Decades
I glanced at my twitter timeline and noticed the following tweet…
Anyone who says the 80’s was the best decade for music needs to be shot. By a firing squad #BBC4
@J___Williamson | twitter
I assumed from the #BBC4 hashtag that there was some 80s music documentary being broadcast, but taken at face value (obvious comedy hyperbole aside) I realised I wasn’t entirely sure whether I’d be up before that firing squad or not. If asked to name a favourite decade, musically speaking, my immediate reaction would be to say “the 70s”. But when I gave it a bit more thought (probably considerably more than @J___Williamson meant her tweet to be subjected to) I realised that – assuming we start “the 80s” in 1980 – rather than 1981 as some are wont to do – then it’s fair to say that my favourite album of all time is an 80s album (Remain in Light by Talking Heads). In fact, a huge amount of my favourite music was released during the 1980s.
1980 also saw the release of Joy Division’s Closer. It was the year of Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, of Autoamerican and of Heartattack And Vine. And the decade that followed saw the entire career of The Smiths and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. It saw Tom Waits move from good to great and on into godlike. The 80s saw Prince at his peak. And what a peak that was. There are moments on Sign ‘O’ The Times that still send shivers down my spine despite the familiarity of 25 years of regular play. It was the decade that brought us the best of The Cure, of The The, of Kate Bush and of The Cocteau Twins. And it was the decade that kicked off the careers of Nick Cave, The Legendary Pink Dots and World Party.
Right at the heart of the decade, 1985 saw the release of Around The World in a Day, Asylum, Don’t Stand Me Down, The Firstborn is Dead, Head on The Door, Hounds Of Love, Hunting High And Low, Little Creatures, Low-Life, Meat Is Murder, Rain Dogs, Suzanne Vega, and Thursday Afternoon. That’s a pretty diverse list of albums… and each one’s a corker in its own way. What’s more, there’s not a year in the 1980s that doesn’t have just as fine a list attached to it.
Then, as the 80s drew to a close, we discovered that It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. We were infused with the Spirit of Eden while we got Naked and Bummed. We got our minds melted by Pixies and My Bloody Valentine as Julee Cruise took us Floating Into The Night, all the while being reminded that The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste.
And you know what…? I’ve not even begun to do the 80s justice. Byrne and Eno’s My Life in The Bush of Ghosts, Peter Gabriel’s So, Paul Simon’s Graceland and Julian Cope’s Fried all helped make the decade what it was. There were seminal records from Siouxsie and the Banshees, R.E.M., and I’m even prepared to put in a good word for The Joshua Tree which – for all its over-earnest breast-beating – contains some cracking tunes. Sure it was a low point for David Bowie, but elsewhere good music was thriving.
Decades?
But of course, I could make a similar case for the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1990s and even the noughties; though I would probably find that more difficult as I’ve discovered less new music in the past ten years. Probably a result of advancing age as well as having an already extremely extensive record collection that does its best to crowd out new releases (there are, after all, only so many hours in the day). Actually, it’s not ten years… looking at my media player, it appears that my discovery of new albums tapers off somewhat in 2007. There’s still a handful each year after that, but nothing like as many as there once was.
As it happens, I have a theory that music has become less culturally important in the past few years and – as a result – there’s less great stuff being produced (“less” not “none”). I’m not sure that theory stands up to scrutiny… though it’d be a good discussion to have over a few pints of Guinness.
Then, as I began to mentally put together the case for the 1970s, it struck me just how arbitrary the “decade” distinction is. It’s a cultural shorthand that extends far beyond music of course, but it tends to be used most frequently in that arena. Most albums released in 1989 have far more in common with the music of 1992 than they do with the music of 1982. There are records from 1979 and from 1991 that – to all intents and purposes – qualify as 80s music. And there are records from the early 80s that tend to be seen as part of the 1970s. The same is true for all decades. The Beatles were a 1960s band even if Let It Be was released in 1970. Hell, I think of The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan as being “of the sixties” even though the majority of their output – quantitatively speaking – came afterwards. And I don’t know where the hell Van Morrison fits in. Astral Weeks (“best album ever recorded except when Remain In Light is” tm) was released in 1968, but is essentially timeless, and damn near everything else he did came post-1970.
On top of that, there’s the fact that the truly great music of every decade… of every year… is massively outweighed in terms of sheer volume, by the truly awful. Or the merely uninteresting. For every I’m Your Man or Lovesexy there are a dozen of Hold Me in Your Arms and Kylie. Two dozen.
