Dude, Where’s the Eighties?

There’s a cliché that I always find amusing: the image of the old fuddy-duddy who says that the popular music of the day is not as good as it used to be. I confess that, in many ways, I too embody the stereotype of this crotchety old man. In my defense, I do think the music produced today is particularly dreadful compared to what came before.

At the beginning of 2020, I watched a video about the songs of the 2010s in order to reflect on the decade. Boy, was I disappointed! Most of the songs on the list were just… awful. The mind-violating imagery of the music videos did not help, of course, but the songs themselves felt like they were on loop. The same music in the background would play on and on, like the droning of an angry swarm or the mechanical crash of machinery in a factory. The singers themselves seemed to have been either high on drugs or replaced with robots.

This sort of monotony in modern music has been commented on by cultural critics. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has pointed out in his book The Decadent Society that our popular culture has been becoming stale and repetitive. He reports on “a sharp decline in the diversity of chords in hit songs, the number of novel transitions between the chords, and even the different timbres produced by the instruments involved.” The lyrics of popular hit songs “have grown steadily more repetitive since the 1960s,” creating a sort of sameness that threatens to turn our music experience into a monotonous blah.

Of course, there is some amount of subjectivity involved in this; how “stale” a particular song is to somebody will differ from person to person. But having grown up listening to a wide variety of pop songs on the radio, I feel comfortable saying that eighties music is the best by far. The eighties represent a sort of transitional period between the post-Vietnam War seventies and the “End of History” mood of the nineties. This allowed for social upheavals that brought with them an explosion of energy. This was the time when Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince all became superstars. This was the era when music television flourished. This was the era that brought forth the “indies” scene.

Two things stand out about this period that I adore. First, the sound of this era’s pop music was unlike anything I’ve heard since. The vocals sounded like something out of an opera. New technology that was made available in that decade allowed for more polished performances. Reverbed snare drums combined with chaotic dance music to create a unique rhythm. The best way to describe this idea of pop music is “pop-synth.” Songs like “Tainted Love,” “Don’t You Forget About Me,” “Come on Eileen,” and “Melt with You” all come to mind.

Second, you saw a rise in hard country. George Strait, perhaps one of my favorite singers, came to dominate the charts with hits like “Amarillo by Morning,” “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” and “Ocean Front Property” were the most popular things out there. I also can’t get enough of Reba McEntire and Randy Travis, who also had great hits.

All of these types of songs played during my childhood. My parents had me grow up with these songs in mind because they grew up with them themselves. But I don’t think my love for them is nostalgia; I grew up listening to Brittany Spears, but I didn’t end up loving her songs at all. No, I think the eighties represent an era in music that the mainstream never managed to recapture since. An era of uniqueness and life that is just gone now.

Thankfully, we do have hope. I’ve recently discovered things like eighties-style synthwave on the Internet. It gives me the eighties feel while being fresh and new to my ears. It’s times like this that I find I enjoy the Internet. And who knows: maybe the culture will rediscover what made music great in the first place. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.