Review: Mixtapes and MTV: Triumphs and Tragedies of 1980s Music, Tony Wellington, Monash University Press
In his book about music in the 1970s, Tony Wellington wrote about how the music we listen to in our youth becomes the comparison point for all subsequent music we hear. So, this book on the 1980s is primarily for Gen X. At the same time, following as it does his books on the 1960s and 1970s, in these three volumes he has impressively built what is close to a comprehensive history of rock’n’roll in the twentieth century. (I look forward to reading his opinions on the nineties.)
Wellington proceeds chronologically, with each chapter a year, from the rise of Kate Bush to the decline of hair metal. There is always the danger of skating over the surface, with so many musicians and songs, but mostly he deftly weaves the music into the historical and cultural context. Somewhat like David Kynaston’s books on postwar Britain, the polymathic Wellington covers the political and the pop cultural. And he offers an Australian perspective on where Australian music sat in the local and global charts.
In his ‘prelude’, Wellington suggests he wants to catalogue changes to music in the 1980s, and the title of the book points to the fact that technological changes were significant, changing the listening experience. There was a sudden panic over technology: home taping threatened record company profits, though at the same time, mixtapes allowed, say, the underground metal scene to flourish. (Metallica undoubtedly benefitted until the later age of file sharing, when the multi-millionaires spearheaded an industry crack-down.)
Electronic synthesizers and drum machines were supposedly replacing ‘real musicians’. Never mind that ‘real musicians’ such as Brian Eno were creatively using synths in the seventies, and synths allowed artists with grand ambitions, like Peter Gabriel, to get more creative. And the traditional rock band format was never abandoned.
Wellington says that the Sony Walkman meant ‘music was no longer a shared experience’. Well, yes and no – it could be more individual, but we still listened to music collectively, in concerts and on ‘ghetto blasters’, and we shared albums we liked. A personally curated and potentially endless playlist online was unimaginable. But Wellington thinks that there was a growing trend, beginning in the seventies, of more self-centred music making and listening, for which conservative philosopher Ayn Rand is partly to blame.
The invention of MTV (1981) was significant, because while image had been intertwined with music earlier, video clips were now almost as important as the music, allowing musically second-rate acts like Duran Duran to succeed wildly. It’s not as if musicians suddenly had to be better looking, as Wellington suggests. It’s more that MTV made more of the spectacle – benefitting the likes of glam metal. After-all, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Phil Collins and Prince were not model-level gorgeous. And Michael Jackson’s appearance just got weirder and weirder as his fortune got bigger and bigger. Wellington writes that a corollary of MTV’s success was that artists made their live shows choreographed spectacles (like video clips), none more so than Madonna, the most successful female artist of the decade (at least monetarily).
You get the feeling that Wellington is less enamoured with eighties music than seventies music (which makes his book no less entertaining). His recommendations tend towards artists who made the kind of music that could have been heard in the seventies. (He has a soft spot for prog rock, so the likes of Genesis and King Crimson get more airtime here.) Indeed, he writes in Vinyl Dreams that the seventies were a high point in rock creativity (in solidarity with Homer Simpson, who once said, ‘Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974’).
He voices his disapproval of many of the biggest hits and the biggest names: U2, Springsteen, Madonna, New Order and INXS, just as, in his seventies book, he criticised the misogynist Mick Jagger, infantile Ozzy Osbourne and vacuous David Bowie. What were worrying signs in the seventies, he thinks, went full-blown in the eighties. He has strong opinions (not necessarily a bad thing), but he perhaps sometimes forgets that cheesy is pop music’s… er, bread and butter. And it’s just this cheesiness – from A-ha to Wham! – that is so fondly remembered.
Record companies had more control in the eighties, with more control of fashions. Stock Aitken Waterman were the epitome of conveyor-belt hit-making. Wellington thinks there was less innovation, and that may have been the case when it came to song structures, but there were still visionaries like David Byrne, and, also, I feel that eighties bands were innovating within a tighter format. (Just listen, for example, to the strange chord progression in the chorus of Howard Jones’s ‘What is Love?’.) And interest wasn’t all polished away, unlike much of today’s mainstream pop music.
Pseudo Echo’s lead singer proclaimed the new romantics the last major movement in pop music, but while corporatisation saw less risk-taking, and, as Wellington puts it, the morally corrupt nature of the corporate rock world meant success was more about who you knew, innovative music still made it through the cracks, and there were new movements with wide influence – hip hop, alt-country, trance and so-called world music.
As in the 1970s, one aspect of this book is how record companies remained occasionally clueless about what would sell, while journalists would continue their elitist modus operandi, and the surprise hits are always a source of amusement. Early critics of Wham!, including Rolling Stone, thought they wouldn’t amount to anything and that George Michael wasn’t much of a singer. Tracy Chapman kept getting rejected by producers. Executives couldn’t see any potential in Janet Jackson’s song ‘Rhythm Nation’, which was a big video hit. All the American record company people hated INXS’s Kick. (Wellington is not that impressed either.) But it topped the charts around the world, as did the singles from it, a feat more significant because Australian artists found it hard to gain traction outside Australia.
There is a moral, almost iconoclastic edge to Wellington’s writing; he is not always defensive of rockers, especially of their misogyny and drug-taking. (In his book on the seventies he goes so far as to call the likes of Jagger and John Bonham ‘vile’.) He takes stock of the wreckage rock stars leave in their wake. As he does in his seventies book, he notes that the law operates differently for the rich; here he refers to Motley Crue singer Vince Neil, who, drunk, killed his friend and badly injured others in a car crash but got off with not much more than a slap on the wrist.
There are inevitably omissions, and Wellington apologises, as he did in his seventies book, for cutting half the manuscript, so we can’t blame him. (I would’ve happily read another 300 pages.) I would just add then that other interesting aspects of eighties music include Bob Dylan’s turn to gospel, and the development of contemporary gospel generally, for that matter. I would also point to the significance of the likes of session musician Dann Huff (heard on Peter Cetera’s ‘Glory of Love’ as well as half of the records produced in the eighties, it feels like) and the sound of the chorus pedal for guitar, which was widely applied in eighties music – as important as the Phil Collins gated drum sound, which Wellington mentions, and as important as hairspray for the vibe of the decade.
Nick Mattiske blogs on books at coburgreviewofbooks.wordpress.com and is the illustrator of Thoughts That Feel So Big.
