retrotalk2022#5 - the Eighties again, again

 Why can't pop escape the Eighties? asks Dorian Lynskey at Unherd

"It’s not just that old hits are doing gangbuster numbers on Spotify. When artists such as Taylor Swift, Angel Olsen, Laura Mvula and Mitski want to pivot to pure pop, they turn to Eighties signifiers. You can hear it, too, in the glittery ebullience of Dua Lipa and Jessie Ware. There are even meticulous Eighties fetishists who create multiverse remixes of recent hits: Initial Talk made Lipa’s New Rules sound like Tiffany and Dead or Alive, while Louis La Roche turned Adele’s Easy on Me into the Madonna ballad that never was.

"Top of the pile right now is The Weeknd, whose latest album Dawn FM is framed as an oldies radio station playing in purgatory. It’s the dream hybrid of new wave, electro and Thriller-funk that the Canadian has been working towards for a few years now: his neon-bright 2019 single Blinding Lights is the biggest Billboard single of all time. Among Dawn FM’s blatant homages to the mega-pop era are a monologue by Quincy Jones, a song named after Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero, and a very peculiar English accent. The Weeknd has long aspired to be the kind of pop colossus who bestrode the Eighties, so why not explicitly sound like one?"

A friend quipped to me in 2010, when I was finishing up Retromania, that the Eighties revival had been going on longer than the actual Eighties had - way more than a decade. In the book I titled a subsection "... the Endless Eighties"

As Lynskey observes, in 2022, "the self-conscious Eighties revivalism of the electroclash scene is now 20 years’ old, as distant from us as it was from the heyday of The Human League."

Indeed I was teaching it as history - two separate 80s revivals in fact: electroclash and also the minimal synth redux movement - in a class on DIY only last week, as a coda to the main part of the class which was on synth-punk / early-industrial / DIY electropop of late '70s / early 80s i.e. the future that then became a retro-future or multiple retro-futures

And old piece by me on some of the other Eighties that were going on alongside the ones that's been memorialized and mined to exhaustion

 

retrotalk2022 #4 - the Eighties again

Why Are Some Zoomers So Wistful For the '80s? asks Ashley Reece at Jezebel

"There’s an ‘80s community on Instagram and TikTok, dominated by Gen Z’ers who have such an affinity for the decade that they’ve decided to make the ‘80s part of their lifestyle. What begins as a cursory look into mom’s closet morphs into a harmless obsession with an era that was over nearly a decade before most of them were even conceived. Their clothes scream Pretty In Pink, their hair is straight out of Heathers, and even their bedrooms look like the set of Valley Girls.

"The surface appeal of the ‘80s is obvious: the music was great and the fashion was out of control. But just as the ‘80s were marked by MTV, malls, and Madonna, they were also plagued by the nearly decade-long reign of President Reagan, the AIDS epidemic, and the last vestiges of Cold War paranoia. One of the most popular pop songs of the decade was “99 Luftballoons,” an upbeat pop song about nuclear annihilation. But the young members of the ‘80s community are savvy enough to acknowledge the era’s faults, and after interviewing several of them, it’s clear that their love of the ‘80s goes well beyond an affinity for Caboodles or synth. Coupled with their passion is a yearning for a time when adolescence was synonymous with freedom. Less meticulously curating feeds, more hanging out with your friends at the food court.

“It was kind of like the last decade before social media, cell phones...internet,” explained Anja Arvesen, a 19-year-old who goes by @offbrandpollypocket on Instagram. “Obviously it’s easy to romanticize something that you never experienced. But it sounds nice, in theory, the way people interacted.”

this was tomorrow, #1

back-to-the-Nineties

"Music fandom often follows a slow boomerang trajectory: listen to top-40 radio through your tween and early teen years, reject those impulses in favor of more cerebral, left-of-center music as you’re growing up, lean back toward pop as you settle into adulthood. The last couple of years have found a crop of young independent artists boldly attempting to reconcile those stages of their own listening life cycles, walking a tightrope of poptimism and experimentalism to create confectionary, homespun electronic music that’s sometimes described as future-pop. Grimes gushes about Mariah Carey and Aphex Twin in the same breath; Canadian duo Purity Ring have listed “Justin Timberlake, Clams Casino, and Holy Other” as inspirational forces behind their prismatic fairy tales; Glaswegian electro trio Chvrches have spoken about loving Fugazi and the Cure in interviews before divulging plans to cover Whitney Houston’s “It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay” in live shows" -Pitchfork's Carrie Battan on AlunaGeorge, who cite Timbaland and Neptunes as big influences.

Except it's not really "future-pop", is it, if the reference points are Nineties and early 2000s (Mariah, Whitney, Timbaland, Timberlake etc).  If it was to even be present-pop, let alone future-pop, it would have to be made in immediate response to, ooh, DJ Mustard and Will.i.am and Dr. Luke....

What it really is, is the Style Council move...  today's equivalent of making Curtis Mayfield records in 1983.

Elsewhere in the hipsterscape, the 1980s are still getting a look-in.... "boogie" (i.e. postdisco black club records) are a big influence, And then there's Ikonika's new album. .People frowned when I said that her debut Love Contact Want Whatever had the whiff of hyperstasis about it, but for the sequel Aerotropolis she's gone outright retro:

"The whole album is a fantasy of me being a lot older in the '80s, and choosing music rather than videogames at that time. It's funny to me that I didn't really grow up at the right age at the right time. And if I had produced this album back in the late '80s, would it sound the same or would it be different? I made an effort to use older equipment – like, I used a 707, I used Bok Bok's Juno-106 a lot. It's nice, as a producer who's come from a computer-based background, to work with machines and see how the early producers did it."

Q: Were you going back to the music of the 80s for inspiration?

"Yeah, a lot of freestyle house. I'm really attracted to that genre because it was very melodic with these brass sounds, and at the same time had really nice dancey, housey, disco and sometimes hip hop beats from the drum machines. I just love the patterns. I was thinking, this music must have been amazing at the time."

This review of Aerotropolis at Tiny Mix Tapes is so IDM-nerd-looks-down-on-collective-dancefloor-experience-as-brainless-and-de-individuating  it's not true, but otherwise seems on the money re. the "the shiny, retrogressive hedonism and 4/4 decadence", which aligns itself with the back-to-house vybe dominating the UK.