Statement Of (Blog) Being, Part 3

I am tired, so I think I'll go off on little tangents. Hopefully one of them will stick.

Why do I love synthpop/'80s "New Romantic" music/synth rock so much? I suspect part of it has to do with a certain sort of exoticism. Because I come from cultures where that sort of cold synth sound is absent or undervalued, there's a sort of unknown geography going on there. Or maybe it's because it's all so immediate. Or....

You know, I was thinking about something this morning on my drive to work. I kept on thinking about how we as Americans hate fun. We are fun haters. We cannot stand the idea of anyone having real, genuine, organic fun, and so we try to destroy as many "fun" outlets as possible. In the '60s, it was okay to have fun because there was an overwhelming abundance of young people who thought nothing of having fun (and also thought nothing of the future consequences for this "fun"), but by the early '70s fun was completely out of the equation, replaced instead by musical wankery. The musical equivalent of trying to see who has the bigger dick, the overnoodley arena/album rock that was in vogue throughout the American '70s delivered nothing but endless instrumental solos and caused lots of (predominantly) male audiences to feel self-important as they beat their chests and hollered at the fantastical extension of their own manhood. Glam rockers tried valiantly to funnel some of that attention their way but got practically nowhere in the States, the odd occasional megahit notwithstanding.

By the late '70s, three separate musical revolutions, two of which emerged from the U.K. and one that was homegrown, conspired to try to shake up the world of music. The British twosome, punk rock and a genre called New Wave, both sought to simplify the performance and writing of rock music, distilling it to its very essence. Punk brought back the rebellious sneering and attitude that made rock & roll dangerous in the eyes of the '50s Establishment, while New Wave went back to the formula that won American audiences over to the artists of the '60s British Invasion. The American rebellion took the form of a more danceable version of funk called disco; largely faceless artists (though there were a few luminaries in the genre) performed music mostly written by others that caused people to have fun, lighten up, get over themselves, and just have a good time. Though it could've been considered prefabricated pop, it differed from the cookie cutter assembly line teen pop of the early '70s by actually being an outlet for these musicians' and composers' artistic expressions. Soon punk rock and disco merged into another musical genre altogether, post-punk, which later fused with original New Wave to create the iconic '80s New Wave sound most people can readily point out.

None of the above were fully accepted in the U.S., though, again because we hate fun. Oh no, we weren't going to invest the time to figure out literate irony and sly cheekiness in our American version of punk; no, American punk had to be yet another outlet for Neanderthal macho posturing, with shirtless males from the suburbs growling into the microphone or noisily destroying their guitars (and their listeners' eardrums). As for original New Wave? Heck no, we won't stand for that kind of business. Those musicians look like they're having the time of their lives performing catchy songs with poetic lyrics! No, we have to have our musicians be absolutely morose and miserable-looking. We have to have songs that we have to suffer through. And heaven help us if our musical lyrics are either spelled out for us or deliberately obtuse via the prolific use of mind-altering substances. As for disco -- well, please, we are not going to stand for a multicultural, multisexual audience actually comingling on the dance floor in a TRULY united nations manner. We'll just make vaguely homophobic remarks and pretend disco is all about the novelty songs written by people trying to cash in on disco. No, we'd rather have anguished troubadors whining on about their lost childhoods while strumming passionlessly on their (acoustic) guitars because all we want to feel is RAGE RAGE RAGE! No love, no serenity, we want to RAGE ON.

So when '80s New Wave/New Pop music (what the synthpop of the '80s was known as) became all the rage amongst early '80s American adolescents, when the most vital American DJs were the ones who were championing this largely British musical format (i.e. Rodney Bingenheimer and Richard Blade), when teenaged boys and girls were having fun listening to music that was a mixture of British punk's DIY aesthetic and winkily witty lyricism, disco's catchiness and emphasis on a strong rhythm section, and original New Wave's insistence on a return to musical simplicity and tightness in chord structure, the American musical establishment could not recoil fast enough. Oh no, these overgrown hippies and stoners exclaimed, our youth of today are having fun with music that could actually be considered revolutionary! They might steal our late '60s counterculture thunder! So they called in Greil Marcus and Dave Marsh and the rest of America's most prominent music journalists to make sure that '80s New Wave/New Pop got quashed but good, which it was by the time 1987 rolled around. By that time, music became severely ghettoized once again, leaving few choices for anyone who wanted anything that was as much a breath of fresh air as New Pop was. (Interesting note: By 1989, the only artist to have that sort of witty, fun-loving spirit was the U.S.'s They Might Be Giants.)

After suffering through the 1990s and the first couple of years of the millennial decade, i.e. the nadir of popular music overall, indie/college artists worldwide rediscovered the joy and exhiliaration of the music that caused the Rolling Stone magazine set to quake in its moldy old boots. They found that punk could sound like something other than a bunch of hypertestosteroned yelping. They discovered the joys of disco dancing with a technological bent that would make Tubeway Army smile. They realized that "New Wave" wasn't the slur they were raised to believe it was. And they found that post-punk was the absolute mark of perfection in the world of '70s pop music. Now even '80s New Pop is getting a reexamination, albeit from artists that are new to the point of being unsigned. The problem with the giant bulk of those artists is that they have yet to reap any real financial or popular rewards for their efforts. They've been getting lots of adoration from the college campus set, but the American Top 40 is still being hijacked by the same ghettoized contrivances that have held popular radio prisoner for the past ten years.

So now what? What I'm thinking is that there needs to be a real critical revolution that goes on. Not from the British, for they will support anything with a real organic intensity and committment to the art of music as long as it isn't too much of a commercial success; indeed, the "Tall Poppy Syndrome" as called out by Australian celebrity journalists toward Aussie celebs has its roots in British music journalism. It is the American music journalism establishment and other journalists influenced by same who continue to enact an unspoken policy of a lack of support for that which did not originate for the Baby Boomer generation. A few lesser-known members of the U.S. musical press are a part of the much-needed revolution, but there still needs to be more support, particularly from the most egregious offenders, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. And there needs to be more of the music consumers' money devoted to that which sought to involve music in a new revolution -- one that would embrace synths, one that would see nothing wrong in urgent disco beats, one that would put to rest the hoary old sound of a thousand souls dying.

I am but one person, and a mere music listener/consumer at that. But I will do my best to get the ball rolling.

(Wow, I actually made a point tonight. Impressive.)