Yesterday Amp posted about some of the wacky music he heard at a high school graduation party. In summary: hits from the late seventies and eighties. Amp wonders why kids are listening to this stuff that is so obviously anachronistic to the youth of today; I may have an answer.
I can’t speak for hip-hop, as I’m still desperately trying to find some aside from DJ Shadow and Prefuse 73 that doesn’t suck, but rock-and-roll is currently experiencing an obsession with the late seventies and the whole of the eighties. Consider the success of the Darkness, a pseudo-80’s band, or the “dancepunk” groups—the Rapture, !!!, Radio 5, Liars—that sound like the Gang of Four, or the “garage rock revival” of the White Stripes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—not to mention the Strokes—or the post-punk obsession of groups like Interpol, or the electroclash influences of the Postal Service.
Admittedly, most of these bands are still in the province of the indie cool kids, but I think that there’s a resurgence of eighties culture across the white bread spectrum. Take a dip into Hot Topic these days and what’ll you see? The same thing you’ll see at Target: Transformers, Thundercats, Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony—the defining toys and paraphanalia of childhood in the eighties. I’m not surprised that this has trickled down into the musical tastes of the graduates at the party Amp went to.
I’m not sure what causes this except that it may, perhaps, be the same thing that’s made me seek out some music from the eighties. I’m only a couple years older than the graduates Amp visited—although I’ve been out of high school for much longer, so this analysis may mean less than nothing—and I’ve always been quietly fascinated with the eighties because I’m aware that the first six years of my life were spent in them but I can’t remember anything about them. I can vaguely remember the New Kids on the Block, the crimped hair, and the wretched music that powered the inspirational sections of movies, but little more than that. My memory doesn’t really begin until ’92 and doesn’t start to crystalize until ’93 or ’94. I’ve always wondered if I missed anything important, any really great music or movies or fashions or whatever. So when I got to be seventeen or eighteen or so, I started looking.
I’m wondering if the “kids these days” aren’t doing much of the same thing. Were those things that they played with as kids—or, more likely, the things that their older siblings played with as kids—actually cool? Was the music terrible or good or what? Was The Neverending Story really all that good of a movie?
So that’s my explanation for things: a bit of vague nostalgia mixed with a hindsight curiousity and a culture that’s actively interested in recycling some bits from the eighties mixed with the simple fact that music these days is actually remarkably dull if you’re a white kid who can’t or won’t like hip-hop. In ten years or so, if popular music is as dead as it is today, I wouldn’t be surprised to see kids jumping around to a playlist that included Limp Bizkit and Britney Spears and Ricky Martin. At which point, I’ll probably be standing around, looking at kids at a high school graduation party, saying to myself, “The fuck are they doing listening to this stuff?”
Hmm, as a final note, I did remember one group, or individual at least, from the hip-hop half of the airways who has been digging into the eighties for inspiration for his music. Big Boi’s half of the latest Outkast album, Speakerboxx/The Love Below, was heavy with beats cut with old-school 808’s which hit the height of their popularity with musicians in the late eighties..
Dude, PDP’s younger than me?!?! Who knew? I was seven when the 80s ended.
PDP,
I think I can explain the appeal.
I’m a lot older, on the cusp of Gen X and Baby boomers, and I was in bands in the 80s. The crucial part was that at that time (late 70s to early 80s), as now, the music industry was going through a kind of flat spot where the emerging acts were highly manufactured and highly dependent on marketing (although we didn’t say “marketing” back in those days, sonny ;-) )
The only difference was that the emphasis today is on singers (crooners?) with a high sex appeal content, lavishly produced shows and Svengalis in the background. Then, it was more “supergroups’ (who were playing music to a higher and higher technical level and being more snobbish about it) and disco.
The punk movement of the late 70s and the subsequent New Wave / power pop / grunge / thrash bands of the 80s shared a DIY ethos where we said Stuff’em to all the supergroups and the regular music industry.
In the 80s, you could get together with a few of your mates in a room with really horrible carpet and thrash out – I use that word advisedly – some songs of your own which you would then go and play in a dark pub with equally horrible carpet.
