Were the 80’s really that bad? Good question. I, of course, would say no no no no….but then again I was 3 in 1985. I also dressed like Cyndi Lauper with an Emily Dickinson fetish, uh, so there again, I am not the most unbiased candidate for this question.
Why then do I ask? Well, I ask this question after listening to the All Music Considered’s excellent “The 80 ’s: Were They Really that Bad?” show from Tuesday featuring Sleater-Kinney genious guitarist/smart NPR blogger/the only girl I’d leave my boyfriend for CARRIE BROWNSTEIN. Now I’ve got big hair on my mind and the lady question thanks to Palin (see post below), so Carrie Brownstein talking about the 80’s (and namechecking New Zealand bands like The Bats and The Clean) is kinda all I need. Oh yes, this easily downloadable goodie might be the RNC antidote I need today.
Also I’m feeling analogy-centric, so I’ve created an analogy list of 80’s to 00’s music.
1. New still-under-the-radar Brooklyn band Crystal Stilts is to (brilliantly underrated) Chameleons UK as maudlin is to monotone (singing, that is).
2. Fey gay cellist Arthur Russell’s 80’s art disco is to Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) singing with neo-disco band Hercules & Love Affair as lost dreams is to body glitter on a dancing man at the Cock on a friday night.
3. Siouxsie and the Banshees is to new electro Manchesterites the Tings Tings as Sofia Coppola film soundtracks are to iPod commercials.
4. Screamadelica-era Primal Scream is to MGMT as vintage is to H&M knockoffs.
“You need to be a quite a snob when you’re makin’ your own music.” Yes, Spaceman, you do. Not to be redundant, but I just can’t stop thinking/dreaming of/recollecting my amazing evening with Spiritualized the other night at Terminal 5: an hour and a half of continuous rock slowed down occasionally by melodious, heart-stirring shoegaze! There were moments when the Spaceman–who literally almost died after a bout of lethal pneumonia two years ago–screamed as though the electricity from his guitar was resurrecting him.
And the beautiful thing about “new media” is that we can all get a taste of the experience via NPR: Bob Boilan did a very serious interview with Jason Pierce backstage at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC and then recorded the whole show for live streaming audio. (“Yeah the lights are dimming”–oh man, Bob, you’re so awesomely uncool).
The setlist is almost identical to what I heard two nights later. Let yourself be wowed by that amazing transition from opening song “You Lie You Cheat” (from new album Songs in A&E) to every sensitive stoner’s favorite Spaceman ballad, “Shine a Light.”
Sex positivity is not always all it’s cracked up to be.
Sometimes being sexually and intellectually free as a woman, or at least trying to be, can hurt like a bitch. No one expressed that better in pop music than Liz Phair did on EXILE IN GUYVILLE. I was late to Phair, but discovered her in my own indie-rock college youth. Like Phair shortly before she made this record a decade earlier, I was in art school (Phair went to Oberlin, a school perhaps even more obnoxious than my alma matter) and I was kinda slutty and kinda confused and had no idea why being “free” didn’t make me feel any better about myself or my body. I also felt that horrible feeling of being left out of the K-Records-style boys club because I was a girl and therefore had no valid musical opinions.
But you don’t have to have had an indie-as-fuck youth like mine or dealt with being left out of the “Mission of Burma or Wire?” kind of bullshit conversation insecure college boys in Converse have (“I STOPPED TALKING AN HOUR AGO”–see Bikini Kill’s “I Hate Danger” ) to understand what Phair was talking about. This album made feeling lonely (“Whatever happened to a boyfriend?/The kind of guy who tries to win you over?”) and angry (“I love my live/And I hated you”) ok. It was a sympathetic voice to all young women finding themselves in post-sexual revolution culture. Remember that time? When you were one part femme fatale (“Because I take full advantage/ of every guy I meet”) and four parts vulnerable …and it was all a mess. Yeah, Phair, she just got that. And then made one of the most important indie rock albums of all time.
Says Phair herself on the album:
I’ll just get really honest with you right now,” she says. “I was pretty good in bed at that point from the point of view of what the guys wanted, but pretty bad in terms of my own enjoyment. And yes, that made me angry. But it was my own fault in some sense.” As she matured into real sexual confidence, she says, the anger faded — in real life and in her music.
Looking back at Exile in Guyville, Phair sees a young woman struggling to establish some kind of control over her own life. “I kind of hear how unhappy I was. It makes my heart go out to the person I was,” she says. “It’s so clear to me now how unsure I was and how vulnerable I really was.”
It’s an album that hasn’t aged a bit, despite the very 120 minutes/My So-Called Life aesthetic of the videos and the art. Go listen to Liz Phair’s KICKASS interview on NPR about the 15th anniversary re-release of the seminal album. I’m gonna quote a dear friend here who says it even better than me:
I was a freshman in high school when this came out. All of a sudden there was this album where this awesome girl was feeling the same things I was. She wanted to understand sex, but she also wanted to understand it for HER. She felt like she made some shitty mistakes, and that she would keep on making them. She was inexplicably sad about something that seemed to be missing in her life, and she was explicitly sad about what she saw about her future as a woman. It was so refreshing to hear someone else get angry about the things that I felt angry about, and, finally, to have my anger, as an emotion, be validated. Someone else thought that it was okay to be difficult, it was okay to ask tough questions, it was okay to make demands and to want and feel things, that, as a girl (or a “lady”), I wasn’t supposed to want and feel. Life altering stuff.
Life altering indeed!
(Buzzworthy! Can you believe MTV showed shit like this at one time?)
