Popular Culture
When they write history books, politics, world events, kings, queens, natural disasters fill the pages. But most of us don’t live in politics (unless things are really bad such as in the late 1970s and the past 5 years). Most of the time we live in popular culture – what matters in our lives is what we are eating, drinking, who we are kissing etc., what we are watching, listening to, what sporting events are on. Young people believe that their tastes in music, movies and television are current, whereas, in all likelihood their taste has been attributed them by faceless marketing types rebundling older concepts in fresh packaging. The most cynical version of this is books that are often re-issued (not updated) with flashy modern covers, but really dated typescript on the inside, for full price.
Around this time, 2 years ago (2011), I purchased Retromania by Simon Reynolds. It was a real eye opener – I rapidly came to realize that much of the music that I had listened to during my formative years were completely derivative and unoriginal. Punk rock, indie, house, rap, electronica – none of these were original: in reality popular music stopped evolving somewhere around 1975.
Tom Br
omley’s “Wired for Sound” – an 80s musical childhood, was a stonking good read. I confess to being a couple of years older than Tom, and, at the time generally disliked 80s pop music. Hated Duran Duran, Spandau, Michael Jackson, Madonna, New Romantics, Agadoo, Stock Aitken and Waterman etc. I realized 2 things: the music from the first half of the 80s was pretty good and the second half of the 80s was shockingly bad (nearly as bad as now). The differences in the line ups between Band Aid 1 and Band AId 2 is revelatory. The seco
nd thing I realized was that there was a good reason why the early 80s pop stars dressed in poncy clothes and wore make-up: they had not abandoned punk rock – they were never punks! If you think about it – a pop star in 1983 was likely born in 1958-60 – and was in their formative musical years in 1970-75 – pre punk. They were all Roxy Music & Bowie fans! The bands that emerged in the late 80s and brit pop were the kids of the punk years, the Stone Roses, Primal Sceam, Teenage Fanclub, Blur, Charletans etc.
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