The Allure of Listening - Chapter 10 - Social Content WIthout Much Independence

 How did USA for Africa and Live Aid suddenly morph to a global insurrection at the end of the 1980s, and was Francis Fukuyama hstening to Top 40?   1985-1990

    I began 1985 with a move to the Bay Area to write business analyses for the high-tech industry. Just about the time of the move, the pop music industry suddenly found its social voice with a flurry of Live Aid, Farm Aid, and anti-Sun City (South Africa) concerts to raise money and awareness for worthy causes. Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats played a critical role in trying to meld artists who had already expressed a political conscience with those guaranteed to have a big draw. Live Aid, with separate concerts in London and Philadelphia, was the most iconic, and was a follow-on to the “We Are the World” single in early 1985, both efforts intended to address starvation in Ethiopia.

    The Live Aid concert was known as much for spectacle – a Led Zeppelin reunion, a Freddie Mercury performance with Queen, dual-continent appearances by Phil Collins, and the last Duran Duran performance for 20 years – as it was for philanthropy effectiveness, a topic which stirred much controversy. The hardcore punks enjoyed poking fun at big-name artists’ concern for East Africa. Live Aid also set the stage for later duds, like the multi-continent Net Aid sponsored by router manufacturer Cisco Systems Inc. in 1999.

    Initially, San Francisco was a big draw for those like me who were new to the city, with venues like I-Beam and Bottom of the Hill. Innovative artists like Barbara Manning and Seymour Glass formed bands such as San Francisco Seals and World of Pooh, harbingers of a larger 1990s Bay Area underground. The East Bay was the place for fundamentalist punk, thanks to the legendary 924 Gilman St. club in Berkeley. I was surprised to see the San Jose/Silicon Valley area was spawning its own bands like Daddy In His Deep Sleep, which seemed to follow an indie ethic more than the larger cities to the north.  There was a strange, nearly invisible tech underground manifested in the quarterly Processed World magazine, largely aimed at entry-level tech workers, but forming the basis of what later became boing boing. Yet the Silicon Valley critiques were drowned out by much larger movements in San Francisco and the East Bay to address AIDS (ACT UP) and continued struggles in South Africa and Central America.

    On the national front, a few artists tried to suggest a partial awakening from somnambulance – Bruce Cockburn’s fierce “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” for example, or David Bowie’s collaboration with Pat Metheny, “This Is Not America.” But there was a lot of performance that masqueraded as rebel behavior, including women artists like Pat Benatar, and male faux-punks like Billy Idol. One might have thought, given the ACT-UP response to AIDS policies, a strong LGBTQ+ artist presence creating a unified front of musicians, but singers like Morrissey and Robert Smith seemed to stand for their own morosity, nothing more. In fact, the lesbian record labels of the late 1970s, who first brought Holly Near, Cris Williamson, and Meg Christian to national awareness, demonstrated more collective action for the queer community in those years than anything in the mid-1980s.

    Nevertheless, art without a cause or even a clear message hit great heights in 1985 – Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, the debut Suzanne Vega album, Husker Du’s New Day Rising, REM’s Fables of the Reconstruction. The intensely personal visions of the best new albums gave a preview of sorts to the diverse landscape of the DIY indie music that would arrive in the 1990s. The best rarely would carry a “we are the world” sort of message, but would make droll and very cryptic commentary on the world at large. And at least in the case of Kate Bush, people still were listening nearly 40 years later.

    What seemed equally true of both late-1980s and 1990s artists was that musicians in both eras appeared reticent to take on the yuppies – the 20-somethings who overtly abandoned social concerns in the early 1980s in favor of making lots of money. The continuing escalation in the stock market due to high-tech startups was only occasionally hit with such speed bumps as the late-1980s savings and loan crisis, the 2000 Internet slump, the much larger 2007-08 mortgage and banking crisis, yet yuppies kept up their pointless material striving for 10, 20, even 30 years, and few musicians wanted to address that. It may have been that, unlike when criticizing Reagan or faceless institutions, a finger pointed at yuppies would come too close to the cartoon character Pogo’s famous line that “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

    Since 1986 was the year I got married, I tended to associate the year with “putting away childish things,” and I worried that such changes would include dismissing pop music in general – certainly a common behavior for those approaching middle age. Enough new bands were simmering just below the surface – Pixies, Soundgarden, Chumbawamba, ‘Til Tuesday – to make me willing to remain an avid music consumer. And the expansion of rap into the mainstream certainly made pop music more interesting. Still, it would take four years of constant pushing by the independent artists to make the 1990s finally move beyond corporate control.

   At least two positive aspects of music digitization were evident by the mid-1980s, though a long way from fruition. First, the expansion of CD manufacturing into contract plants allowed smaller labels like Rhino, SST, and Dutch East India to offer both new releases and reissues from bands that were both obscure and eclectic, from Meat Puppets to Mission of Burma. These labels were ready to take advantage of the big indie breakthrough of 1990. It’s worth noting that many existing bands spent the last years of the ‘80s expanding their styles, to prepare ye the way of the DIY. Swans went from harsh metal to Middle Eastern-influenced orchestral rock; Sun City Girls went from Arizona hardcore to East Asian mysticism; Mudhoney and Alice in Chains moved from earlier styles to align closer to the Young Turks of the Pacific Northwest like Soundgarden and Nirvana. Something was definitely in the air.

    Another positive aspect was that the convergence of computer culture and pop music took its first hesitant steps in the mid-1980s. The world was still close to ten years away from the World Wide Web and ubiquitous web browsers like Netscape, and it would be a few more years beyond that before music downloads and streaming services were possible. But the first nascent online networks like The WELL (Whole Eath ‘Lectronic Link) popped up in mid-decade, followed by the arrival of Internet protocols like TCP/IP, which turned isolated local networks of computer nerds into global sharing communities. The music-centric interest groups on WELL and other networks allowed the acceleration of tape sharing, which became the equivalent of 1970s bootleg vinyl, but driven from the bottom up by the fans of bands. Mainstream culture was only aware of the explosion of tape sharing by Grateful Dead fans, but it actually expanded from dozens to hundreds of artists during the mid-1980s, driving the engine of decentralized fandom that became a key expander of music culture in the following decade.

