The Me Regeneration

Forever Young

I remember kids singing “Land Down Under” on the kindergarten bus, and my friends and I used to ask the carpool moms to turn up the volume when the “shark song” (Hall & Oates’ “Maneater”) came on. Watching the Live Aid DVDs, I still get chills when I see Nik Kershaw scratching out the opening chords to “Wouldn’t It Be Good.” The John Hughes movie moment during which a song rich in bass, synthesizers and English accents accompanies the on-screen reverie of a teen dream come true still touches the pre-adolescent romantic in me. These pop flights of fancy—now so cliché—were the transport across the parking lots and strip malls of my town into a vivid world of sensory overload. Magic and wonder can still be found in their detritus.

Perhaps it’s my nostalgia for youthful innocence-lost talking here, but there’s something both cold and robotic, yet painfully yearning, in even the most glib ’80s music—some undercurrent of souls grappling with the distance between one another, using the brittle techno-futurism of keyboards and synthesizers to beam themselves across the miles of postmodern sprawl. The ’80s pop charts subsume heady stuff—world-weary pop majesty in the truisms of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”; more specifically, nuclear fear in OMD’s “Enola Gay” or Alphaville’s “Forever Young”—and that’s without delving into the even meatier underworld of post-punk titans like Joy Division or early R.E.M. Musically, the ’80s were a time of dizzying diversity during which ’50s revivalists like the Stray Cats shared the radio with Prince’s neo-soul and skinny-tie groups like The Romantics, all while hip-hop was finding its first expression in New York, and Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys laid groundwork for a technologically intricate revolution in dance culture. Pop music spilled in every direction simultaneously in the ’80s, and to this day, the decade’s musical output gets a far worse rap than it ever deserved.

That’s why the current ’80s resurgence is both a welcome and tragic phenomenon. On the one hand, radio stations and VH-1 pitch kitsch and “Hey, remember Pac-Man?” frivolity, based on the cynical proposition that as my generation grows older, cashing in on our nostalgia is easy—just show us the “Jesse’s Girl” video a few dozen times and make us laugh at our big hair and Bangles obsessions. But the more subtle stylings of the ’80s are also experiencing a renaissance in modern music. Not only have artists like Morrissey, Duran Duran and The Cure experienced mini-revivals, but increasingly their sound has achieved new expression in a growing field of prominent acolytes like Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, Interpol, Stellastarr*, Snow Patrol and Elkland.

It’s partly the inevitable demographic fact that these bands would’ve listened to ’80s music because they were of a musically impressionable age during the period. But if that were all, it would make for a pretty short story.

As more than one critic noted, one of the most striking things about 2004’s edition of the Coachella Festival was the degree to which The Cure were the dominant musical sensibility, their influence weighing heavily on groups like The Rapture, The Killers, Muse and even, arguably, certain slices of the Radiohead catalog. While Robert Smith’s Edward Scissorhands exterior and maudlin melancholia have themselves become something of a visible franchise, the legacy of The Cure looms even larger than it initially appears.

The Cure serves as a meeting point between musical genres. Rising from the intense post-punk subculture of kindred pseudo-gothfolk like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus and The Comsat Angels, power pop wafted through the band’s sound and sensibility. Aside from the Byrds-jangle of later hits like “Friday I’m in Love,” songs like “Boys Don’t Cry” or “Just Like Heaven” have been touchstones bands ranging from Dinosaur Jr. to Goldfinger have worked into their live repertoire in total earnest. Simultaneously bright and dark, The Cure hit a midpoint between the distraught shadow of Joy Division and the bombastic theatrics of U2. They were to the ’80s what The Doors were to the ’60s: an idiosyncratic voice that distilled various strands of the era’s musical culture with its own sense of atmosphere and mood. In the same way The Doors straddled the line between blues-based rock and hippie psychedelia with dark sonic cinematography, the Cure united punk and pop.

During its first wave of popularity, The Cure was a bit much for me. I was a preteen just learning to play guitar, and a late-enough bloomer that the sexual angst and ethical self-doubt rife in the band’s lyrics were an emotional chasm I’d yet to cross. I stuck instead to the more muscle-bound, unambiguous guitar rock that had started moving New Wave’s more glamorous instincts into hair metal. While The Cure didn’t have the fey operatic flamboyance of The Smiths or the druggy, vaguely sadomasochistic menace of Depeche Mode, its music dealt with fragility, rebounding from cycles of attraction to lovers mysterious as your own capricious self, pining over mistakes made with a hint of inevitability. Melodramatic—hell, yes—but for whom has a song like “Pictures of You” not momentarily seemed like rapturous truth?