What the 80s represents is rebellion against the A & R machine. Unless you are referring to Kim Wilde and all those kind of people.
D’oh. I have just made a damn fool of myself by not seeing your June 18 post before I commented on your next. Now I can see the actual playlist.
Kitsch appeal, pure and simple, PDP. “Stayin’ Alive” was the kind of thing 80s bands were rebelling against.
Sometimes I’m very glad that I have van Gogh’s ear for music. I can’t remember any music that was played when I was a teenager or any time after that. It’s probably like not having one of the senses that others have. Most music is just noise to me, though I do like Laurie Anderson.
I don’t think this is a new phenomenon. When I was in high school, in the early 1980s, I and my friends were really into music from the late 60s and early 70s. When I was in college, in the late 80s and early 90s, funk music from the mid 70s was the in thing. When my dad was middle school and high school age in the 1940s, the cool music was hot jazz from the late 20s and early 30s—Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Bix Biderbeck, Pee Wee Russell, Fats Waller, and so on.
It seems to me there is a recurring trend for young people to form subcultures around the pop music of a decade or two before their current one. The idea is to find culture to identify with that feels removed enough from their current moment.
There may be things to say about why 60s and 70s psychedelic rock appealed to kids in the 80s as compared to why 20s and 30s hot jazz appealed to kids in the 40s as compared to why 80s music appeals to kids in the 00s. But there’s something going on here that is not precisely about the music.
Thanks for making me feel like an old, old fart, PDP! Nah, just kidding. But I confess, I did have a fluttering moment of thinking, “Wow, she’s smart for her age,” which is the sort of insulting thing that old farts say.
PDP, I already knew that you were 1) male and 2) EIGHTEEN years younger than I am.
I think the shocker of Amp’s post isn’t that they like 80s music, but that they like all the kitschy mainstream hits of the 1980s. Or really, late 1970s–I remember they used to play My Sharona at all the bar mitzvah parties I went to in 1978 and 1979 (and other songs by The Knack, we all liked Good Girls Don’t. Bohemian Rhapsody was even earlier than that!
I think this is deliberate kitschy camping it up to the truly danceable tunes. I hate to disagree with Ben like this, but if it was really about what was cool, wouldn’t they be listening to XTC and Steve Winwood? Though maybe I think that was cool and actually I’m a total doofus. Please don’t tell me if you think it’s the latter…
I’ll confess that I think the psychedelic rock I listened to and the hot jazz my dad listened to are cooler than the kitschy 80s stuff the kids were listening to at the graduation party Amp observed. But when I was talking about what was cool and what wasn’t I didn’t mean cool in some quasi-objective sense of the word. The thing that makes the retro music cool to the group that forms around it is that they can be in the know about some slightly secret quality that it has—generic 60s psychedlia, African-American funky psychedelia, swing (African-Amerian context also important here) and, in the current example, 80s kitsch.
I do think we could come up with some analysis of why the ineffable-you’ve-got-to-be-in-the-know-to-be-in quality that appeals to today’s highschool students is kitsch rather than the hep rhythmic sophistication of swing rhythms or the mind-expanding dimensions of (some) psychedelic rock. There’s definitely something historical and interesting about the appeal of 80s kitsch to young people today. But the cyclical part was what I was getting at, the part that’s about being young and learning to express self and group affiliation thorugh one’s taste—a phenomenon that is not quite so historical.
So, RA, if you were into XTC, I’d say the thing that you and your friends were in the know about was it’s intelllectual edginess and it’s self-consciosness about pop music forms. That’s a cool thing to find cool in my book.It certainly doesn’t make you a doofus.
i blame “I Love The 80’s”.
While the movie may have been bad, the book Neverending Story is quite good. (Yes, willfully off topic, but it had to be said.)
Hey, I can’t wait for I Love the Nineties. 90210 jokes abound.
many years ago in the mid 70s there was a song,kind of a political
satire of sort where a reporter would ask a question to say,…….
the president and a exerp/song would answer, such as Bertha butt
she’s one of the butt sisters or, here come the judge. What was it
called ?????