    At a subconscious level, the summer of 1988 felt like a dam was about to break, exemplified by the reunion of Pere Ubu and release of its classic The Tenement Year album.  My wife and I were in Stockholm for the International AIDS Conference, and I found the new Ubu while perusing Stockholm music stores. On the same trip, we took a train and ferry trip to Leningrad (soon to be reverting to its old name of St. Petersburg), to check out what Gorbachev’s perestroika meant on the ground. There were plenty of street poets and buskers on the boulevards of pastel Victorians, along with agitators taking advantage of the new opening. By the time we got back to the U.S., new stirrings were happening in South Africa. Within months, the Tienanmen Square uprisings and East European revolutions were under way.

    Pop music still was taking its time to break out of years of predictability, but new tunes from They Might Be Giants, Midnight Oil, and Unwound had me convinced the great awakening was not my imagination. Even the top pop charts displayed much more hard rock than in mid-decade, exemplified by Poison, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, and Def Leppard in the Top 10 – maybe not innovative rock, but a step above crooners. On rarer occasion, a band with real indie cred, like Del Amitri or Faith No More, might crack the charts.

    What was evident throughout the last couple years of the 1980s is that nostalgia exploitation had found new markets. In the 1970s, nostalgia for the 1950s was satisfied by movies and TV shows like American Graffiti and Happy Days, as well as by bands like Sha Na Na. As the 1980s ended, a weekly chart would typically sport a re-recording of a 1960s or 1970s song by a newer artist. It was not until the latter 1990s that the trend of band reunions became common, but as more and more bands hit middle age, that 1990s reunion trend sported a shelf life extending to the 2020s and beyond, eventually being augmented by more and more tribute bands.

    The second half of 1989 seemed infused with era-defining events, beginning with Tienanmen Square in early June and ending with East European nation liberation and the fall of the Berlin Wall in Oct.-Nov. In mid-October, the Bay Area suffered a massive earthquake that finally convinced my wife it was time to leave (I had grown tired of Bay Area culture at least two years earlier). We began looking for affordable housing in Colorado by the end of the year.

    In retrospect, we were lucky that pop music didn’t display the same type of jingoist hubris that U.S. diplomats did after Gorbachev “freed” the Central European nations to pursue their own fates. Instead, the slacker sound, whether in the heavy Nirvana instantiation or the breezier Pavement version, displayed a languor that could not be turned into the type of tub-thumping displayed by Springsteen’s Born in the USA six years earlier. Even if most 1990s songs were at less than speedcore pace, 1990 began with its own type of excitement – career-defining albums by They Might Be Giants, Tori Amos, The Sundays, and Toad the Wet Sprocket. In fact, the entire year of 1990 in both album releases and singles charts carried the feel of waking from an opiated dream. There wasn’t a unifying theme as there had been in the psychedelic or punk eras, but there was palpable excitement.

    Conventional wisdom holds that the entire decade of the 1990s was the low point for the manufacture of vinyl LPs, followed by a slow-building resurgence in the 21^st century, but that’s not quite true. In aggregate numbers, the observation might hold water because of the small lots that indie record labels issued for both CDs and LPs. But the last half of the 1980s was when vinyl was reduced to little but 12” singles in the hip hop and dance/EDM worlds. I remember The Swans’ 12” EP of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was my only vinyl purchase of 1988, and that represented a point of low tide. The indie labels of the 1990s made a point of offering titles on vinyl, often as special art objects with hand-made covers. In most cases, a vinyl release cost less in a retail store than a CD release.

    Through all of the 1990s and 2000s the two formats were at least at price parity, and this held until the mid-2010s, when a shortage of lacquer worldwide, and a lack of vinyl pressing plants to respond to increased demand, caused the price of vinyl to explode to retail prices typically twice that of CDs.  But for a brief period of time in the early to mid-1990s, vinyl lovers experienced a special heyday. The catch was that most of the vinyl titles could only be found through special print catalogs or in special orders from record stores with savvy owners. This was well before the days of Discogs or eBay, and even prior to the era when every record label sported a web site taking customer orders. The first such online music ordering outlets only arrived around 1995-96. The vinyl was out there all right, but you had to know where to find it.

Coming in three weeks (Aug. 9) - Indie Rock, Prospects and Problems - 1990-1997
If you assumed it was all about Nirvana and grunge, you missed the entire message.

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

The Allure of Listening - Chapter 9 - The CD as Unfortunate Equalizer

 It was never the CD's fault - at least, not in the way you think. 1983-87

    As the LP began its resurgence early in the 21^st century, people found all kinds of crimes to lay at the feet of the compact disc, yet the problem had little to do with its format, or with the digitization of a recording in and of itself. Sure, plenty of people claim the preservation of an analog slope in an LP makes the music sound “warmer” with a good turntable, but what the hell does that even mean? Listening to the first CDs was indeed a revelation, because one could experience a clean, unadorned melding of individual musical instruments. The debut of CDs in 1983 happened long before audiologists discovered people have a much better listening experience if a little white noise is thrown in with the signal (think cracks and pops in an LP).

    But because the CD was introduced at roughly the same time as the Mac and the IBM PC, many people confused the digitization of the master musical recording, for transfer to an audio CD, with the later lossy compression of music for easier downloading and burning of files on a desktop device with limited storage capacity. CDs used dynamic Pulse Code Modulation during transfers from master tapes, masters which could be analog or digital. Sampling rates were significantly higher than either the lossy (MP3) or lossless (WAV, FLAC) compression standards introduced in the 1990s, but keep in mind, the later compression standards operated on files, and such standards were not necessary in the 1980s, and would not arrive until the late 1990s. In the early 1980s, CDs could provide excellent sound quality unless studio recording engineers messed with the equalization and the high- and low-pass filtering, which is precisely what was done to most commercial CDs by the late 1980s.

