5/3/2023 0 Comments 80s melancholy love songs![]() Yet the seeds of our modern fragmentation were there in the 80s with regional scenes and the rise of DIY fanzines and indie labels – before “indie” was a thing. Purple Rain-era Prince was culturally ubiquitous in a way that even the top seller of 2018, Drake, could never hope to achieve in our more splintered landscape. The Ed Sullivan Show was long gone, but 80s music still had its equivalent of The Beatles’ US television debut in Michael Jackson moonwalking on the Motown 25 special, or even Peter Gabriel getting an entire cable-connected country talking about music videos with ‘Sledgehammer’. It was a transitional period full of huge, nationally shared moments but also tiny, secret scenes. In retrospect, this might be the most wonderful thing about the 80s. If only it hadn’t taken a third of anyone’s lifetime to get over our collective panic over parachute pants, perms and topiary-style new-romantic haircuts, and to hear ‘Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This’ or ‘Tainted Love’ play in the supermarket to realize that we were living through glory years that were mistaken for dog days. But, let’s grant the obvious: any decade that ever compelled anyone to say “Kajagoogoo” out loud has a lot to answer for.īut here’s a secret – and it’s understandable if you’re too shy to repeat it: 80s music provided a golden era in rock and pop. ‘What Is Love?’, we can now belatedly acknowledge, was a great song. Not that it was a completely ignoble goal. A transitional periodĮven among the greats there was some self-abasement going on in an effort to keep up with the Joneses… the Howard Joneses. The stigma kicked in as the decade was still in progress, probably about the time that crestfallen baby boomers realized that even the counterculture icons of the 60s weren’t immune to the bright and cheery tropes of the dawning MTV era, whether it was Grace Slick wearing shoulder pads in the ‘We Built This City’ video, or Bob Dylan using that same horrible gated reverb drum sound everybody else was, on Empire Burlesque, and co-starring in a film with Rupert Everett. There are reasons why the 80s is too often remembered more for its costume-party clichés than as a peak era in music. Can someone help an epoch out and pull that thing off, please? For those of you haven’t been paying attention, 80s music is cooler than you think. Is it possible to bully a decade? The 80s sure seems to have an eternal “Kick Me” sign on its back.
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