be regarded as overblown, avaricious and rootless. Genre distinctions reasserted themselves. The consensus shattered. Authenticity made a comeback. Even Madonna sounded serious.

During the Noughties, the quintessential products of the Nineties inspired hungover nausea. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), the Eighties is when everything goes garishly awry: too much money, too much cocaine. When artists such as Beck and producer Stuart Price foregrounded Eighties’ influences in 1999, many critics assumed it was some kind of ironic prank. Soon, though, the virtues of Eighties pop were being seriously reassessed. Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant praised electroclash because “it’s not trying to be normal. In the Eighties, pop was aspirational. Then it got taken over by being one of the lads: rave, football, Britpop. It stopped being aspirational and it celebrated ordinariness.” Steadily, the Eighties was reborn as the apogee of pop as larger-than-life escapism. Its hugeness — sonically, melodically, emotionally, commercially — was no longer embarrassing but admirable.

Over time, younger artists emerged for whom the Eighties were an idea rather than a memory. In 2002, LCD Soundsystem mocked “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Eighties” but for someone like The Weeknd, born seven weeks after the decade ended, this absence of first-hand experience is what allows for a potent simulation of the era, as distilled and romanticised as it is in Stranger Things.

In this dream of the Eighties, half-real, half-fantasy, there is Prince but no Huey Lewis; Depeche Mode but no Howard Jones; the vibe of a John Hughes movie rather than the songs that actually appeared in John Hughes movies; and an unreasonable amount of neon. A record like Blinding Lights, M83’s Midnight City or The 1975’s A Change of Heart is not a sonic reenactment of the Eighties but a fresh riff on our collective (mis)understanding of the Eighties.

Why does Eighties pop have such inexhaustible talismanic power? Partly because it is thrillingly colourful, glamorous and dynamic next to the jaded minimalism of much post-hip hop pop music. Partly because it recalls a time when futurism still outweighed nostalgia and fame still looked like fun. It also represents a period when hits could have universal appeal without being bland and a song could be both gauche and glorious.

But there is another, more underrated factor. When Tamara Lindeman was asked why she loved Eighties pop, she didn’t cite production values or style. “It’s the music that’s about longing and desire and despair and unrequited love,” she said. The mood of an archetypal hit — Together in Electric Dreams, A-Ha’s Take on Me, Madonna’s Borderline — is urgent exuberance with a streak of melancholy and yearning. A common narrative, in both the lyrics and the videos, is transformation and escape from the mundane. As Prince’s 1999 or Alphaville’s Forever Young make explicit, the fear of imminent nuclear annihilation played a part in this compulsion to live fast and large.

Knowing that so much of Eighties pop’s energy came from a passion for the right-now and the what-next, I want to avoid the irony of simple nostalgia and a fusty dismissal of what is happening in pop today. But when someone as commercially dominant as The Weeknd is using the Eighties imaginary as a winning template, then and now can’t be so far apart. He is plugging into the closest that pop music has ever come to attaining its utopian ideal of being everything to everybody.

***

Listen to Dorian’s ‘Misremembered Eighties’ playlist here.


Dorian Lynskey is an author, journalist and UnHerd columnist.

Dorianlynskey

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Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
2 years ago

God, this reads so much like something I had totally forgotten existed back then – one of those pretentious articles in NME or Melody Maker from the 80s. I didn’t know I missed that stuff until I read this piece.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

