How I Started Liking 80's Music (Except for U2)

It took me until 2014 to fall in love with the 80's.

I was born in 1983, so to say I "grew up" in the 80's would be a stretch.  I came of age in the 90's.  But I did live through the majority of the 80's, and I was sentient for the last half.  And I remember the music.

When I was a teenager, the 80's were still a recent memory of the generation before mine, so naturally I thought everything from the era was totally lame.  I was, as many are at that age, totally enamored with my generation's flavor-of-the-moment, grunge/alternative.  That gradually segued into a fascination with punk and metal, two traditions that make quite a business out of rejecting others.  My punk and metal phase carried over well into my 20's, whereupon I gradually began broadening my horizons.

I've always been one to seek out the roots of a particular thing I like, and I've often found that whoever "did it first" often did it best.  So it was that I became the avid classic rock fan that I am to this day.

But then a strange thing happened: I started getting old.  New music began to sound progressively shittier and shittier to me.  Sure, an artist here or there would hearken back to the sounds that I've loved, but I would guess I've liked less than 5% of the music published after 2001.

Those of you music fans in your 30's and beyond can probably identify with this pattern.  And I'm betting you'll identify with what happened to me next.

As I settled into my 30's (which incidentally, has been the best decade of my life so far), I found myself increasingly drawn to nostalgia from my own lifetime, rather than from my parents' heyday.  Suddenly, bands like Roxette, Depeche Mode, Poison, and Dead or Alive--bands which had sounded tragically dated to me before--started sounding fresh again.

I'm still a huge metal head; if I'm listening to music, there's about a 60% chance that it's some iteration of heavy metal.  But until the last few years I always hated hair bands and their weepy power ballads.  But lately I've been able to listen to songs like "Home Sweet Home", "Sister Christian", and "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" without a trace of irony.  I genuinely like those songs, and many more like them.

I used to cringe when songs like "She's Got The Look" and "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" came on in my presence.  Not anymore.  

That last example brings up an even stranger twist; I used to have a special flavor of hatred for 80's songs by bands that formed in the 70's or earlier.

And that brings up an interesting point.  Every era has its share of shitty music, but I still feel like the shitty music of the 80's is a special appellation of shittiness.  I think this might have something to do with the fact that much of the subpar output was created by artists whose careers began long before the 80's.

The rock stars of the 60's and 70's enjoyed a unique level of superstardom.  They had the pleasure of being associated with one of the largest and most influential cultural movements in history.  So when the next generation came along, many of these stars didn't simply fade into the background.  They had done so well by their fans that they had artistic carte blanche.  So they kept grinding out records in a futile effort to remain relevant in a generation that had passed them by.

Every generation finds a way to say "fuck you" to the one that came before it.  So 70's artists who wanted to stay relevant in the 80's had to find ways to say "fuck you" to themselves--or at least their old way of doing things--just to keep pace.  If that isn't a recipe for artistic disaster, I don't know what is.

You can see this phenomenon in action in every decade before and since, but I feel like the 80's was the first time it happened on a broad cultural level.  Before the 50's or so, music didn't have nearly the influence on young minds that it has had since then, because owning music simply wasn't as common--or even possible.  Ownership of recorded music has been steadily on the rise since the early 20th century, but somewhere around the middle of the century it crossed a barrier.  Before Elvis, some people had records.  After Elvis, everybody had records.  And the amount of music people encounter and subsequently buy has only increased with each successive generation of music media.

After the advent of music as a widely available consumer product, a different dynamic came into play.  I wasn't there, but I get the sense that 60's and 70's rock music felt like part of the same tradition.  But some time circa 1977, a handful of punk bands came along and voiced the clearest "fuck you" of any generation before or since.  And that changed the game.  Now every new crop of musicians does what it can to stand apart from those that came before.  Those that don't are viewed as benignly nostalgic at best, but usually they're simply dismissed as copycats.

I feel like the transition from classic rock to punk to new wave was a particularly rocky one because it was the first time in the age of music collecting that a new generation of musicians had drastically pulled away from their predecessors.  And the predecessors that survived the transition had some deep artistic challenges facing them.  And the result was that most of the music they made during the new generation's reign was...bad.

