Icono-Curmudgeon-Clast - Loring Wirbel's Rants: The Allure of Listening - Chapter 9

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.