Before the effortless internet descended upon us, an aspiring artist or musician had to I imagine dig into his or her inner self in order to … come up with the goods. Merit came with effort. If as I think someone in the Beatles once said that a song of note relies on its creator summoning up 1% inspiration, expending 99% perspiration, then in an interfering tech-ridden world, the amount of time spent on jamming or strumming under the stars must be a lot less. Also, some artists today make their statements when they join some political fray and tweet — their business of pop effectively becomes a sideline; their heart and soul must not be in it. Coming up with the goods is no longer a worthwhile endeavour itself when fame awaits anyway because pop is now a visual rather than an audio thing. The song had always tended to carry the video back in the 80s; now, unfortunately, the video carries the song. The lyrics may be flashed up on tiny screens as a way to overcome the fact that they are indecipherable to most ears. (Indecipherable because they have nothing to really say, or there is embarrassment at their insipidity?). But take away the hand-held technologies, take away the visual medium, then budding songwriters and pop artists will have to sing out loud and clear. They would have to make an effort to hit the big time in an analogue world. Universally meaningful lyrics would have to be written. That’s why pop music wasn’t just for 16-year-olds back in the 80s. But in the internet age, pop music has struggled to stay relevant as a meaningful thing in people’s lives. It’s only now a sliver of the entertainments on offer, all jostling with each other over the airwaves. Hence the screeching and wailing and mournful warbling coming out at you everywhere at the shops and petrol station forecourts (for crying out loud!). These singers of today are poor little victims! They are tired and angry and demand people listen to THEIR problems! Yet they don’t seem to realise that they speak to nobody. In ten quick years a twenty-five year old is middle-aged. Why should he or she not raid his parents’ old records?
Equality of opportunity during the Reagan and (dare I say it) the Thatcher decade of the 80s was a big factor in black and white applying themselves in creating fantastic ballads and wonderful songs that were big enough to play their small but not insignificant part in bringing down the Iron Curtain. The West Germans lapped it up, the East Germans then wanted it to. Most of it was fun and spirited and good-natured even. Everybody did not see themselves as victims. People were really beginning to go places, cheerfully. Everybody could see that they were each an uncommon man, an uncommon woman.

Now That’s What I Call Freedom! It’s as if, though, it never really happened. You’d think. Looking at America today.

D M
D M
2 years ago

I would say the 80’s ‘best pop music period started in 1978 and lasted to 1987. Names I think of include Blondie, Elvis Costello, The Specials, Kate Bush – too many to mention.

Jesper Bo Henriksen
Jesper Bo Henriksen
2 years ago
Reply to  D M

Blondie’s music didn’t age well, in my opinion.

Last edited 2 years ago by Jesper Bo Henriksen
Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
2 years ago
Reply to  D M

Oh, absolutely. Elvis Costello, The Police, The Cars, Joe Jackson – all great stuff that began when I was in college. Also, I have a different theory about why it was and remains so influential: the 80s were optimistic, we had strong, capable, brave world leaders – Reagan, Thatcher, Walesa, John Paul – who genuinely cared about freedom and prosperity, the hideous Soviet Union was a crumbling mess, and the Berlin Wall came down in ’89. It was a wonderful time to be alive for many and an example for the rest of the world. But too few took heed, so we’re living in a dystopia. Is it any wonder why young people who were born in the new millennium are looking back?

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

A sense of wonder about the world was transmuted through the pop music and movies way back then. The effect was like the stars sending postcards to their fans every time they pumped out the hits. ‘Wish you were here’ … they seemed to wish to say. The desire to entertain and be entertained had been strong. Unfortunately today art and music must ‘speak’ to an audience. A particular audience. It’s the bedding down of cliques. The desire to have universal appeal has thus gone. And retaining a sense of wonder in the internet age has all but disappeared. A cold curiosity about everything has set in. Part of entertaining or cheering up an audience is, or ought to be, the delivery of something comforting, some solace or consolation. Not Bacchanalian stuff like the Mamma Mia! phenomenon, say (which was much more a puerile video posting than a postcard). Music-hall provided solace in spades, although with a little pomposity its entertainment side was puffed up. Anger and resentment in pop music seem to have displaced solace as the back-up to cheer. So don’t expect another The Power Of Love anytime soon. There were two songs of that very title in the Eighties. Pop music ain’t popular anymore.

Angelique Todesco-Bond
Angelique Todesco-Bond
2 years ago

Oh Allison, that is so very true, made me a bit tearful. Fantastic optimism and lust for life, today feels so drab in comparison. I am very glad I was a teen in the 80s.

D M
D M
2 years ago

Yes – and all this in spite of or perhaps because of the deep recession of the early 80’s as epitomised by Ghost Town. And I was well past my teenage years !

Last edited 2 years ago by D M
Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
Reply to  D M

By 1987, a whole clutch of talented musicians probably thought to take a break after their efforts in the early 80s.

