Return of the Living Eighties

Popular music has a case of the Eighties, and nothing exemplifies this more than the phenomenal success of Taylor Swift’s album 1989. As I write this, the digital download continues to sit in Amazon’s top ten best-selling albums exactly a full year after its release. The vanguard of this trend recasts Eighties music through the sensibilities of twentysomethings and markets it for teens today, which to my mind raises a question: What is someone who lived through the year 1989 to think?

I was raised to despise synthesizers, drum machines and studio effects in favor of real people playing real instruments, and there were plenty such musicians in 1989. The three biggies in my circle of friends were Violent Femmes, R.E.M. and U2. Singles from R.E.M.’s Green (1988, video) were all over the radio and 3 (1989, video) was the most mature work from Violent Femmes yet, but it was U2’s 1988 release Rattle and Hum (previous post, video) that most electrified us. We wore out the cassettes in our Walkmans, passed around bootleg VHS copies of the documentary, and strove in vain to have holey jeans as cool as The Edge’s.

In short, I would not have touched music like Taylor Swift’s with a ten-foot pole.

But while Taylor Swift’s haters are legion (and decisively losing the battle), she engenders no such dislike in me. The alternative music boom in the early to mid-Nineties was bliss, but as an adult I’ve branched out. I recently wrote a series of posts on hip-hop music (here), the only live performances I’ve attended in recent years have been either opera or heavy metal, and the only music on my Amazon Wishlist at the moment is Selena Gomez’s Revival. The truth is, with such eclectic taste, I’m more inclined to enjoy bubblegum pop now than ever before.

I first noticed the return of the Eighties sound when my son, who was three at the time, began enjoying what he called “the banana song” on the radio. This was Charlie XCX’s “Boom Clap.” (The lyrics “on and on and on and on and” sounded like “banana-nana-nana” to him.) It’s not a hard song to enjoy, and we also enjoyed her follow-up single “Break the Rules.” (My son asked why she doesn’t want to go to school, because to a kindergartner “School is fun!”) The songs on Swift’s 1989 are similarly catchy and the videos showcase retro fashion:

 

 Hipsters have long considered the Eighties anathema, but now certain hipsters--interestingly, those too young to remember the Eighties--are mining the pop side of that decade for inspiration. For some, however, the Eighties never went away. Duran Duran, a staple of MTV in its glory years, never disbanded despite music trends turning against their style. Nonetheless, 2010’s All You Need Is Now showed the masters of the actual Eighties can still write like it’s 1986, and their recent single “Pressure Off” shows they can also write like it’s 2015, and there’s little daylight between:

 

If the pop idols of today’s youth can reach back to the New Wave for inspiration--or remakes, as with Lorde’s rendition of the Tears for Fears hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” (1985)--then I hope their fans will do some exploring of pop/rock history as well. And, just as importantly, I hope those of us who actually lived through 1989 can reach forward from our roots in the past to seek value in today’s vogue.