    With an ideal source, an early CD of classical music or acoustic jazz was indeed a joy to hear. The problem was that the arrival of the CD gave record companies a chance to maximize profits while paying little attention to the best way to offer digital sound. It was a no-brainer to realize that record companies would appeal to boomer sensibilities by reissuing albums from the previous 25 years in CD formats as rapidly as possible, hoping that many music buffs would fully replicate their collections in the little silver discs. In most cases, that meant not making any effort to re-master old recordings to take advantage of CDs’ digital representation. Later in the next century, these old recordings were given better treatment at the 40^th or 50^th anniversaries of their release, by getting re-mastered versions released in CD or LP. But in the mad gold rush of 1983-86, little of that happened.

    It was just as bad or worse for new music being released on CD. A few bands from the Athens, GA scene or the Paisley Underground realized a good CD release was best for optimizing strings and horns with depth, along with a solid bass sound. But most mainstream producers in the camps of hip-hop, dance-pop, and Minneapolis soul preferred a bright and treble-heavy sound with plenty of synthesizers. At the time, it was thought to be the best optimization for the CD format (particularly for a boombox or an automotive CD player), but in most cases it made for a more tinny, less substantive sound. What is worse, artists like Carly Simon or Judy Collins, who should never have been given a synthesizer treatment, were graced with similar engineering to make their sounds more plastic.  (What, exactly, is meant by “synthesizer swoosh”? Peruse any of the 1980s albums of (Jefferson) Starship, Loverboy, Journey, etc. for prime examples of a genre best left forgotten.) These production aesthetics occasionally worked, for example in Michael Jackson’s Thriller. A few electronica-influenced pioneers like Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark and Haircut 100 used it to their advantage. But in most cases, the “80s Sound” was a mistake in execution. And the mistakes in the recording studio were blamed for the most part on the CD itself.

    There was a subtle hint of irony in the fact that only four months after the March 1983 debut of the CD in U.S. markets, Jean-Michel Jarre held a protest against home taping (what he would call “piracy”) by releasing a single copy of his latest album. In retrospect, home taping from CD to cassette seemed like a negligible hit to the revenues of artists when compared to the later furors over home CD burning, Napster and similar free downloads, streaming services like Spotify – each successive technology seemed to cheapen the revenue opportunities for new artists, while at the same time making exponentially more music available for the individual consumer. But during Jarre’s days of contention, using the CD as a master to churn out cassettes seemed like an apocalypse for the musical artist.

    This made the morphing of punk into hardcore seem all that much more of a failure to adequately respond to 1980s corporatization of popular music. Granted, a few art-rock specialists like Laurie Anderson and Negativland were providing lonely voices not only in opposition to Reagan’s “Morning in America,” but in opposition to the assumptions driving the Sony/Warner/Geffen machines in general (and Laurie’s massive United States Live made jaws drop more than her earlier O Superman) .

    Hardcore punk, by contrast, not only relished in its own marginalization, but relied on unbridled anger and the repetition of trite anti-Reagan name-calling to brand the hardcore tribe. Exceptions to the rule, like Jello Biafra and The Dead Kennedys, stood out in part because the rest of the scene was so tedious. I often felt, when watching a hardcore show, the way I did listening to David Peel or Rastafarians sing about pot – “Fine, smoke some weed, but you can’t build a movement on such thin gruel.” (And of course, the straightedge contingent within hardcore didn’t even have the substance-abuse signifier to hang their toques on.) One of the reasons why hip-hop leaders like Run DMC and Beastie Boys sounded so radical when they emerged later in the decade was because they were responding to a pent-up demand for something rebellious and fresh.

    In the third decade of the new millenium, it seems almost quaint to talk about the power of major labels, since the gaming and streaming industries have left recorded music as a denuded husk of its former self. But the combination in the 1980s of a “baby bust” that left far fewer teens to launch new garage bands, and a consolidated music industry looking only for proven entities like a Phil Collins or Rod Stewart, meant that an independent music business was almost nonexistent. It’s no accident that teens discovering hip-hop and their disgruntled older siblings looking for indie music discovered mixtapes at about the same time. The music industry was skewing toward an older, more conservative audience.

    There were new bands like Sonic Youth coming into being, and new labels like SST and Homestead in a nascent state, but a true “indie rock” business was still almost ten years away. First music lovers had to live through such atrocities as the Sony acquisition of Columbia Music in 1988, and the petulant billionaire David Geffen trying to pass off Geffen Records as an alternative to the big kids (the same David Geffen who would later sue Neil Young for making albums that “didn’t sound like Neil Young”).

    When REM released the Chronic Town EP and the full-length Murmur on the new IRS label, it was already clear that Miles Copeland’s new imprint would own much of the college radio market, signing bands ranging from The dB’s to The Go-Gos to Suburban Lawns to Wall of Voodoo. It wasn’t that  IRS had such better terms than other labels or that the majors were cluelessly conservative, the lack of serious competition to IRS was a reflection of the college-radio market being less interesting in a baby-bust Generation X world. Most of the original IRS releases were vinyl, though Copeland was on top of the CD shift, which took place for IRS between 1983 and 1985. Keep in mind, the entire IRS roster meant next to nothing to the average fraternity/sorority or business-major student, in the same way that campus protests over apartheid, Euronukes, or Reagan’s funding of the contras failed to enter such students’ consciousness. If you were going to school in Boston, Berkeley, Isla Vista, or Santa Cruz, you might consider such cultural elements a big deal, but middle American did not.