So it's easy to see how a guy like me, who was enamored with 60's and 70's bands, might think the 80's sucked.  That decade destroyed half of my favorite bands, and made limp-wristed lounge acts out of all but the sturdiest few.  Even immortal powerhouses like Black Sabbath, The Who, and Yes took more than a few bad steps in the 80's.  And as a fan of first-wave punk, it felt like new wave was a sellout defilement of punk, rather than its logical conclusion.  As a fan of early 70's proto metal, it was easy to feel like hair bands were pandering to the lowest common denominator, which in turn led me to underground movements like early thrash and death metal.

But now that I've grown a little, and put some distance between myself and the quick-tempered opinions of my younger days, it's easier to listen to 80's music without all the baggage that strong, youthful opinions bring.  I'm able to hear these songs without judgement, and when I listen with an open mind, I find that I genuinely love a lot of music from that era.  I even like Dio-era Sabbath better than the last couple albums of the Ozzy era.

My new mindset has enabled me to like stuff I used to hate from the subsequent generations as well.  I'm not ashamed to admit that I can get down to some Backstreet Boys.  My blood no longer curdles when the Goo Goo Dolls come on my 90's Pandora station.

But all of this even-handed wisdom can't change one simple fact:

U2 fucking blows.  Bono is the God of whiny idiots, and The Edge is the lamest excuse for a guitar hero I've ever seen.  

The Edge's guitar tabs:

Tom Morello's guitar tabs:

If I live a thousand lifetimes, I will never like U2.

...except for "Sunday Bloody Sunday".

You should like the Foo Fighters

One of the greatest recurring arguments in my marriage stems from the fact that my beautiful and intelligent wife--whose opinion I respect--does not like the Foo Fighters.
I never would have called the Foo Fighters a polarizing band. Marylin Manson? Sure. Any contemporary country artist? Definitely. But to me, the Foo Fighters always seemed a distillate of pure rock music. Not the lowest common denominator, but a band built around traits that any rock fan can appreciate.
And yet, apparently, it is possible to dislike them.
I have another friend who--as far as I can tell--has never enjoyed a single piece of commercial music unless it was made before he was born.
I respect all tastes in music, but as a highly logical person, I've always balked at the fact that I cannot crack the code of this friend's taste. The formula "if you like ____, they you will like ____" does not work on him. We've been trading compilations since cassette tapes were the preferred medium, and I don't think I've had a single home run in all those years.
It frustrates me, but I know what it's like to be a discerning music fan. Ask my wife. I'm excessively, dancingly opinionated about music. But for me, finding music I enjoy is a logical process. (Which is why I hate the randomness of radio--even Pandora). I'm ALL ABOUT the "if-this-then-that".
And I fucking LOVE the Foo Fighters. Having two people in my life that I can't convince drives me crazy.
Even when I was a teenaged anarchist and professed to dislike anything that made the artist money, in my secret heart I still loved the Foo Fighters.  They have a command of melody that is seldom so at home in hard rock. They exercise restraint in all the right places, and know just when and how to make energetic excess not overly excessive. The music is perfectly proportioned--they rock exactly as hard as you want them to. The lyrics are clever, but never obscure. And they have one of my favorite qualities in an artist: awareness of those that came before them. They don't create in a vacuum.
The Foo Fighters are accessible, and wildly commercial, but never pandering. And they're not sellouts, despite their massive sums of loot. They've been around 20 years, and they've never rested on their laurels or stopped challenging themselves artistically. They've grown with every album, while never letting go of their core sound.
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW DIFFICULT THAT IS?
And rare. Most 20-year-old bands are content to churn out the same album over and over, or they stop making new music all together and quietly retire into their greatest hits phase, playing 3-4 shows a year and finding new and creative ways to rerelease the same dozen songs.
Finally, Dave Grohl just seems like such a good dude. The kind you would have over for dinner, and drink beers with on the back porch while your kids played together. He is clearly a real musician who cares about music; anyone who argues otherwise is a fool. The stuff he's created over the years has a sense of honesty and genuineness that is almost extinct from popular music.
I think the main reason my friend is ill-disposed to the Foo Fighters has something to do with the fact that their music is meticulously arranged and carefully crafted.  What I call craftsmanship, my friend would call contrivance. And in a sense, he isn't wrong.
See, when an artist cultivates a particular energy in their work, it's an attempt to control how the work is percieved. And I can understand why some people find this distasteful, because when a person does this in social situations, it's vain. So to some people, trying to control an audience's perception of a work of art is also vain. But art is made to be percieved. If it is never percieved, I think it's hard to call it art. I acknowledge that there is value in art that feels off-the-cuff, raw or accidental, but as a meticulous, methodical person, I respect the learning and effort it takes to do it the other way--with craftsmanship.
For me, the problem arises when an artist crafts  their art to control the audiences economic support of it. It's one thing to craft art so that people will see it a certain way. Quite another to craft art so people will buy it. Because at its core, art has nothing to do with money. So anyone who brings considerations of money into the process of creating lowers their art.
That doesn't mean I'm against making money. As a matter of fact, I would very much like to make a fantastic sums of money from my art. But the way I see it, the process of merchandising necessarily comes after--and separate from--creation. I'm willing to work as hard at marketing as I am at creating. But I am not interested in creating just to market. Marketing serves creating, not the other way around.
I think perhaps my friend--whose opinion I respect--does not perceive this distinction between craftsmanship and contrivance. And when he hears the overdubs and double-tracked vocals of a Foo Fighters song, he hears contrivance.
I hear deliberation, knowledge and artistic vigor.
My wife, on the other hand, remains a mystery.