Jesper Bo Henriksen
Jesper Bo Henriksen
2 years ago

A bit of survivorship bias here; easy to remember the Eighties greats while conveniently forgetting the dross of that decade. The Eighties artists who have made it through the generational curtain – and as an Eighties parent to 2022 teenagers, I know which ones have – tend to represent enduring human tropes.
Stupid drunk loud fun? Van Halen. Deep, artful, Rimbaudian despair? Joy Division. Simple cartoonish energy? The Ramones. Operatic joy and flamboyance? Queen.
Artists like Madonna and Phil Collins might be influential when it comes to contemporary music, but I rarely hear their names mentioned or their songs played at my house.
I wish I could get my kids into The Specials or early Public Image – that bass!. They couldn’t care less, though.

Michael O'Donnell
Michael O'Donnell
2 years ago

Absolutely agree. When BBC 4 was showing 80s totp it was mostly unwatchable. Does anyone remember the endless time that The Only Way is Up was in the charts? Ghastly song, ghastly singer

Gunner Myrtle
Gunner Myrtle
2 years ago

Don’t forget the Hair Metal bands – Twisted Sister, Poison, WASP. To be fair they were gloriously awful in a way that wouldn’t be possible today. I think the fact that MTV needed constant fresh content and spectacle – and had a huge audience – made these bands possible.

Jesper Bo Henriksen
Jesper Bo Henriksen
2 years ago
Reply to  Gunner Myrtle

Good point. Although I think Guns ‘n’ Roses has stood the test of time, in part because Slash is an exceptional musician.

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
2 years ago

It’s not often I don’t get through an Unherd article but I couldn’t finish this one.

Perhaps it was the style or maybe just because the 70’s was clearly THE decade

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

Utterly wrong- the 1965 to 1980 period was not only the golden age of creative, artistic popular music, it heralded so many different genres, including Mowtown, heavy rock, ballads, and country. The musicians were supremely talented, and itbis this music that I still hear at parties and dances of all generations. The 80s was a dead period of moog synthesis, and it has been downhill ever since

D M
D M
2 years ago

I think the peak was in 1978 but the earliest years in the 1980 were quite good as well. But it certainly tailed of by end of 80s In my comment I suggested 1978 to 1987 as best but the end is a bit fuzzy so I Could agree to 1978 to 1982 as peak. And pre 1978 certainly better tha post 1987.

Jesper Bo Henriksen
Jesper Bo Henriksen
2 years ago

You’ve actually been to a wedding that doesn’t play Van Halen’s “Dance the Night Away” or Wham’s “Careless Whisper”?
These are the numbers that get all the generations on the dance floor.

JP Martin
JP Martin
2 years ago

When my upstairs neighbours were away for the weekend, their teenage daughters decided to throw a party (as teenagers should after so much misery in lockdowns). To my surprise and delight, they played nothing but 70s and 80s music. Almost exclusively English pop. Mercifully, there was no rap and no hip hop. It was interesting to me that two French girls who were not even born in the 1980s would make these choices.

Roger Inkpen
Roger Inkpen
2 years ago

Yes, there is something about 80s music that has stood the test of time. Thinking back, it probably was the first half of the decade – up to Live Aid in fact. I’ve no problem with the Band Aid/Live Aid thing, but I wonder if some of the performers found themselves such worldwide stars it went to their heads. Or at least they lost much of their creativity.
Others will say the 60s, the 70s were better, but I don’t think any other decade compares for the sheer variety of pop and rock: indie, new wave, ska, reggae, new romantic, even early hip hop. Some of it was bubble gum pop like Wham, other stuff serious, even depressing like the Smiths, Joy Division.
You could say ‘the 80s’ started in the late 70s, with the offshoots of punk like Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, The Clash and PIL starting then. I was listening to Greatest Hits radio top ten the other day – in one week’s top 10 we had Blondie’s Rapture, Madness with Grey Day, Dire Straits with Romeo and Juliet, and Lynx – Intuition. All really strong singles, but totally contrasting music genres. This was 1981 when I was 16, so of course I might be biased 🙂 but I hear current music it sounds like musak. Someone warbling away on autotune, with no energy or enthusiasm!

N T
N T
2 years ago

Pop really, sort-of starts a little earlier, sometime in the late 60’s or early 70’s with Queen, Led, Black Sabbath, etc. but it gained momentum through the 80’s. The only reason I know that is because even though we never tried to convince our kids that those groups were great (by that time, we had moved on to other things), they found them on their own, and they and their friends all jive to the same tunes we did.
It has been a weird, kind-of alarming reliving of all the things that happened during that time, and thinking “My parents were right, this IS the devil’s music, and these damn kids are doing the same things while listening to it that we did.”