    When CDs expanded manufacturing to the U.S. from original plants in Japan and Germany, it surprised few people that Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA would be the first mass-produced disc, followed closely by Mariah Carey’s debut long-player. Punks and rebels, even those in the relative mainstream like X with its third album More Fun in the New World, or The Replacements with their first four albums, would be strictly vinyl, with CDs following several years later as production facilities expanded. This may have made a difference to boomers reaching middle age who were entranced by the new format, but teens and college-age listeners were shifting to mixtapes and only saw CDs as a useful vehicle for future Walkman products. The arrival of this format was a wash for existing record-store owners – CDs did indeed represent a new way to repackage existing works for customers, but the small form-factor of the case made it necessary to develop long-form cardboard packages to prevent theft (with this dual packaging, most of it going to landfill, increasing the CD’s environmental footprint). Also, CDs tended to be sold in big-box retail stores as much or more than dedicated music stores, at least until new independent labels helped create a market for the smaller or regional artist.

    College and young-adult parties in 1984-85 tended to be dominated by power playlists of Van Halen, Madonna, Billy Joel, Tina Turner, and Michael Jackson, mildly interesting in their own right, but rarely inventive. In the mid-1980s, it was only Prince, Mats, and a handful of others who demonstrated innovation. Albuquerque had a decent underground club scene at the time, but when hardcore punkers all were trying to imitate DRI or Black Flag, it got almost as tedious as the mainstream. I would occasionally frequent dedicated hardcore venues like B&M Lock (affectionately known as “Bash & Mash”), but I got bored rather quickly. Art rockers like Laurie Anderson, Flipper, and Butthole Surfers played a bigger role keeping the music aficionados awake than was realized at the time. What with relationship heartbreaks and Dadaist visits to the Democrat and Republican conventions in 1984, my own soundtrack that year tended to Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer.”

    I lived with a few former Tempe friends in a house on Silver Street in Albuquerque known as the “Loco Pony,” with a similar artist enclave across the street that became the Pony Annex. Somehow, Navajo and Lakota Sioux members of American Indian Movement ended up at the Loco Pony, as did Katowice refugees from the 1981 declaration of martial law in Poland. The most colorful member of the household was arguably Seamus McKillip, an Irish character who sold mobile homes, and made several late-night TV commercials featuring his dog Coco, a collie who wore neckties. Seamus threw regular sartorial parties for Coco, where the price of admission was a necktie.

   Needless to say, we were all surprised when the FBI raided the Loco Pony in 1985, and it turned out Seamus McKillip was really James Barrett of the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Armed Revolutionary Front, which later became the United Freedom Front, subject to nationwide FBI raids in 1984.  For months, the FBI was convinced that the presence of AIM members and Polish refugees in the same house must mean something crucial.  Barrett apparently turned state’s evidence against Raymond Luc Levasseur, and promptly vanished. Coco ended up at a chicken ranch in Oklahoma.

    The arrival of Springsteen’s Born in the USA represented another trend of the CD era, outside the physical format. Springsteen’s three releases since Born to Run (four if you count the unreleased album The Promise) – Darkness at the Edge of Town, Nebraska, and The River – all offered wry and relatively dark musings on the lies inherent in the promises made to the American working classes. Born In the USA continued this in a subtler vein where the tongue almost could not be dislodged from the cheek. Many conservative Americans interpreted it as the quintessential patriotic album, though that was far from Springsteen’s intention. He wanted to couch critiques within the parameters of the dominant “Morning in America” narrative. Reviewers were quick to recognize this was clever, while cultural critics thought that Springsteen was censoring himself. Both camps failed to notice that Springsteen’s deep cuts often were the best, as they were in past releases, this time including “Bobby Jean” and “Downbound Train.”

  

   In reality, The Boss was merely following a trend of narrowed parameters of protest that characterized the U.S. between roughly 1982 and 1987. In the final two years of Reagan’s reign, genuine musical protest arose regarding South African apartheid, AIDS policies, and expanded Central American wars. But the five years in the middle of Reagan’s two terms, precisely the time when the CD was getting established, were a time of muted protests not only against Reagan, but against corporate control in the music business.

    CDs, therefore, took on guilt for crimes that were not of their making – poor, tinny, and synth-heavy engineering; muted opportunities for social protest; and the lack of a second- and third-tier “farm team” of musicians behind the standouts. Both the 1970s punk era and 1990s indie era boasted the presence of dozens of artists on the periphery of most music listeners’ consciousness. In the 1980s, there were small support teams behind REM in the Athens scene, behind Mats and Prince in the Twin Cities scene, and within the Paisley Underground/jangle-pop scene, all of which got far less attention than they deserved. In other realms, standouts like The Smiths and the latter-era Talking Heads had to shoulder a scene on their own. These three factors were social signs of the times that were only accidentally a product of the CD era, yet the maligned little shiny disc took on the sins of a decade.

 

    As for rap, the major impact of groups like Run DMC, NWA, Beastie Boys, and Public Enemy did not arrive until mid-decade. In the early 1980s, it remained underground, albeit with a significant white audience. Many people assume that Tipper Gore’s founding of the Parents Music Resource Center in 1985 was a response to gangsta rap, but her motivating source was really a Prince single. Dissent was brewing below the surface, but most middle-class Americans remained unaware of it until pioneers like Rick Rubin brought rap groups to major labels in the second half of the decade.

    I might have given up on popular music in the cruel summer of 1984, were it not for the simultaneous arrival of early works from The Cure and The Smiths, as well as Laurie Anderson’s sprawling United States Live. Other artists were peeking out from under corporate somnambulance, including Michelle Shocked and 10,000 Maniacs. It would take until decade’s end for the early buds to blossom into a true grassroots DIY movement, but at least it held the promise of something beyond corporate dancey-pop.

Coming in three weeks (July 19) - Chapter 10, Social Content Without Much Independence, 1986-1990

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

The Allure of Listening - Chapter 8 - The Co-Opting of Culture

 Music hews to new constraints in the dawn of the Reagan and Thatcher years - 1980-83

    One segment of pop music culture did not notice nor did it care about the closing of the American mind. The launch of Studio 54 at the end of 1977 and the arrival of Sony Walkman in 1979 represented the bookends of the period when selfish dilettante culture won the day. Largely content-free exercise tunes dominated the pop charts because they were ideal soundtracks to jogging in the park. Beat-heavy sex tunes were made for the dozens of clones of Studio 54 popping up around the country, where sex took place in semi-public and cocaine was everywhere.

