a chap called Ryan Britt asked me some questions recently about Eighties revivalism for a piece he was doing...
on the endless Eighties revival(s)
Eighties-referencing in music (in fashion it started
earlier, almost as soon as the Nineties was over) first stirred in the later
years of the Nineties. You had certain techno artists reactivating ideas from
electro and from synthpop - Drexciya, Dopplereffekt, Adult., others. And
then separately there was this short-lived and unsuccessful attempt in the UK
to launch a New Romantic revival around 1995-96 - the journalists behind
it called it Romo, and claimed it was a renaissance of glammy early Eighties
ideas, rather than a revival. That puttered out, in part I think because
it was way too premature. Not enough time had elapsed from the original period
for it to seem charming or mysterious.
But then it just gradually built, you had Electroclash in
the early 2000s, you had Daft Punk, then Gaga, Little Boots, La Roux taking it
mainstream. So to answer to your question I would say it’s the 2000-20009 phase
that is the prime and peak of Eighties retro. BUT it has obviously carried on
all through this decade as well. Just when you think it’s finally gone away
someone else crops up reviving
The one thing I wish I had thought to say and put in the
book - a friend of mine made the observation to me and I recycled
in various pieces around the book, but didn’t have it in time to put in the
book itself – is that the Eighties revival has gone on longer than the actual
Eighties did. By the time Retromania came about in 2011, it was about 14 years
since Eighties-retro first kicked off. And even now in 2017 it’s still going
on - you have the whole synth-wave / outrun style of electronic instrumental
music inspired by action-movie soundtracks of the era and early videogame
music. Or Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars imitating early 80s funk like the Gap Band
on “Uptown Funk”. Or Haim with their strange obsessive recreation of the sound
of Fleetwood Mac circa Tango in the Night, the very precise simulation of
mid-late Eighties reverb and drum sounds and Yamaha DX7 synth and other
production hallmarks.
I think the Eighties have proved to be a bit like the Sixties –
it’s now a perennial fixture of retro culture, and there’s a lot of material,
fads and micro-phases that people can draw on. The same thing happened in the
actual 1980s with Sixties revivalism – there was no one “Sixties revival”,
there was a series of revivals of different phases of the Sixties, different
styles. You had concurrent revivals of Sixties soul / the Motown sound, of
Byrdsy jangly psychedelia, of the more British Pink Floyd / “Hole in my
Shoe” type Swinging England / Carnaby Street psychedelia... and then a
bit later people started being influenced by the late sixties when things got
heavy and guitar solos starting to get extended and cosmic.
Periods in culture and music are constructs, they are produced
by discourse and opinion, people agree to believe that there’s this unitary
thing called “The Sixties” or “The Eighties”. But any given alleged Zeitgeist
is unlikely to follow the calendar punctually; it’s also going to be the
case that a lot of the population are barely involved in these supposed mass
confluence of belief or excitement, their minds are occupied with other things,
or their mentality is effectively stuck in earlier decades. And people
carried on living in the Sixties long after that decade came to an end – look
at the Deadhead phenomenon, or groups in the UK like Hawkwind and Gong and that
whole free festival circuit in the UK, which ran through the whole Seventies
and even into the Eighties with the same kind of music, long hair, drugs etc.
Decades in calendrical reality comprise a whole set of phases;
you could call them micro-decades. The Sixties that involved Beatlemania
and “Help!” is radically different from the Sixties of the White Album and
Abbey Road and the first two albums by The Band. That particular Sixties –
mustaches, beards, rock gets mature and worthy and earthy - then carries
on a good way into the Seventies. It makes sense to think of a block of
pop time that goes from 1968-1972 maybe.
At the same time it’s all a game and it’s all for grabs –
endlessly arguable over - subject to revisionism and counter-views.
Things blur and overlap. Even as a new bloc of pop time (glam 72 – 74)
takes over and appears to be the new dominant thing, the earlier bloc is
carrying on – those bearded artists are in fact selling shitloads of albums,
playing huge tours. Another example is prog – the official history says
that punk took over in 77 and that was the end of prog. But all the major prog
artists – Pink Floyd, Genesis, yes, etc – were never more commercially
successful than during the New Wave era, if you think of things like The Wall.
And the periodization is different for each art form or area of
popular culture.
Oh there are links and synchronization - fashion and music
are very close, and there are links between music and film. If you look at say
Scorsese and that generation of directors, they are very much counterculture
rock era figures, doing for the movies what the bands they worshipped did – and
the links are very clear with Scorsese doing The Last Waltz movie with the
Band.
But when that whole golden age of maverick movie making
(Coppola, Scorsese, Pakula et al) is eclipsed by the Jaws / Star Wars
blockbuster mentality (as you say, in some ways the beginnings of the Eighties
– all those action / child-mentality type movies like ET and Raiders of the
Lost Ark etc), you can’t synch that to what’s happening in music I don’t think.
In music, rock is having a renewal of edge and politics and commitment and
realism (and low-budget DIY) with punk. But the opposite is happening in movies
– they’re becoming ever more big-budget, escapist, regressive, and in that
sense building towards the kind of mass entertainment of the Reagan era.
2.
Yeah I think Eighties retro is
lame really, deep down. (As is all retro). At the same time I really
enjoyed the first Haim record and various other Eighties-reproduction records.
I enjoyed the Stranger Things soundtrack. I just think it’s odd that people go
back to sounds or styles that in their original time and context were modern
and new and often futuristic. (All the Fleetwood Mac/Tango in the Night
production hallmarks were actually new, at the time).
I’m not sure whether Stranger
Things needs to be set in the Eighties or what that adds to the story.
Perhaps it would be just as good a story if it was set in the present, or in
the 90s, or in the Fifties.
Certainly TV productions seem to
love setting things in an era and really going to town with the period
reconstruction, making sure there are no anachronisms for the nerds out there
to spot. It seems to be something that TV people – set designers, costumers,
hair and make-up – just love to do. (As do film people). However I don’t know
if that is “retro” in itself – for instance Mad Men is really a period
drama - it’s as much a costume drama as Downtown Abbey. So that
seems to be a perfectly valid reason to do the time travel thing, even though
you could say it’s done to such an excessive degree that there is a sort of
retro-fetish element to it.
In Stranger Things case though
it does seem possibly somewhat arbitrary. I can’t remember much about the plot,
but maybe for dramatic reasons it needed to be in a period when kids werent’
able to tell their mother’s where they were using their phones?
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