Like so much ’80s music, be it Tears for Fears or Elvis Costello, The Cure made intensely personal music. It had a distinct style, but wasn’t preoccupied with poses the way punk—by its very oppositional nature—had to be. Global politics obliquely filtered into many ’80s songs, the Cold War more a moody backdrop than a slogan generator, unlike the music of the ’60s. And rather than the hedonistic flights of fancy in the musical landscapes of ’70s disco and album rock, a lot of ’80s music—and The Cure’s music in particular—was cleaved by a sense of shame and responsibility, a fascination with the internal wounds caused by casual experimentation in sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

This dimension of its music may be the strongest link between The Cure and the primary progenitors of its legacy. Even an otherwise ephemeral pop song like The Killer’s “Somebody Told Me,” has a sense of self-measurement and interpersonal earnestness, attributes taken to a more breathless level on Snow Patrol’s “Run.” The pendulum in rock music has swung back to emotional ownership, and in that sense today’s lyricism can’t help flashing a certain reflection of the ’80s.

Going Underground

Trying to synthesize ’80s music into one genre is a doomed exercise; between X’s “Los Angeles” and Greg Kihn’s “Jeopardy,” for example, yawns a huge gap. But in this sense, too, today’s music is comparable to the ’80s. While the ’90s witnessed the mass market’s swallowing of the underground in a desperate attempt to perpetually reinvent Nirvana’s surprise success, the ’80s were the point at which the parallel worlds of the mainstream and the underground co-existed most harmoniously. Compare the track listings on two Rhino box sets: the Omigod! “totally ’80s” box and the recently released Left of the Dial. The former lays out songs like “Bette Davis Eyes,” “Electric Avenue” and “Footloose,” while the latter is filled with everything from Suicidal Tendencies and Minor Threat to The Sugarcubes and XTC. It’s a testament to the viability of both worlds that in the same year VH-1’s I Love the ’80s can make a hit out of rehashing Omigod!’s world, while the Pixies’ lionized reunion demonstrates, in raw tickets sold, how many people were raised on ’80s college radio.

These days a similar dichotomy has crept in. In a sense, the Coachella Festival is the best example, having sold out for two sweltering days when at the same time the Lollapalooza Tour—featuring almost entirely the same bands—folded due to lack of national interest. In other words, groups like Broken Social Scene, the Flaming Lips and Interpol sustain appearances in select alcoves of urban hipsters, but in areas characterized by mainstream-radio domination, limited concert venues and a dearth of indie retail, the development of a well-rooted quasi-underground is inconceivable. An interesting and unfolding story that may well become historically emblematic of these times is the Arcade Fire, who has sold out shows in both New York and Los Angeles, all of them filled to the brim with industry weasels, and yet it remains to be seen whether the band will leave Merge Records (or the venerable Rough Trade in the U.K.) to project its idiosyncratic vision to a larger audience. After all, is it really logical to make an album like Funeral on a major label these days? So much of what this magazine features belongs to a vibrant semi-underground similar to the ’80s—a counterpoint to Jessica Simpson and J. Lo but enjoyed by a specific subculture. The Shins and Drive-By Truckers, magnificent as they may be, seem about as likely to compete with Usher for national mindspace as Sonic Youth was to unseat Madonna from her MTV-generation throne. Instead, these bands will roll on for the faithful subset who have the access and interest to participate in such undergrounds.

The last major pillar of my shotgun theory about the parallel between today’s music and the ’80s is that—as we all know—the music of the mid ’80s slowly gave way to hair metal, and it seems quite possible that the same may happen again. If the reunion of Mötley Crüe or the success of The Darkness isn’t alarming enough, consider the extent to which there is a widely growing vacuum in the realm of hard music that pop may rush in to fill. Could it be that the waning career of Marilyn Manson prefigures a pop-metal revival in the way Alice Cooper preceded the eventual blooming of Def Leppard and Quiet Riot? Does residual interest in Ozzy Osborne pave the way for bands that mix glamorously embraceable faux-subversion with expensive leather outfits and tinny guitars? Are there still pimply 12-year-old boys dying to idolize wailing men in tights? Is Velvet Revolver the first volley of a renewed interest in the tattooed denizens of the Sunset Strip? Don’t say you haven’t been warned.