    While there were plenty of good disco songs in the post-1979 period, the innocent joy of early Donna Summer and KC hits was gone, as self-infatuation drove a desperate 1980s club culture. There were worthy offshoots, such as the rise of gay dance clubs and the particulars of the Minneapolis sound dominated by Prince. But for the most part, disco showed its worst as it optimized for the Reagan era (just as punk showed its worst as it optimized for the hardcore Reagan-criticism era). And of course, the gay side of disco culture soon fell victim to an emerging AIDS crisis.

    The migration to the mundane moved into high gear from early 1979 on. A few Top 40 hits were mildly interesting (The Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes,” Nicolette Larson’s cover of Neil Young’s “Lotta Love”), but many more were simply insipid (Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, Melissa Manchester’s “Don’t Cry Out Loud”). Punks didn’t just abandon Top 40 because underground playlists were more interesting. They were driven from the format by relentless promotion of pablum. Meanwhile, in physical formats, pre-recorded cassettes began eating into 8-track sales due to Dolby noise-reduction features, but it would take a few more years for dubbing decks arriving in the home for the home-made “mixtape” to make a mark in music listening trends.

    Wider acceptance of outsider music in both its original and its toned-down “new wave” forms was a double-edged sword. It was certainly gratifying to see Talking Heads and Blondie make the charts, but as some regional punks became national touring acts, there was a predictability present in 1979 that was not there in 1977. Such commodification of rebel culture helped lead to the reaction known as no-wave music, as Eno chronicled for the New York underground scene in the No New York album, and as enthusiastic artists like The Slits and Lora Logic provided for U.K. audiences. Some might place Siouxsie and the Banshees in that “outside the outsider” movement, though the Banshees later evolved to a more Goth sound. (And before we reject the U.K. as a dreary place in the 1980s, it helps to remember that The Pretenders snagged their first hit in mid-1980, with bands like The English Beat following quickly behind. In fact, an entire subculture of “fun first” emerged around Adam Ant and Bow Wow Wow.)

    Long before Reagan began taking a rhetorical edge over Carter in the 1980 election season, one could feel a conservative and homogenizing trend hitting the music scene, driven by disco and the taming of punk. It’s important to remember that England did not become a dark and dismal place with the assumption to power of Maggie Thatcher in 1979, nor did “morning in America” happen instantaneously with Reagan’s swearing in in early 1981. Rather, the 1980-81 period was a recession-driven discontent era with post-punk in both funky and gloomy versions predominating, disco in an odd sort of half-insurgence, and music as uncertain of its styles as Reagan and Thatcher were uncertain of their ability to dominate the political scene. It was only with Reagan’s victory over PATCO air traffic controllers, and Thatcher’s efforts to turn the Falklands war into a national jingoist crusade in 1982, that pop music itself succumbed to the broad synthesizer swoosh that placed so much of music under corporate control, hence becoming less interesting.

    Before we make the simple case that music consumers were responding to the “me culture” vibes that found their ultimate instantiation in the Reagan and Thatcher years, it’s useful to remember that big labels were driving this pop music trend as a way of re-establishing dominance after the free-form years of punk. Yes, small labels survived in certain genres like hardcore punk, but the largest labels, including Warner, Columbia (later Sony), and Virgin structured their artist development programs around multi-media dominance, inoffensive performance, and the type of mega-events that began with the Buckingham-Nicks Fleetwood albums, and were perfected in Michael Jackson. There was a downside to this for the big labels however. The 1980s made them fat and happy, with the result that they tried to use proven marketing techniques in the 1990s when the next round of indie labels came around. The methods failed to work even before the arrival of the Internet, and once downloading and streaming culture arrived, the major labels were doomed. It just took them several decades to truly understand what zombies they had become. And the moves toward obsolescence and death began in the 1980s.

    Fans of 1980s hair-driven hard rock might protest that bands like Van Halen, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Sammy Hagar, and Judas Priest got their start during this era; I would insist that proves the point, in that these bands typically played more cliché-ridden, less interesting rock than even their 1970s arena-rock predecessors. There were regional exceptions to the rule – the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul in particular gave the world Prince, Lipps Inc., Husker Du, and The Replacements. But the brighter lights only served to clarify how uninteresting the duller lights were. One factor that drove many teens to rap by the early 1980s was the major shift of pop charts to older and safe artists, while the AOR FM stations favored hard-rock hair bands.

     Nostalgia buffs can find a bright spot in anything, and the epitome of this positivism came in the 21^st-century love for early-1980s Yacht Rock genre. Anyone who wants to include truly innovative artists like Hall & Oates in that genre has a place to hang their hat, but artists like Christopher Cross and Andrew Gold felt tedious in 1980 and remain tedious in the 21^st century when spun in retrospect. (A sad sign of the times was that Cross won four Grammys in early 1981, displacing Pink Floyd’s The Wall in the process.)

The reason new outsider artists like Laurie Anderson or Lydia Lunch sounded so fresh was in part due to the background of pop music being devoid of innovation in the first few years of the 1980s decade. Those with an edgier sheen to their nostalgia in the 21^st century might point to the bands of the Paisley Underground as an early-1980s bright spot, and it’s true that the reissue of Game Theory, Rain Parade and Three O’Clock albums in the 2020s garnered a lot of attention. But was the Paisley Underground big in that 1980-84 era? With the exception of The Bangles, not really. Still, one could work in a record store in 1981 and be convinced that little had changed from the heights of the late 1970s. The Police were riding high, prior to Sting’s departure to perfect the worst in 1980s excess, and a new Irish band, U2, was stirring a lot of attention, a good five years before Bono became insufferable.

    There certainly was more going on in subterranean subgenres, though their visibility often was greater in the U.K. and Europe than statewide – the polyrhythms of Bow Wow Wow and Adam and the Ants, for example.  The August 1981 debut of MTV should have made a difference in that marginal visibility, since MTV tried to air bands on the fringe, but for the most part, the cable network seemed to favor only the more vapid of the outsider artists, such as Flock of Seagulls or A-Ha.

