Mansfield Fox

Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

It Pains Me, But Thank MTV for Good 80s Music

One must still have chaos inside one's-self to give birth to a dancing Radio Star. - Nietzsche, "Ecce Buggle"

Eve Tushnet asks "Why is '80s music just better?" She posts some responses. My take? It was video. Video may have killed the radio star, but it spawned a generation of music that was self-consciously unserious because it was operating in that most ridiculous of all media: the bad music video.

In the 50s and early-to-mid 60s, all pop music had the vaguely silly, effervescent quality that Ms. Tushnet associates with 80s pop. This was, I think, because no-one had figured out how to make the standard rock quartet - drums, bass, two guitars - into a vehicle for "serious" music. If you wanted serious music, you went to Classical music, or the atonal stuff Philip Glass was producing, or maybe to jazz. But pop music was basically stuck writing music about pretty girls and fast cars.

By the end of the 60s, a couple of bands - the Beatles and the Who, I think most prominently - had discovered a way to combine advances in recording technology, Eastern religions and mountains of drugs to make "serious" rock music. Hence: the rock opera, the double album, etc. Much of it still retained the old impishness of the old rock - an opera about pinball, songs about yellow submarines and octopoidal gardens - but it was clear that rock (and pop) had changed, and that the age of "She Loves You / Ya Ya Ya" was gone. In the hands of lesser artists, this became a kind of painful seriousness. That, combined with the increasing coarseness of American pop culture (chart the path from Paul McCartney wanting to "Hold Your Hand" to the porno-ballad "More, More, More") produced by the late 70s the nadir of American pop music (at least until the last five years or so).

Then: video. All of a sudden if you wanted to make it big you had to produce a video to go with your single, and get it aired on MTV. And yet, a strange thing happened: a lot of the stuff that looked dramatic and impressive on stage looked impossibly silly when shot close up through a video lens (I'm looking at you, Ziggy Stardust). And the videos themselves were ludicrous: low quality image, almost no budget, poor technology, unimaginative staging and direction. And yet, you had to make them. As a defense mechanism, I think, early video artists embraced the ludicrousness of what they were doing. The began to produce self-consciously silly videos, and music to match. Consider the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" or Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran". As the decade progressed, technology improved and the whole thing became less hokey and overtly silly, but the nucleus of the old stuff - the lightness, the idea that Fun was at the core of the "80s sound" - remained. Think of Duran Duran's videos, or A-Ha's "Take on Me". Even as the videos stopped looking like they'd been produced in someone's rec room, they retained a faint aura of ridiculousness that made it impossible for artists to become too earnest or self-important.

What happened? Again: technology. As video-making technology got better, people began to realize that videos didn't have to be faintly ridiculous anymore. They could be serious vehicles used to sell serious songs (think "Jeremy"). As with the advent of serious rock music, the first examples retained much of the spirit of the old. Guns'n'Roses' "November Rain", for all its excess, takes itself quite lightly, and so, like Chesterton's angels, it flies. Compare it to Aerosmith's equally indulgent epic videos from the period - "Cryin'", "Crazy", etc. They're dreary and serious, even when they're trying to be fun. (The fact that Tyler is largely pimping out his teenage daughter doesn't help, of course, but still.)

As the 90s progressed, things got worse. Music videos largely became an exercise in narrative or in technological wizardry, and got ever and ever sleeker. Along with that, the spirit of fun disappeared from the music. Bands whose analogues in the 80s would have produced music that was faintly ridiculous, and therefore good in the way Ms. Tushnet describes - acts like N*Sync or Brittney Spears - instead produced stuff that, despite hitting all the right synth-pop notes, seems serious and workmanlike.

I understand that this unicausal theory misses a lot of stuff (as all unicausal theories do), but I do think it's important to remember the role that technology, particularly the emergence and passing of the "bad music video" medium, plays in the changing fortunes of popular music.

nota bene: Please take the entire above post with a substantial grain of salt, as I had just turned nine when the decade in question ended. My analysis is built on a foundation of half-remembrance, speculation and lots of VH1 viewing. Anyone with a better pop-historical memory is welcome to send in corrections to the factual or causal suppositions contained above; I will do my best to correct the post accordingly.

UPDATE: After a day of trying, Blogger finally let me in to correct the name of the Pearl Jam song. Keep the corrections comin', folks.