Metal v. Indie in the 1980s: Introduction pt 1

Aaron: Welcome to Track Chatter, an occasional blog where two long-time friends and music lovers geek out about songs. With each entry, we choose one track to talk about, from a variety of angles – lyrics, musical style, structure, production, and so on. We’ve recently wrapped up a project in which we discussed one song from each of The Beatles' UK studio releases.

With our new series, we thought we’d go in a slightly different direction – rather than pick one specific artist or band, we’re going to talk about songs from a particular decade: the 1980s. Yes, that overcooked oldie is coming up again. But our hope is that the spin we’re going to put on the discussion will lend it a relevance that a lot of more nostalgic appreciations of the decade don’t always convey. We’ll see.

But before we layout the ground rules of this series – the limitations we’ve imposed on ourselves, if you will – perhaps it’s worth having a chat about the decade in general. Lew, is there anything that can be said about ‘80s music that hasn’t been said already, and maybe hundreds of times?

Lew: You know, my depth of knowledge as regards critical writing on the music of the ‘80s is probably not that deep, so I’m not sure if my perspective is original or not. But, I guess there are a couple of things about the ‘80s as a decade of music that are immediately significant to me. 



First, and probably most obviously, the ‘80s was the decade in which the forms of popular music, which generally still exist and populate the landscape of pop music today, came to full prominence. For example, prior to ‘80s the differentiation between what could be called heavy metal and what would be interpreted as hard rock was not an especially meaningful distinction, with your Thin Lizzies and Foghats occupying a place not greatly removed from Deep Purple or even early Judas Priest. By contrast, by the time Metallica released Kill ‘Em All in 1983, it was pretty obvious that they were doing something quite different from AC/DC. Equally as important, the ‘80s is the first decade in which you start seeing hip-hop emerge as the massive artistic/social/commercial phenomenon that it has been for the last two decades (at least). Those are two strong examples, but one could discuss punk, indie or dance pop and I think the idea that we see those forms evolve to something fairly close to their current iteration during the ‘80s is still apt.

The other thing that makes the ‘80s really fascinating for me is that music production made some huge technological leaps during the course of the decade. It’s a kind of evolution that's always apparent in the music of the decade, even if it's to the detriment of the music at times. Engineering techniques of the ‘80s were very adept at creating, so to say, “cold” textured sounds, but handled warmer, more organic sounds with less success. I’m sure we'll get into this further once we’re talking about specific tracks, but for me, the attempt to modernize the sound of music in the ‘80s is worth the time spent – not least because, again, what they were trying to do at that time offers a significant forecast of what music production has become since then.

With that said, I guess I’d ask you the same thing – do you have a particular set of thoughts about the ‘80s that jump out when you think of the music of the decade?

Aaron: Well, I guess I should say up front that my relationship to ‘80s music is complicated. It was the decade of my teen years, but also a decade that I didn’t always feel comfortable as a member of. In fact, I tend to find ‘80s nostalgia a bit hard to fathom, except when it’s the variety that whole-heartedly embraces the cheese factor.

In terms of music, I spent the early part of the decade listening to the nascent metal scene, with old standbys like AC/DC and Black Sabbath occupying my cassette queue alongside (then) newbies like Motley Crue and (gulp) Quiet Riot. But by ’84 or so, I was on my way to becoming a full-on classic rock fan. Little mid-‘80s music of any stripe penetrated my consciousness beyond being background noise unless I could somehow square it up with my classic rock tastes, sometimes, admittedly, in very random fashion. So I loved The Joshua Tree and thought INXS’s Listen Like Thieves was a great album. I also dug more classic rocky stuff like anything by Tom Petty (as anybody who’s had more than a couple beers with me can tell you!).

Then something sort of weird happened around 1988 – I discovered The Velvet Underground. They seemed to fit in with my love of classic rock, albeit in slightly off-kilter fashion. The strange thing was, the friends of mine who liked VU were the friends of mine who were listening to music by bands like REM, The Smiths, The Cure, bands that, at the time, I most certainly did not dig. And then when I went off to college in ’89, I met “cool” people who introduced me to current bands like Jane’s Addiction, but also earlier ‘80s stuff like The Replacements. All of a sudden, this music I had flat out rejected for most of the decade seemed completely relevant and cool to me.

And as I’ve grown older, other music that I couldn’t allow myself to like for fear of being “uncool” has given me so much joy now that I don’t really care all that much about being cool anymore – so I’ll happily throw on a Michael Jackson song or Duran Duran’s greatest hits.