    MTV’s arrival accentuated two trends that already were bubbling into mainstream consciousness. First, the notion of the short-form music video as a new art form had been expanding since the era of The Beatles’ “Rain/Paperback Writer,” but MTV rotation made art in video a necessity, not an afterthought. Second, MTV’s visual eye candy became baseline only months before artists like Madonna and Paula Abdul raised choreography to a status equal to that of music arrangement. Dancehall disco and aerobic workouts at the gym already had underscored the role of performative dance to a level far greater than in disco’s early days, but the imminent arrival of Prince and Madonna choreography on MTV would make the dance element a permanent feature.

    Videos often were created for the celebrity visual potential, as when Rex Smith of Grease fame was paired with Rachel Sweet for a remake of “Everlasting Love.” In MTV’s first year, some bands like ABC and Spandau Ballet seemed to carry the theatrics to melodramatic levels. Dozens of “serious” musicians would complain that this meant almost a necessary de-emphasis on lyricism and songwriting styles, but dance and Broadway-style performance were both djinns that would not go back in the bottle.

    I had moved from Tempe to Tucson to take advantage of an unusual degree program in science journalism at the University of Arizona. My 8^th St. duplex was nextdoor to Tucson High School, where low-riders were displayed to a soundtrack of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” and War’s “Low Rider.” The duplex also was two blocks from the notorious Tumbleweeds Bar. In addition to seeing bands like Black Flag and X early in their careers, I got to experience the musicians of Green On Red, Pedestrians, and UPS, that later formed what was known as Tucson Hard Core or THC. But it wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to go.

    I took a long bicycle trip through northern California to the Oregon border in the summer of 1981, giving me a ground-level view of where musical trends were heading in the larger cities of the Pacific Northwest. For the most part, it seemed we in Tucson were aware of most Bay Area trends, and might even have them beat here and there. Back in Tucson, the last few semesters of 1981-82 were grim times, living off a 50-lb. bag of millet and facing the murder of a friend just weeks before earning my degree. I was looking for sullen dance music as a soundtrack, and the only offerings that seemed to fit that limited bill were posthumous Joy Division singles, Remain in Light by Talking Heads, and in particular, Under the Big Black Sun by X, the latter a perfect description of living in Tucson in a funk. Once the former Joy Division had reassembled following Ian Curtis’s suicide, to create the hyper-dance collective New Order, the writing seemed to be on the dance club’s walls.

    After getting back together with a Tempe girlfriend, we spent the summer in the Arizona mountains, and I then moved to Albuquerque to take a science reporter job with the Albuquerque Tribune. Locally, there were aspects of the music scene I found exciting, but it was hard to insert it into a national or international moire that made any sense. New national trends were bubbling just under the surface, as evidenced by a University of New Mexico show in which the young Athens band REM opened for Gang of Four. Yet the morphing of punk into hardcore seemed to be an exercise in Reagan-bashing tedium. At the same time, mainstream culture was filled with bubbly clones of Sheena Easton, or interchangeable hard-rock bands with forgettable lyrics – Journey, Foreigner, Loverboy, Styx, REO Speedwagon.

    To be sure, there were still reasons to give in to pure pop – any of the Hall & Oates singles of the era or “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell. But why did the full smorgasbord platter of popular music suddenly feel so devoid of substance? At a party in early 1983, the arts editor of the Albuquerque Tribune showed me an early instantiation of a technology scapegoat. I could blame my music ennui on the compact disc.

Coming in three weeks (June 28) - "Chapter 9 - The CD as Unfortunate Equalizer"

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

The Allure of Listening - Chapter 7 - Everything Everywhere

 Was the punk tsunami a new wave, a no-wave, or a rogue wave? - 1977-79

Followers of pop culture who have never ridden the crest of a strong wave often wonder what it feels like, if there are precursors to observe or recipes to follow to bring a wave to fruition. The answer to the latter is a definite no, because the answer to the former involves the chaotic “butterfly effect,” where tiny initial conditions lead to huge results. Sometimes, waves involve only a political or social dimension. The Gaza campus encampments of 2024, the Occupy wave of 2011 and the Black Lives Matter wave of 2020 might be seen as near-tsunamis, while waves like the post-Seattle-battle “follow the World Trade Organization” movement of 1999-2000 were smaller but discernible.

    When political and social waves converge with cultural and music trends, a rogue wave of unprecedented size is created, usually from random inputs that combine at just the right time for just the right effects. The youth culture wave stretching roughly from Beatlemania to Kent State was arguably the biggest (some might extend its beginning to mid-1950s rock and roll, and there are good arguments on either side for its inclusion). Because I was so young when that wave broke, I thought of it as the norm in society, and only realized later how tedious the eras between waves could be.

    Punk culture never had the broad base of acceptance to match the events of a decade earlier. However, it arrived at the same time as a political reawakening centered on environmental, anti-nuclear, and anti-apartheid activities, with opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America added to the mix after 1978. The political elements of the wave never matched opposition to the Vietnam War in breadth (though the 2 million marching for nuclear disarmament in June 1982 hit records never before seen in the late 1960s). But when the smaller wave of punk crested sinusoidally with the smaller wave of political reawakening, a rogue wave of not insignificant size was created.

    In late 1976, when Patti Smith released her misunderstood and oft-derided sophomore album Radio Ethiopia, I fell in love with its near-delirious mysticism, and noticed a distinct throbbing in my own brain, akin to the old farmer whose bunions would swell when a storm was approaching. I made a conscious but inexplicable decision to add a poetry and small-press specialty class to my fall class schedule, and began volunteer work for a quarterly literary magazine published out of the offices of the Lansing Star, called Invitation. I had already been writing for the Lansing Star on the local activities of a private police-intelligence club called the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit, an organization with ties to the 1974 death of Oklahoma plutonium worker Karen Silkwood. The poem I submitted to Invitation was one on Silkwood, and I suddenly felt resonances everywhere. Al Drake, the poet who ran the DIY poetry publishing class, encouraged such intuitive resonances.