So does it even make sense to talk about whether the music of the 90s is better than the music of the 80s? Certainly Bone Machine and Henry’s Dream are better albums than White Feathers and Blackout. But you could just as easily choose Wet Wet Wet and Bryan Adams as your representatives of the 1990s, and… well… they’re no Prince or The Smiths.
In fact, you just have to compare Prince to… er… Prince. The 80s really come out of that one smiling.
In the end, I came to the conclusion that – when all’s said and done – there’s a pretty simple way to identify precisely when music was at its very best. Ask yourself the following question… “When was my 21st birthday?” Now, take the five years before that. Take the five years after. Add them together and you have the best decade for music. See? Simple. And no firing squads required.
I concur on all the albums & artists you list.
“There are records from 1979 and from 1991 that – to all intents and purposes – qualify as 80s music. And there are records from the early 80s that tend to be seen as part of the 1970s.”
True. Out Of Time, for instance, is an 80’s album, whereas Automatic For The People is audibly from the 1990’s. Kill Uncle is sonically an 80’s album, whereas Your Arsenal belongs much more in its given age. But both these examples are only a year apart. A lot of this is actually to do with the changes in CD mastering, but still those shifts in technology leave fingerprints on the fabric of recollected time.
Being so deep into the music or art of any period, you feel incremental changes that are not apparent to you in others. For instance, I can usually identify whether a song was recorded in either 1967 or 1968, because of the huge leaps forward in technology that were sweeping through music at that time. The Astral Weeks that we know, for instance, could never have been recorded in 1967, it simply wouldn’t have sounded the same. Beggars Banquet is clearly 67, while Let It Bleed & Sticky Fingers are the first stirrings of the seventies in the late sixties. Another example: compare Revolver or Rubber Soul with Magical Mystery Tour or Abbey Road. Some people may actually not hear very much difference but for me it seems huge & self-evident.
But I wouldn’t be able to tell you even if a painting was made in the first or second half of the 1700s, & I’ve not really noticed any great sonic changes in the past 5 (or even 10!) years of present day pop music.
In the 80’s the cut off point of the classic sound was around 1988. I distinctly remember the warm, woody analogue synth sounds of the earlier years (Remain In Light, or Purple Rain, or Madonna’s first 2 albums, for example) became replaced with something thin, saccharine & plastic, with Stock, Aitken & Waterman taking over the British charts. This may simply be the poorly handled use of early digital technology.
The same happened in film around the same time, where the (again,) warm & woody feel of magical & hugely entertaining studio films like Close Encounters, E.T, The Thing, Terminator, Splash, Ghostbusters, Back To The Future, Indiana Jones etc became replaced by a seemingly endless parade of cold, heartless, cheap & flat-looking movies about yuppies in striped shirts & braces making their way up the corporate ladder, while still being cool & ‘living 24 hours a day’. If the early 80’s were a throwback to the fantastically imaginative wonders of the thirties, the late 80’s were 1950’s button-down shirt, skyscraper-set air-conditioned nightmare all over again.
I’m getting this very much again while watching the films of the 30’s right now. There’s a version of Dracula (1931) which has been recently put out with a Philip Glass score added. It’s a sound film, with dialogue, but at the time it was shot it would have been too difficult to also add music, the technology was too new. Whereas, if it had been made even 6 months later, it would have had musical accompaniment added as a matter of course, & so actually be a different film. The difference between the films made in the first half of that decade & those let through after the Hays censorship code came in (July 1934) are tremendous, & there is freer creativity & expression displayed in the first five years of sound cinema than at any point until the late nineteen sixties.
The more things like this you see, the more incremental changes you perceive, & the more the reality of the age becomes apparent.
February 11th, 2012 | 2:22pm
by L. Byron
“I have a theory that music has become less culturally important in the past few years”
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly…
February 11th, 2012 | 4:31pm
by Paul
I agree absolutely with your last paragraph. Without doubt, the sixties were the best music years: the Beatles played the Cavern three times a week (I once jived with Cilla Black!), Radio Caroline was anchored in the North Sea….ooops, am I an old codger, or what?
February 14th, 2012 | 4:11am
by R J Adams
My best decade starts and ends a bit earlier than the 5 years around my 21st, but you’re basically right. Also, I had the advantage of substantially older brothers with loud stereos so I was buying proper records at the age of 10. But still, I came of age in the 80s amidst a cloud of lots of the bands you mention like REM, Prince and the Smiths, as well as The Church and the Cocteaus.