All of this is a long way of saying, when I look back at the ‘80s now, it’s hard for me to say exactly what I thought of it then, or even, really, what I honestly think of it now. That era is so tied in with navigating those emotional landmines of high school, and sex, and bad hair, and trying so hard to be cool in some acceptable sense of the term (which, I guess, is fairly uncool), that I have a hard time separating how I felt about it then from how my feelings have changed over the years. It’s like, sometimes I’ll be listening to “Driver 8” and a thought will come to me about how important a song that was to me when it came out, and I have to remind myself that I hated REM when that song came out and didn’t really get into it until sometime in the early ‘90s. Does that make sense?

I can go on about this, and would like to, but I’ll flip it back to you, first, Lew. Sorry I didn’t quite get to your very interesting points about the ‘80s as the cauldron of modern music and your thoughts about production – both of which are topics I hope we can return to. But I’m curious, how have your feelings about the decade – including on those two topics – changed over the years since you experienced the decade in all it’s acid-washed glory?

Lew: That’s an interesting question – like you, I’m not totally sure I can answer it. It’s a complicated set of emotions. As we discussed during the Beatles series, I grew up around a good amount of music as a younger person. So, it wasn’t unusual for me to hear my parents playing the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who, and eventually Dire Straits, The Police and Men at Work (oddly enough). I enjoyed a lot of that, and spent some good afternoons playing Dungeons and Dragons and listening to music. But, at that time, I was more about D&D and comic books than music – I was planning to be a comic book artist when I grew up. That plan lasted roughly until I heard Twisted Sister for the first time in 1984. It was one of those moments that almost sound fictional - I heard someone playing “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and instantly liked it better than any music that I’d heard before. I can say without exaggeration that that song changed my life (kinda sad, I know). But, from that time on, I started looking for more music like that, and came across Ratt, Quiet Riot, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, Ozzy and so on (more or less in that order). Within a year, I was a metalhead who was actively soaking up the hair bands, and heavier stuff, of the time as fast as my parents and finances would allow.

During this time (four or five years), very few of my friends liked the same kind of music that I did. My high school was in a college town, and as such, was in love with “college” bands – The Cure, The Smiths, and REM, as well as punk bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, DRI, Dead Kennedys, and so on. I didn’t really like much of it, but I heard a lot of it. But, more importantly, I got the general sense that the music I liked wasn’t cool. This was a problem. The only band that I liked that seemed to be generally acceptable was Led Zeppelin, so I eventually strayed away from metal into classic rock by 1990 or so (which wasn’t a bad thing, since it revived my love of The Beatles), and didn’t really find my way back to heavier music until the Seattle bands started happening.

Since then, I’ve gone through multiple periods of rediscovering ‘80s music. It’s been important for me to try to consider that (admittedly large) group of songs on its own merits, or lack thereof, without the social pressures that I was pretty constantly aware of when I was originally hearing them. And, probably because it was so formative to me, I feel compelled to investigate fairly regularly to see if there’s anything I missed, or if I was hearing things that weren’t there at the time  – essentially, trying to take the decade on its own terms, as a musical era. Along the lines of your “Driver 8” comment, I can hear “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” and genuinely find it hard to believe that I would have hated it at the time (although I would). In point of fact, I think a lot of the debates you and I used to have about REM were holdovers from my dislike of them in my teens, which I’m happy to have put behind me.

In terms of your remark about ‘80s nostalgia, I guess I think of the “cheese factor” as a lens that’s kind of a given when I approach music from the ‘80s – in one way or another. Does that make sense?

Aaron: Yeah, it makes total sense. I think my annoyance with the nostalgia (or at least the nostalgia as it most noticeably tends to play out) is that it’s mainly about one bright shiny memory of a decade of parachute pants, puffy hair, Rubik’s cubes, and Pac-Man. As much as I totally embraced some of that stuff when I was younger, it’s lost a lot of its innate power to please (in the face of greater technology, etc.), so enjoying it today seems to be purely for reasons of nostalgia. And some of the decade’s music – good or bad – gets caught up in that: songs like “Like a Virgin” or “Purple Rain,” but also kitschier stuff like “Rock Me Amadeus.” And yet, something like “Purple Rain” is actually really far from kitsch and is still something to be enjoyed, cherished even, for how incredible it is (although, heh, you’d never have got me admitting that at the time!).

