Oh that’s sooooooo ’80’s…

On Monday, I bought the new Chairlift album, “Something”, and listened with avid delight to a work of sheer brilliance. As I sometimes do after listening to a piece and coming to my own conclusions, I went looking for reviews to see if anyone else had been blown away by it’s magnificence. The first review I found was on the NME website. Now, NME has a rich history of “up my own arse” reviewers and equally anally residential reviews. The reviewer of this particular album, one Mark Beaumont, gave it a respectable 7/10 but the headline really twisted my melons…

“They’ve adopted the ’80s as their new direction”

I read on and found such gems as, “The ’80s revival taken to its spangliest, synthiest, chino-flappiest extreme” and “You wouldn’t be surprised if Go West had produced it, with Jonathan King as engineer. It really is that ’80s”. Sprinkled amongst these were references to 80’s bands who the reviewer, himself probably only in single digits of age in the decade in question, compared certain tracks to in that annoying, “Band Y meets Band X” way.

Now, Beaumont is “famously” casutic in his reviews. In other words, they lack that much substance he requires to stir up a frenzy of annoyance to provoke a response and somehow demonstrate how “right on” he is, but it’s not him I’m singling out here. His was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

What really wound me up was this trend of describing lots of music as “harking back to the ’80’s”. What does it exactly mean? What characteristics defined ’80’s music? And this is the thing. I AM old enough to properly remember the ’80’s. It was my decade. The decade of my formative teen years. So I remember that decade with great detail and affection. And yes, I am a massive fan of the music of that time too. But if I was Chairlift, I’d be a bit fucking peeved by this review. Obviously I can’t speak for them directly, but having just made a brilliant album some 22 years after the end of that decade, I’d hate to think people were positing that I’d just mashed up a bunch of old styles to create my new body of work. Influenced by the ’80’s? Yeah, I’d give you that. But not a direct comparison.

Image © Bruce Davidson from his book, Subway

Anyway, I got to thinking about this on the way home tonight. As one does. And then it dawned on me. The comparison with the decade that style forgot might actually be completely complimentary. How did I arrive at this conclusion? Well, it’s quite simple. In the ’80’s, pop music was booming and maturing. From it’s birth in the late 50’s, to it’s formative years in the 60’s and it’s troubled late teens and post-pubescent years in the 70’s, pop musicians had just come out of a revolution. Actually, two revolutions. The first one was Punk. Punk was not just a musical genre, it was a movement. An ethos, a way of life and an art form all of it’s own. It was all encompassing. And it shook pop music to it’s core after the self indulgent years of Prog, Glam and MOR. All of a sudden, a youth movement was awakened and empowered to go out and just do what they wanted artistically. Fuck the fact that you couldn’t play an instrument. Screw the idea that you needed cash to make it in the business. In fact, the business could go take a running jump for all we cared. We just knew that as far as music was concerned, we were as mad as hell and we weren’t going to take it anymore. Bands were formed, inspired by the revolution and proceeded to make simple but powerful statements, both in the music they made and listened to and the way they dressed and behaved. Punk was the enema that pop music needed if it was going to live. And it worked. Beautifully.

The second revolution was electronics in music. At the end of the ’70’s, synths were no longer the toys of the well heeled. The Japanese soon saw to that with Korg, Roland and Yamaha releasing every increasingly powerful and affordable instruments. Now, not only were kids spurred on by the Punk ethic, they could now achieve more using less by embracing technology. They may not have sounded like the Pistols, Buzzcocks or Ramones, but they sounded like no one else at all and that was exactly how they wanted it.

So the ’80’s was the empty pool that this new found energy and creativity spilled into. Every week, new sounds were emerging. Every week a new look burst forth from the pages of Smash Hits and Melody Maker. Every week a new sound was born and you didn’t know which way to turn when it came to Friday and Saturday nights. A myriad looks and styles, both in fashion and in music. Cliques and movements sprung up all over the country, always original and always new.

Style forgot the ’80’s because the ’80’s forgot style. Not the other way around.

So maybe, I wondered, as I drove the wet roads back home tonight, if one compares a band or album to the ’80’s, maybe it’s actually complimentary in as much as it means they are doing something new, unique and inspiring as opposed to what we have had to put up with for the last 15-20 years as far as pop goes, which is a constant deluge of musical effluent, cooked up and force fed to us by marketing people and the Simon Cowell’s of this world. Maybe, by “being ’80’s”, it’s actually a statement about being something other than the bilge and detritus that we are forced to consume like some pour duck being fattened for Foie Gras, crammed full of utter rubbish before being sacrificed for the pleasure and consumption of the wealthy elite.

Could it be that being referred to as being ’80’s is the ultimate compliment for being challenging rather than plagiaristic of a bygone era? Or is music just music and we find ourselves travelling on a cycle of revivalism and soon we’ll be harping on about how rave like the latest hits are and saying things like, “Ooooh, those guitars sound just like Graham Coxon”?

Whatever it is, whatever you think, music, on the whole, is stale, stagnant and in desperate need of another enema. I can’t see where it is coming from, or when it might happen, but we could do far, far worse than being “just like it was in the ’80’s”.

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