The 80s Were Not All Duran Duran
I saw Ian McNabb of The Icicle Works talking about music of the ’80s, and what he said was true, that everybody thinks it’s basically Duran Duran and that was the ’80s, but there was so much more.
Just this past week I was digging into very after 1984, when the DX7 came out, and it just was like a big splatter of cheese. Everything, all the progress that had been made with affordable synthesizers, kind of flew out the window with these digital sounds, and the problem was that everybody was using the presets because nobody knew how to program or change the sounds in any meaningful way.
This is something that I’m working on right now myself, trying to learn FM synthesis and sound design.
Anyway, that’s just one part of ’80s music.
I would point to bands like Go West and Bourgeois Tagg. Listen to these records. The songs are great, but it’s pure cheese and so dated and ridiculous sounding, but at the time it sounded like it was from space.
Add to that that there was no way for a kid to know what the hell was going on. Why did music start sounding like this? If you look at the charts from 1983 to 1984, the difference is huge.
I’ve postulated here before that 1982 was the last great year of the analog synth era. It’s not debatable. It just is. The DX7 forever changed music.
And I’m not sure if it’s just old people thinking no change in music is ever good, or maybe it was somebody else’s era, but the point being is that yes, it was definitely the ’80s and definitely cheesy, but there were also other things going on.
Ian McNabb also mentioned The Waterboys. Huge for me. The first compact disc I bought after switching from mainly buying records was Fisherman’s Blues by The Waterboys. Totally rootsy.
Then you had Jason and the Scorchers doing hillbilly rockabilly stuff. The Stray Cats? Come on. That was straight-up ’50s revival music.
So while all that other stuff was going on, there was also crazy roots revival stuff that was really amazing.
When people are talking to you about the ’80s, and I generally refer to this as “lessons from children,” what I mean by that is like when a 25-year-old on LinkedIn is telling you what whatever market he’s into is like and all the lessons he’s learned lately. Makes you want to throw up.
Same with this post-synthwave world of people telling you what the ’80s was like when they weren’t even born last century. It’s insane.
There was so much good music. It was a decade of artist development and record companies that weren’t all bad because they’d let these people do what they wanted and give them a few albums to do it before they dropped them on their ass.
It was an amazing time, and a lot of that music needs to be plumbed and explored.