    I moved off-campus to a house on the Okemos border with several friends from my freshman year in the dorm. The housemates all were politically aware and lovers of obscure music, so it felt like a house of dilettantes, even if a bit middle class. It was the autumn of Ford-Carter debates, of Seabrook protests, and of near-unknown bands making their debut at New York’s CBGB. The feeling of anticipation following the November elections had little to do with a peanut farmer from Georgia, and everything to do with cultural prototypes waiting to be born, and nascent protest movements like the new Mobilization for Survival which sponsored anti-nuke actions at the Midland, MI nuclear power plant.

    The new year announced itself with critical album releases like Television’s Marquee Moon, Bowie’s Low, and for the more mainstream listeners, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. With the exception of Mac, where the ubiquity of Stevie’s voice peaked right around the new year, none of this excitement manifested itself in Top 40 radio, which was in the middle of the Debby Boone-Andy Gibb-Leif Garrett period. But since our own weekend parties centered on a turntable, radio listening could not be farther from my mind. Winter nights carried a soundtrack of Patti Smith’s recorded mumbling about “Brancusi….blood and space” (while the real Patti was in a neck brace after a fall from a Tampa stage), and Tom Verlaine shouting “Prove it! Just the facts.” A lot of Tom Waits seemed to end up in the mix, as I was gravitating more to the power of the spoken word and performance poetry.

    The atmosphere on campus synched well with music coming in from Europe and from larger U.S. cities. WhereHouse Records opened during the bicentennial year as a mecca for all new releases, and Flat Black & Circular opened in 1977 as a repository for used records and eclectic releases from small labels (the latter celebrated its 47^th birthday in 2024). After I left town, East Lansing was graced with many chains such as Tower Records and CD Warehouse, though none sported the longevity of the dependable FB&C.

    It’s easy to forget how strange the first few months of the Carter administration seemed, what with the Hanafi Muslim siege in D.C., multiple back-to-back plane crashes, a series of terror actions by the Baader-Meinhof gang. Events later in the Carter administration could be placed into a bucket of Islamic revolution, the Afghanistan crisis, etc., but when random events do not fit a predetermined template, it’s remarkable how quickly they are forgotten. I was integrating a lot of this imagery into the poetry chapbook that would become my semester project for Al Drake’s DIY class. The experience spurred me into making a call for submissions for a literary magazine, maybe a bit presumptuous of me, though the response was surprising.

    The promotional flier that mentioned “deliberate unmarketability” reflected my growing disillusion with the communication department at Michigan State University. I was looking for the equivalent of an MIT Media Lab that did not yet exist. MSU was convinced its communication school should fall fully under the Business Department. By the end of the spring semester, I had made up my mind to transfer elsewhere, but where?

    At some point early in the summer of 1977, I met several residents and hangers-on of the poetry house on campus, Surf City Convent. I was overjoyed to find that Lee, Sam, Rosa, and Marilyn had no pretensions, and were rather mischievous most of the time. Going drinking and carousing with the convent in that summer involved trips to dive bars to see unrehearsed local punk bands like Tool Box, mostly doing covers of Sex Pistols and Dead Boys. In the course of the summer, we picked up new releases from The Clash, The Vibrators, Elvis Costello, The Saints, and Richard Hell & the Voidoids. It was a distinct musical and cultural movement in its early stages. I remember a day in early September where we had a record swap of sorts at Surf City – Sam showed off the first single from Talking Heads, “Love > Building On Fire,” and I brought in fresh LPs from Iggy Pop and Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson.

    By the time the literary magazine was published and we hosted an open mic at Jocundry’s Bookstore, I had already dropped out of MSU for fall semester. I lived temporarily in an old tumble-down farmhouse on Grand River Ave. near the airport, soon to be condemned for an interstate freeway expansion. We’d host parties with a background of Costello and Robert Gordon, while I asked around about cars heading west. Rosa had written three Arizona poems, and I decided that would be my next destination. (After I left Michigan, some members of Surf City Convent joined local art-rock bands like Trainables and Betty & Dean’s Living Room, while others formed the core of what would become Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Lee became a nationally-renowned poet and literary critic, leaving us all in awe.)

    I made a stopover in Oklahoma City for a couple weeks at year’s end to help out on pre-trial discovery for the Karen Silkwood civil trial, then came barreling into a north Phoenix neighborhood, Sunnyslope, in early February 1978. I lived among some of the Valley of the Sun’s most down-and-out for a couple months, and made friends with Phil, a lanky man with beret and goatee, who’d repeat like a mantra, “Ain’t nothin’ for the head like the old Grateful Dead.” I moved to Tempe by March, and lived for a brief time with a few Star Wars nerds excited about the arrival of the century’s greatest space opera franchise.

    The chance discovery of a call for roommates in mid-spring steered me to two soon-to-be-lifelong friends, Chris and Kevin, who matched my musical interests and political aspirations to an uncanny degree. Within weeks, we had launched an Arizona branch of Mobilization for Survival, holding political encounter sessions on almost a nightly basis. Punk albums were rolling out weekly, and the 45 rpm bins at both Tower Records of Tempe and the small, scruffy World Records down the street kept me fed with odd new singles. World Records’ proprietor, Geno, turned me on to the Cleveland band Pere Ubu, which defined for me where art-rock really ought to go, even if it never turned into the most sought-after cult music in the country.

    The greater Phoenix area sported a punk scene nearly as vibrant as that of L.A. The larger regional bars featured touring appearances by Weirdos, Dils, Talking Heads, while a Tempe theater would regularly host the pride of the local community, The Consumers. I got introduced to various scenemakers like Bill Drummond, a visual artist who always seemed to wear a haz-mat suit, and Frank Discussion, founder of local band The Feederz, who gained some broader notoriety in the southern California scene. Still, the regional scene seemed more tuned to elite insiders than a massive Arizona public at large.