Additionally, a lot of the music that I missed out on was actually positioning itself in opposition to all that stuff. It can be a bit of a stretch to find a commonality between The Replacements and, say, Top Gun (I’m sure somebody could do it). Plus there’s the stuff that sits squarely within that nostalgic glow while also pushing up against it – something like the video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” which was a huge phenomenon in the ‘80s, but is also far from the day-glow sheen that seems to ensconce so much of the nostalgia for the decade.

So it remains, for me, a constant question of that repeated re-visiting that you talked about. Because I think, for “serious” music lovers, it’s easy to completely trash a certain segment of ‘80s music – the popular, the shiny, the “I want my MTV!” rocket ship stuff (well, once MTV blew up, that is) – while it’s equally easy to lionize other segments – the formerly underground, or “dark,” or whatever was called (as you pointed out) “college music.” Whereas all that stuff seems to exist on a continuum, a continuum that keeps shifting every time I try to pin it down.

Lew: I think you’re right to say that it’s tempting to dismiss a lot of popular music from the ‘80s in favor of more underground music, and in keeping with your remarks about “Purple Rain,” I think that’s a mistake a good part of the time.

On the subject of kitsch in ‘80s music, I think this points back to our evolving conversation about nostalgia: there are some elements of ‘80s music that are only enjoyable as kitsch – whether that’s “Rock Me Amadeus,” “Wild Wild West,” or whatever. There’s also a fair portion of ‘80s pop that seems to toy with being kitschy, but also seems to have genuine aesthetic purpose – the Devo effect, as one might say. And, there’s also some stuff that was probably cutting-edge technology at the time, which sounds fairly dated today – “Don’t You Want Me,” by The Human League, for example – and becomes kitschy nostalgia by the effect of making an attempt at a production that it couldn’t really pull off (losing its innate power to please in the process).

On the other hand, I think “Don’t Come Around Here No More” is a great example of a track, and production, that overshadows the ‘80s artifacts that it contains by virtue of the fact that it would be unusual in any era, while nevertheless being sort of an exemplar for its time. Needless to say, that’s a pretty subjective assessment, but I’ll stand by it.

Conversely, I think the music that swims against the tide of ‘80s production, which I’d group The Replacements and REM into, as well as The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Smiths, etc. (but not The Cure!), avoids some threats of consideration as kitschy nostalgia, because it doesn’t call to mind the same associations of MTV, leg warmers, and so on. It's slightly more difficult to place it in time, and I would say that it's able to occupy a place more closely related to one's personal experience with it than you might get with music that was more culturally pervasive in an overt sense.

All of this is a long way around to saying that I agree with your observation that a continuum for mainstream and non-mainstream music from the ‘80s is hard to pin down, because the mainstream comes with so much additional baggage that doesn’t relate exclusively to the music itself. But, I think that’s part of the fun of talking about it so long after the fact – you can at least partially recognize and compartmentalize those associations, and hopefully get enough distance to disregard them.

Aaron: Okay, so if I can just sort of sum up (and tell me if I’m wrong). Keeping in mind the continuum that we’ve talked about, can we say there’s three basic, large, sort of overlapping groups of music from the ‘80s (and perhaps any era): 1) music that’s so firmly grounded in the era – whether in terms of its relationship to fashion, production aesthetics, commercial tie-ins, or otherwise – that it cannot escape or transcend associations with the era (positive or negative); 2) music that is incredibly grounded in the era, but because of its high degree of “quality” or its level of influence, has been able to rise above those associations and continues to be judged as much on its own merits as it is on being a product of that particular era; 3) music that for whatever reason – active resistance, lack of contemporary commercial viability, or some other form of quirkiness – resists almost completely association with the era beyond the fact of the time of its recording. Does that make sense?

So in group 1, we might put the kitsch of “Rock Me Amadeus,” but also songs like “Wake Me Up before you Go-Go” (but not all WHAM/George Michael) or “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” In group 2, we might add most of Prince, much of Madonna, Born in the USA-era Springsteen. And in group 3 we might put most indie music, as well as a lot of (non-hair) metal, dance music, and most of the hip-hop from the ‘80s. Totally subjective on my part there, of course, but while you (and our readers) might shift songs and artists between the groups, would you say the groups themselves make sense? Moving on to the two types of music we plan to talk about, it might be useful to keep such classifications in mind as we try to set up something of a framework for our more specific discussions. What do you think?

PART 2

COMING UP: We finish the introduction by laying out the types of songs we'll be talking about and discussing our criteria for picking them.