I think it gets augmented by our immersion in music and the wealth of ‘fair enough’ stuff that we were around that gives us the impression of a rich musical culture; in my time there were the Wonder Stuff, Strawberry Switchblade, The Alarm and a thousand others. These days we don’t know about those sort of artists, or else are now so knowledgeable that we see them as hackneyed copyists instead of fair enough.
My big brother was 11 when glam rock hit – exactly the age it was aimed at. Big dirty riffs which gave music that rocked to the accelerated development of post 60s children, a level of sexualisation and gender confusion that must’ve terrified parents, coupled with utterly meaningless lyrics that will have made parents think there was some sordid hidden code, all nailed to catchy hooky tunes. He was 15 in 1977 and John Peel rescued him from schoolmates’ prog twaddle with the avalanche of punk.
He contends the 70s were the best decade ever and ‘all 80s music is crap’. He ignores what I was listening and really just laments the fact that he had become a civil servant who bought Paul Young 12 inches and Go West albums.
February 14th, 2012 | 10:57am
by Merrick
Byron, I know your broad point is insightful, original and accurate, and that nobody likes a smartarse but – being able to identify whether a song was 67 or 68 and saying Beggars Banquet is clearly 67? Fraid not daddio, it’s 68.
February 14th, 2012 | 10:58am
by Merrick
My best decade starts and ends a bit earlier than the 5 years around my 21st
Possibly even five years earlier. Looking at what was in the charts, pop music seems to have stopped being My Stuff and turned into something just for kids almost immediately after my 22nd birthday – on one side there’s “Don’t you want me”, “Come on Eileen” and “Only You”, on the other there’s Howard Jones and Paul Young, “Gold”, “Red Red Wine” and “Only You” (the cover version). Oh, and “Blue Monday”, obviously, but in a way that’s my point – even the good stuff was starting to sound like news from a foreign country. On the other hand, by the time I was 12 things were properly kicking off – I was still at primary school for T Rex’s first three singles, and they were properly my stuff. The Beatles were my older sisters’ stuff, so they didn’t really count. On the other hand, Family – who remembers them? – were my older sisters’ stuff, but I really wanted them to be my stuff.
So there’s your answer: the greatest decade in music was the 70s, but the long 70s, from 1969 to 1982 – or, in terms of my personal chronology, from 9 to 21 inclusive; 22-26 was nowhere. The person I’d really like to hear from to test this would have been born in 1955, i.e. just too early for punk (on the 9-21 scale).
February 15th, 2012 | 8:07pm
by Phil
Merrick,
you’re right, don’t know what I was thinking there. It probably stems from the fact that I rarely listen to any Stones albums before Let It Bleed (& very few after Exile). I love Sympathy For The Devil, & Jumping Jack Flash, & No Expectations, but Beggars has always sounded too thin & scratchy to me (Street Fighting Man, for example).
The Stones in the 60’s were a bit of an oddity anyway, as they were much more rooted in the older sound of the blues & so were less inclined to chase the cutting edge than some of the other bands (The Beatles in particular), & when they did they often sound like they’re trying a little too hard (Sgt Pepper vs Satanic Majesties). I also think Olympic Studios lagged a little behind say Abbey Road or some of the American studios technology wise. Jimi Hendrix always sounds about a year out to me.
You know, thinking about it I think perhaps the greatest difference between The Beatles & The Stones might be that The Beatles were always changing & exploring, looking for new horizons, & that in itself is what we come to think of as their “sound”. Whereas The Stones were always looking for The Sound Of The Stones, the sound of themselves, the point where they would transcend their influences (white boys carrying blues records) & sound like no-one else before or since. And they found that for definite (sonically) by the time of Let It Bleed, but had only in patches after Exile, & lost for good after Black & Blue. Well okay then, Beast Of Burden too.
The wider point still stands though (if we loosen up the rule a little wider) that to compare the sound of ‘Help!’ to ‘Abbey Road’, or ‘The Rolling Stones Now!’ to ‘Let It Bleed’, or ‘Wednesday Morning 3a.m.’ to ‘Bookends’ or ‘Beach Boys Party!’ to ‘Friends’ or ‘The Angry Young Them’ to ‘Astral Weeks’… the difference is black & white, even though there we’re looking at a period of no more than three to four years.
February 18th, 2012 | 1:05pm
by L. Byron
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMAB3r6EjcM – Decades. ’nuff said 🙂
February 26th, 2012 | 5:49pm
by Hugh