    My own work and study agenda was odd and invigorating. I worked for the ASU Publications Department, designing book covers and choosing fonts in a pre-desktop-publishing era, trying my hand at such publications as the first English translations of the poems of Nicaraguan priest Ernesto Cardenal. At night, I’d take evening classes on international security, including military-policy courses from the Cold War warhorse Donald Dalgliesh. I remember a small chain-smoking Romanian woman who taught Eastern European politics. As a final project in her class, I put together a history of the repression of the Prague band Plastic People of the Universe, who later gained international fame as close allies of future president Vaclav Havel. Deciphering the Plastic People made me ponder what was underground, what was for the masses, and how to tell the difference.

    Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth once made an observation on jazz which he predicted would fit many musical trends – something arrives as the most powerful genre of youth, then migrates to an elitist genre favored by serious listeners, and finally fades into near-obscurity, except for occasional periods of revivalism. Various strands of pop and rock music were caught between mass popularity and elitism during 1978. A few forms of progressive rock joined punk in the elitist club, but struggled to find the popularity they deserved – bands like Chrome and Gong would drift into and out of the punk milieu, while prog-rock fans tried to decide if they wanted to be associated with these boisterous whippersnappers. (It is an odd truism that those who fit nicely within the MOR/AOR camp tended to “misremember” in later decades how involved they were with elitist bands – “I was at those earliest Blondie and Talking Heads concerts.” “No you weren’t. I was there. You were at the disco.” This misremembering repeated itself with every succeeding decade.)

    In such an environment was the artificial bifurcation between new-wave and no-wave born. Major labels wanted to remove what they saw as the seamier aspects of punk, and began promoting high-energy but cleaner bands along the lines of The Cars, The Shirts, The Romantics, and Tommy Tutone. Make no mistake, many of the new wave artists were more than worth a spin. Partly in response, New York and San Francisco art-punks deliberately turned up the dissonance and created no-wave, favored by DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, James Chance, Pink Section, Flipper, and many others. Brian Eno produced the multi-artist album No New York which defined the no-wave movement.

    Meanwhile, a few AOR bands like Styx and Queen wedged themselves into a tightly-controlled Top 40 culture dominated by disco and forgettable ballad music. It was still a year before the Sony Walkman hit the streets, but early trend-setters already were taking their cassettes to the gym using makeshift stereo systems, in which music playlists were designed as background to serve exercise routines. The 1978-79 “music as Pilates” movement hinted of the future singles lists of the 1980s, where Madonna and Paula Abdul led a coterie of pop stars for whom dance and movement played a far more important role than arrangements or lyricism. Such shifts in focus remain central today to genres such as K-pop. I had moments of self-doubt in 1978 where I wondered if I was giving MOR music a short shrift, but checking out lists of hits 45 years after the fact made me realize that, except for a few great novelties like Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” and Randy Newman’s “Short People,” the Top 40 lists of the time were as vacuous as I remembered. Sometimes, smooth hits with saxophone like Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” or Steely Dan’s latter 1970s hits proved of momentary interest, but all too often, songs like Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me” previewed the synthesizer swoosh that would be all-too prevalent in pop hits of the early 1980s.

    As anti-nuclear actions started escalating in the second half of 1978, I pondered carefully the changing role of politics in pop. The Laurel Canyon and Americana artists like Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt tended to dominate the series of “No Nukes” concerts. A handful of the more serious British bands like The Clash, Crass, and Gang of Four applied class analysis and Situationism to their screeds, and helped to inspire later U.S. bands like Dead Kennedys. Yet deep social critique requires a long-haul vision, which was not forthcoming from the vanguard.  The Clash hit its high points with Give ‘Em Enough Rope and London Calling. Despite its title, the band’s three-LP Sandinista tended to dub excess, and by the era of Cut the Crap, The Clash had become a parody of itself. Even the on-point Gang of Four, which wore its Dadaism on its sleeve in 1979, moved to New Order-style dance numbers by the post-Falklands Thatcher era. Crass may have stayed honest, but no one paid the band any attention. That left only The Pop Group, Alternative TV, and Tom Robinson Band to define British resistance politics.

    In the U.S., Jello Biafra’s rhetoric with Dead Kennedys helped to spur the hardcore punk movement of the early 1980s, but by Reagan’s second year in office, most hardcore bands were relying on trite stereotypes and name-calling for their political activism. In short, rebel politics in pop culture played a negligible role from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s.

    Dozens of genuinely fresh and exciting punk and art-punk albums were released in 1979, via a mix of genuinely independent labels, major labels, and faux independents backed by the big shots. Major labels tried to steer and co-opt movements through new wave. They pointed out that the existence of songs like Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Talking Heads’ “Take Me to the River” in Top 40 charts proved the adaptability of hit radio. Of course, the music that made it that far usually had moved into “smooth” territory that occasionally augured the mainstream turn of the band. But not always. Talking Heads could win mass appeal while remaining true to its emerging dance styles, and Patti Smith could win hearts and minds with “Because the Night” while changing very little of her outsider style.

     Nevertheless, the last half of the last year of the 1970s was a time that hinted of as much or more constriction of pop music as it did for emerging styles. The rise of no-wave in New York, and the popularity of Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees in England, proved a remaining flexibility in playlists, while Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” gave a preview of what was to come in hip-hop disciplines.

    However, the looseness of the Carter era was tightening quickly. The Iran hostage crisis in November, followed in rapid succession by the seizure of the Kaaba in Saudi Arabia and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by year’s end, left a feeling that hard lines in the Western world would become the norm. By early 1980, Carter himself was leading the charge to reinstate the draft, and to task Zbigniew Brzezinski with unleashing the CIA in Afghanistan. British rebels already felt the stern hand of the Iron Lady changing everything in U.K. politics, and now U.S. political rebels and pop innovators were getting a taste of how different the 1980s might soon seem, even as our own nation still was a year away from the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

In three weeks (June 7) - "Chapter 8, The Co-Opting of Culture" - Punk melts down in a cesspool of Reaganism and Thatcherism - and an excess of dancing.

 Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel