Having it on a Sunday is about as arbitrary as you can get, I think.
Anyway, Michael Bérubé, rightful owner of Arbitrary but Fun Friday, is busy what with running the world’s most popular defunct blog among other things, so I am stepping up unasked to take it over this week, two days late, which is the story of my life.
Those of you who were alive during the Reagan Administration will recall that that decade just seemed incredibly freaking endless. This was certainly true politically, if only because we Americans as a nation did not know that we would one day look back on Reagan’s amyloid-plaque-ocratic administration as a relative paragon of diplomacy and careful consideration compared to what we have now.
And it was also true of mainstream rock and roll, which had to all appearances died in the first half of the decade or thereabouts: I date the mortality to the moment Billy Zoom left X, though there are some who argue for when The Clash split up, and a few place it on December 7, 1980, the sad, sad day when The Germs’ frontman Darby Crash died, only to be upstaged by John Lennon’s dying the very next day. The 1980s was the decade of Don Henley and Tears for Fears and Simple Minds and quite honestly, if I keep listing them here I may get depressed. I had to LIVE in the goddamn decade, man. You kids have it so EASY now, what with your “iPods” and your “printing” and your “fire.” We had endless repetitions of Gimme Three Steps on the Classic Rock stations. It was horrible.
But the 1980s wasn’t entirely bad, of course. There was tons of good funk and hip hop, even if Will Smith WAS part of it. There was the birth of the Quiet Storm genre, worthwhile even if Smooth Jazz was its probably inevitable demon spawn. There was the ska trend, the Specials and Rankin’ Roger and a brief shining moment in 1983 when Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley was nearly paved in checkered high-top shoes and OK fine, go ahead and add Sting to that list, even though he broke up the Police and starred in Dune the very same year, injury added to insult. There was the post-Zoom X and their folky compatriots, Dave Alvin and the Cowboy Junkies and Camper Van Beethoven, Michelle Shocked and Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman. There were momentarily popular and not untalented groups such as TimBuk3 and Edie Brickell. There were proto-emos like The Cure. The list goes on.
Your Arbitrary But Fun task, should you choose to accept it: remind us all of 1980s music that did not suck.
I’ll start us off.
Rankin’ Roger hit on me one time.
Well, I’m still glad to have been 13 in Britain in 1980, in spite of Maggie f**king Thatcher. There is so much to choose from, but this (1985?) sort of follows on from the Billy Bragg clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fwtFSEovro
Random memories (all c.1980-82):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOe18JcatZo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJOLwy7un3U
But seriously, how much time have you got?
... I mean, I can’t be the only person with a 1980s iTunes playlist can I? (Even if a lot of it is early 80s. What doesn’t suck after 1985? Not so sure on that one.) I loved everything Two Tone; Adam and the Ants; pretty much the entire output of Stiff Records (and that’s a LOT of music); Soft Cell; Eurythmics; the Pet Shop Boys; Echo and the Bunnymen; XTC.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyzsBqk8u1w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59-3i7EvBu8
Aha! Trick question. It all sucked. In fact, everything since Peter Gabriel left Genesis sucked. Especially Genesis.
i think i was busy during the ‘80’s. i remember listening to music, but i’ll be damned if i can remember what it was.
Whew! Nothing better than a truly arbitrary ABF. And thanks for “Levi Stubbs’ Tears”—I was in a band that covered that little tune, but we debuted in 1990, so we don’t count. And I’ve always liked Modern English’s “I Melt With You,” even though it’s been eaten by fast food commercials lately.
Give me an hour and I’ll make you a CD.
=v= You sorta stack the deck here, by bookending the decade with The Clash and The One-Man Clash. Gonna be hard to find anyone else to measure up.
Something about creativity in transition really resonates with me, so I’m more forgiving of 80s musical excesses than my otherwise picky standards would let me tolerate. I liked where post-punk was going, then I liked where new wave was going, then ... I didn’t like where it ended up. But what a ride.
I was fortunate enough to discover college radio in the middle of the decade, right when corporate radio figured out whatever formulae they needed to commodify the prevailing trends. From there I got into hip-hop, but I lost interest as sexism and gun fetishism took over—which made another once-vital genre into a commodity.
=v= My home page says I liked these groups in the 80s:
The Art of Noise ·· The B-52s ·· Beastie Boys ·· The Beat ·· The Bobs ·· Billy Bragg ·· Kate Bush ·· The Cars ·· Sheila Chandra ·· The Clash ·· Bruce Cockburn ·· Cocteau Twins ·· De La Soul ·· Dead Can Dance ·· Dead Kennedys ·· Thomas Dolby ·· Indigo Girls ·· Fela Kuti ·· Bob Marley ·· New Order ·· The Pogues ·· The Police ·· Run-DMC ·· Michelle Shocked ·· The Specials ·· Bruce Springsteen ·· Spinal Tap ·· Tvlking Hevds ·· The The ·· The Tubes ·· UB40 ·· Suzanne Vega ·· Violent Femmes
But that’s an unrepresentative sample, limited to groups I could find links for back when “home pages” were something people did.
Stevie Ray Vaughan. Monumental talent.
Ditto what Michael says about “I Melt with You.”
My life would be incomplete without the Cowboy Junkies but I always thought of them more as a 90’s band (they are still going strong today, notwithstanding Michael Timmins’ obsession with feedback).
I still remember the first time I heard “Like the Weather” from 10,000 Maniacs—it came over the car radio of my 1980 Chevette. I immediately thought, “I bet that album has even better songs on it” and I was right. (That turned out to be the last LP I ever bought.) I saw them at the Guthrie Theater in the spring of 1988. Natalie Merchant invited some guy from the audience up to sing the Michael Stipe part on “A Campfire Song” and though he was no Michael Stipe, it was cool (or that’s how I remember it).
Yikes. How could I have forgotten to mention my favorite 80’s band, Midnight Oil!
You know, by all rights, I ought to be a huge 10,000 Maniacs fan. The whole band, I think including Natalie, was at least friends of friends back at Buffalo State in the very early 1980s, and I knew Jerry Augustinyak (the Maniacs’ drummer) enough to hang out with and occasionally jam with: nice guy.
I like them fine, and find a couple of their songs — Noah’s Dove being one of them, and I’m listening to it right now — profoundly affecting. But it just never occurs to me to call myself a fan. Probably just a Buffalo hangover having nothing to do with the band.
There was something about 10,000 Maniacs that was somehow offputting. I’m not backing off what I said above—I still think In My Tribe is a wonderful album—but Natalie Merchant had a way of distancing herself from the audience. I can remember her twirling around, seemingly lost in a bit of her own world, as she sang on stage. Before the ‘88 gig I mentioned I went to a record store signing and she never looked anyone in the eye. So I have no idea if that’s why you wouldn’t call yourself a fan but it might be one reason why a person would say that.
=v= “I Melt With You” was “our song” for a major relationship that, well, dissolved. The Romantics marked the occasion with a 1990 remake that was slicker and devoid of passion. As mentioned above, they later used it to sell rainforest beef larded with genetically-modified corn syrup.
This thread has prompted me to update the 1980s section of my home page. This was mostly a matter of replacing a long-defunct hand-crafted fan site with an official site (generally the band’s name dot com), and otherwise favoring Wikipedia over RuperMurdochsSpace links.
=v= Arrgh! s/Romantics/Modern English/. “What I Like About You” was not subjected to a slicker, soulless remake.
spyder’s right, the Dead were still a serious musical force through most of the 80s (the Greek shows in July ‘85—hyped as the 20th anniversary—come immediately to mind). Also Miles was playing again, the Art Ensemble of Chicago still had Lester Bowie, and even Wynton Marsalis was relevant for a while there. Pat Metheny kicked ass for a solid decade.
In “pop” I really liked Rickie Lee Jones’s first few records, Van Morrison recorded some of his best work (No Guru), and Infidels is still one of my favorite Dylans.
Elvis Costello! And thanks to Lesley Plum for reminding me of the Jim Carroll Band. Also, Joe Jackson did not suck most of the time.
Thanks so much for that video. I lived through the 80s, but all the music I now listen to from that decade I was almost totally unaware of at the time—I first got into Elvis Costello in 1991 when he performed on SNL from Mighty Like a Rose. I became obsessed with Bragg’s music some time around 1998 when an office mate had some of his CDs in the communal player.
My only contribution is to second Camper Van Beethoven. I saw them in a club in Ann Arbor in ‘88 or so. Key Lime Pie is still, song for song, one of my favorite albums. Below is a link to CVB doing Turquoise Jewelry around ‘87:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJQEBo2ATo4&mode;=related&search;=
Like Spyder, who I’m sure I will recognize if I ever meet him, I spent the bulk of the 80’s in a Dead-inspired haze in the Bay Area, where I saw among others, 19 Berkeley Greek Theatre Dead shows. And a ton of Henry J. Kaiser (the Dead at the auditorium, not the eponymous guitarist) shows. I too VERY fondly remember 7/13/84 at the Greek with the surprise encore Dark Star, after they put up giant screens and showed NASA slides of the planets. But, how ‘bout this one: Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan (Alone and Together) at the Oakland Coliseum 7/24/87?! Perhaps the highlight of the ‘80’s for me.