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

As a child, I can recall being captivated by the sounds of the 70s. Before I was a teenager, like. The Carpenters, I liked.
Can we say as much about today’s music in relation to the very young as they go about the shops with their parents? Or into town with the car radio on? Are you captivated?
Iranian refugees to Britain who escaped the Islamic Revolution there, must have gained some solace from encountering the fun pop music back in the early-to-mid 80s. It’s possible, is it not? I don’t know what happy encounters to do with music today’s refugees make. It’s now a screeching wall of noise no doubt.
Once again the West shoots itself in the foot. You could swan around for the next fifty years with Elvis at your fingertips and never encounter the guy.

Russell Hamilton
Russell Hamilton
2 years ago

Could the editor have not helpfully reduced this article to just this bit: “the Eighties is when everything goes garishly awry”

Last edited 2 years ago by Russell Hamilton
Jesper Bo Henriksen
Jesper Bo Henriksen
2 years ago

We had bores like you in the Eighties as well.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago

Prince but no Huey Lewis; Depeche Mode but no Howard Jones
This is a good point. Hindsight filters out the tripe. My idea of a “legendary” band/act is one where either
1/ everyone likes at least one of their songs, or
2/ they’re still acquiring new fans today.
There can’t be anyone who is today newly getting into Huey Lewis, or Whitney Houston, or Phil Collins, or Talking Heads, or The Jam, or Johnny Hates Jazz, or Bad Manners, or the Specials, or UB40, or Five Star. Yet if you want a moment of Proustian recall of times past 40 years ago, it can often be had by listening to such tat, exactly because it’s the first time you’ve heard it since you last heard it, on the radio, 40 years ago. After a few listens the effect fades, and you have to find new forgotten tat to listen to, in order to evoke the past again.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Eric Clapton.

Jesper Bo Henriksen
Jesper Bo Henriksen
2 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

I attended a Specials concert a few years ago that attracted a good number of young Rude Boys. Too many, in my opinion, as their energetic dancing pushed us older fans off the floor.
The greatest disappearing act, in my opinion, has been performed by U2. Biggest band in the world at one point. My teenagers don’t know them and don’t want to know them. I tried “New Year’s Day” one recent Jan 1 and they made me turn it off.

SIMON WOLF
SIMON WOLF
2 years ago

The early 80’s pop acts were overall better than the 70’s ones although arguably 80’s pop started with Abba’s videos partly because the 80’s singers tended to contribute to their own songs and videos whilst the 70’s ones had Svengalis figures.Abba are an example the 2 photogenic ladies rarely contributed to the songwriting but without the Ladies would anybody still playing their music.
However the 80’s rock groups are not a patch on their 60’s and 70’s influences.Take the Echo & The Bunnymen/Simple Minds/U2 brigade and compare them to their obvious influences The Clash The Doors, Genesis or Roxy Music.

SIMON WOLF
SIMON WOLF
2 years ago

The early 80’s pop acts were overall better than the 70’s ones although arguably 80’s pop started with Abba’s videos partly because the 80’s singers tended to contribute to their own songs and videos whilst the 70’s ones had Svengalis figures.Abba are an example the 2 photogenic ladies rarely contributed to the songwriting but without the Ladies would anybody still playing their music.
However the 80’s rock groups are not a patch on their 60’s and 70’s influences.Take the Echo & The Bunnymen/Simple Minds/U2 brigade and compare them to their obvious influences The Clash The Doors, Genesis or Roxy Music.

Ed Cameron
Ed Cameron
2 years ago

If this is the music (and I was there, I heard) from which current artists draw inspiration, our culture will continue its slide into the vanilla cream greased abyss.
Who knows what I mean by “our” culture, but “my” seemed delusional in its grandiosity.
DM might have some of my record collection, which went missing in ’83. Were you in a share house in Glebe?
Give it back, mate.

Mikey Mike
Mikey Mike
2 years ago

“I Think We’re Alone Now” was released in 1967 by Tommy James and the Shondells. Proof that 60’s pop music is the best pop music.

Howard Ahmanson
Howard Ahmanson
2 years ago

The eighties? A great come down from the Golden Age of 1965-79!

Howard Ahmanson
Howard Ahmanson
2 years ago

The eighties? A great come down from the Golden Age of 1965-79!