Ruminations on the Beatles: Beatles For Sale

Everything I've said about the previous three Beatles albums goes for this one as well.  It's got some of my favorite deep cuts ("I'll Follow The Sun", "I'm a Loser") and some of the classics ("Every Little Thing", "Eight Days a Week"), and again, the band shows growth, moving towards less obvious love song territory, even tackling some subjects that would normally find themselves in a blues tune.  But the music isn't what I want to talk about with this album.
I've had a digital copy of Beatles For Sale as long as I can remember, and I've listened to it dozens of times.  But this past Christmas, my wife bought me the complete Beatles Discography on LP in a re-issue box set that comes with a huge coffee table book about the albums.  It's a gorgeous package, and one of my prized possessions.  I spent about 3 solid days flipping through the book and the LPs, just enjoying the artwork and the feel of the albums.
I used to collect LPs, but circumstances caused me to part with my collection long ago.  The feel of having  them in hand after so long brought me right back to my early college days, when I had nothing better to spend money on than a stack of used records.  Anyone who has ever owned one should understand.  The gigantic, art-covered sleeves were half the experience of owning an LP, and it brings something unique and special to an album, especially when its one of your favorite bands.
Beatles For Sale, specifically, was the first album in the boxed set that I really marveled at.  I'd seen the cover before, I knew it was a jump towards an artsier presentation for the band, and daring in that it was the first not to feature the band's name prominently on the front.  But until I owned the physical LP, I had no idea that it was a gate-fold cover.  To those not in-the-know, a gate-fold is often used for double LPs, with two sleeves connected by a hinge, effectively doubling the space for album art.  Beatles For Sale isn't a double LP, there's just and extra flap on the front, allowing for twice the art, just for fun.

The art itself is understated, nothing like the schizophrenic Klaus Voorman piece that makes up the cover of Revolver (my vote for best album cover of all time).  The Cover is just pictures of the band standing in a leaf-strewn park in autumn, looking too %&*#ing cool to be real.  The inside is just a live shot on the left and the band posing in front of a mural at Twickenham Film Studios during the filming of A Hard Day's Night on the right.  It's simple, and with a cursory glance you can see everything there is to see in the pictures.  But for a fan of the Beatles, and a fan of album art in general, its entrancing.  Something about holding that massive cardboard sleeve in hand makes it magical, even if the art itself contains no secrets.
And there's no doubt that after you've dropped the needle for the first time, pouring over the gigantic sleeve will enhance your experience.  The Beatles did it better on future albums, sure, but they did it first on Beatles For Sale.