Speaking of 1980s music… October 29, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture.trackback
As we were last week. I found this site this week and to be honest it’s been highly entertaining. There’s something about music generated in a localised context that is always intriguing. And given the dominance of one form of music in the context of Nashville it’s fascinating to hear music that took a different – sometimes deliberately so – direction. Though given that Jason and the Scorchers are perhaps the most well known group on the lists here there is more than an hint of that dominant musical form [though then how to explain Jet Black Factory who were though nowhere near as well known a band that had a profile outside of Nashville with a musical approach rooted at least partially in New Wave, if not indeed close enough to Goth].
That said though there’s a sort of dubious pleasure to be had from looking down the list of names of groups and trying to work out what sort of music they produce. Little surprise to discover that sone are synth based, while others have a Joy Division influenced approach, others more than an hint of REM while others are fairly basic hardcore.
To be honest the standard is very variable. One or two are polished, but overly so. Others are amateurish in the extreme. No surprise there. But some are pretty good and there’s something fragile and likeable about all this and the comparisons with Dublin during the 1980s are impossible to evade. Who among these is the equivalent of The Atrix or Blue in Heaven, or indeed The Slowest Clock or perhaps as interesting a question which is their version of Something Happens? Actually that may not be that interesting a question.
Enjoy.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Speaking of Eighties music, where I live practically everything you hear on the radio – in bars, in restaurants, in shops – is hits from the Eighties. Its’s driving me barmy, especially as I didn’t like much of that stuff when I first heard it.
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Oh, don’t worry about hits. None of the above were hits. Or anywhere near them.
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Worse again is the idea that there was actually a genre called Eighties Music where Love Will Tear Us Apart rubbed shoulders cheerfully with Hungry Like The Wolf and Never Gonna Give You Up. Which is quite ironic considering the rigour with which the devotees of the kind of music played by Fanning and Peel used to police the borders. In a world where Queen and Wham would be headlining Glastonbury if they could get them, that probably seems an incredibly odd thing now that everyone realises you should just relax about all these things and have a good old singalong.
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The thing about good 80s music is that most of it was under the radar. Only rare ones enjoyed commercial success — Bowie for a few years, Smiths, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Prince, Springsteen… But most of the treasures are to be found in obscure albums.
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