Post a controversial music opinion

(and when i say beatles i do kinda mean the byrds by extension. byrds by proxy? you know what i mean...)

DJP's taxonomy of classic/timeless/dated is absolutely spot-on, and clarifies a murky realm.

I am henceforth incorporating this taxonomy into my brain. If I ever use this in public I will try to ensure proper credit.

Fwiw I deeply love some music that is unambiguously dated. As dated as a neon-colored cotton Forenza sweater over acid-washed jeans. Or a Yamaha DX7. I regret nothing.

Interesting convo as I listened to Rhythm Nation for the first time since I was a kid just the other day. I was actually struck by how fresh & banging it sounds in 2023 (well, not the ballads), like it reminded me more of Bomb Squad or something than I was expecting.

I'm not going to speculate about what the kids are into these days, but I could see that sound coming back but maybe more in the form of like a Stereolab/Broadcast (meaning how they treated "dated" 60s sounds) spin on it? Like I'd be surprised to hear it in mainstream pop, but I wouldn't be surprised if more leftfield artists did something with it. It's an exhilarating sound even with the archaic tech.

That said, I think the lyrics on RN might be a sticking point for any kind of revival, more than the sound even

I do think the question of why some styles come back and others don't is interesting. I don't think it's about quality or about feeling more clearly "of their time" at all, in fact the retroness/datedness is so often part of the reason ppl get into them. And going by the usual revival cycles New Jack Swing's moment would have been like ten years ago, it's weird that it didn't happen. All the iconic 80's styles were already being very heavily revived in the 00's after all. So ums' speculations about ppl's rhythmic language skills are interesting to me.

the younger you are, the less baggage/nostalgia you have when it comes to 80s sounds or any decades sounds obviously. i mean it feels like we are on our 3rd or 4th generation of people who are looting the 90s and 80s and they all find something in those times that are not what we might find to use. us old folks.

I lack the technical knowledge to describe this but I think there's a very identifiable compression and clipping you hear in a lot of 80's digital drums and synths, same sort of thing that makes NES/SNES/Genesis VGM sound so unique. but yea "Rhythm Nation" very much the exception, though it's very much of its era I think the sound is incredible and real dynamic.

and the sound *has* come back, if not necessarily in the pop realm. its cool how many very identifiably 80's sounding productions - particularly those from the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono - suddenly sound very modern again

badfinger were huge. not every power pop band is big star. abba were not big star. but they were big. stars.

Funny you should mention ABBA and Rickenbackers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnm6d9vd7sg

I always think of New Jack Swing as a 90's sound tho I realise it bridges the two decades. Realise my post makes no sense if you think of it as an 80's thing.

i feel like Boyz II Men helped usher the clanky nujak of 80s janet into the 90s. dallas austin? and whoever did Funky Divas. i am terrible when it comes to remembering who did what in nujak land. i just listen to it. i listened to the first Shai album the other day! there are some really pretty ballads on that album.

no that makes sense imo, not everything stops on a dime when a decade turns

(i'm more of a so so def kinda person when it comes to that era. throw a little bass into my battle jeep r&b. make mine Dupri. Totally Krossed Out holds up WAY more than you might think!)

kpop has had a pretty permanent new jack swing revival in the background, it's never been the dominant trend but it's a major influence in general and more explicitly revivalist stuff pops up regularly enough

in western pop all i can really think of though in the past decade is bruno mars' "finesse"

just need mariah and beyonce and janet to start a nujak supergroup. i feel like whenever i hear a beyonce song it always has one foot in that early 90s world of mariah and tribal house and generic eurodisco. but not a lot of clanking or abandoned factory jackhammer beats. that i can remember. obviously marching band trap is a nod to the cacophony of any L.A. and Babyface remix from 1993. they could get those guys to produce. or even better get Bell Biv & Devoe to produce. i still play my BBD remix CD. it's so fucking loud. get hype williams to do a steampunk motorboat chase video and voila you are breaking worldwide tour records for the next 5 years.

I don't consider Rhythm Nation 1814 new jack at all.

its the song "rhythm nation" itself that serves as a bridge to future nujack luminaries. i could play "rhythm nation" into "humpin around" into paula abdul's "rock house" down at the club and nobody would blink.

not that i would. or maybe i would...

i just really want to have a freestyle night. thinking about asking the local club if i can do it.

scott seward I would happily listen to your proposed supergroup

I don't consider Rhythm Nation 1814 new jack at all.

It 100% is and it’s wildly revisionist to say it isn’t

the song or the album? the song definitely is, though as mentioned it's held up way better than most of the New Jack Swing of the era. the album itself not so much if I remember

OK, I'll clarify. The album's NJ-adjacent but it's moving too fast and too densely arranged for Guy, Keith Sweat, etc. DJP, you and I on previous threads have said RN and, say, Meat Beat Manifesto have more in common. Let's say it's NJ-adjacent industrial.

that's definitely something that someone could type on the computer if they wanted to

The Rhythm Nation album was New Jack Swing refracted through the Minneapolis Sound. My comparisons to industrial are more about the sonic similarities of the outputs than attempting to give them a common lineage, basically my lifelong crusade to identify the through lines in the music that I like from varying disparate sources.

Giving rise to ever-more-novel hyphenates.

There's a technological reason too, I think. The eighties got the flood of affordable digital gadgets, and it took a while to sort out how to use them most effectively. And 70s records are the zenith of electrical analog recording, a culmination of engineering starting forty years before, with multitrack recording finally accessible down the food chain. So the 80s are kinda like the 20/30s, you give the recordings a bit of leeway sometimes, and the tone can sound comical to those who haven't acclimatized.

― Terrycoth Baphomet (bendy), Wednesday, July 26, 2023 12:37 PM (yesterday)

Could it be that recording/computer tech allows greater emphasis on items like a balanced sound pyramid (bass at a level where it's felt as well as heard as a distinctive melodic and harmonic entity), as well as crisp hi-hats/percussion and mid-range guitars/synths with warmth and heft instead of 'clock-radio' tinniness; meaning that the biggest thing limiting '80s sounds from a revival is the how any appeal gets it's legs chopped off by the era's production capabilities? The only 2 '80s-style sounds I hear regularly are the gated drums and the cha-ching!-guitar accents from Scritti's Cupid & Psyche '85 (I hear those all over indie pop records), or when Hip-Hop or pop-punk tracks have a measure of '80s production as a part of a build-up to the more contempo-sounding verse or chorus.

I was listening to the most up-to-date remaster of Yes' 90125 - an album with a sound as state-of-the-art as it got in '83 - and as forward-looking and massive as the chorus of "City Of Love" sounds, the keybs in the intro for "Our Song" are still so cartoonishly chintzy, you'd swear they were from a different album/producer.

I always thought the keyboard on "Our Song" was a deliberate throwback to baseball-park organ sounds, since it's apparently a song about playing shows in the US.

cartoonishly chintzy

Funny you should say that, i always thought "Chintzy" would be a good name for, like, a Pokemon. Or even more so, the gibberish-spouting Sidekick Creature Nuisance to the main group of teenagers in an 80's adventure cartoon. "Cut it out, Chintz!"

I just thought you should know that's what i think of whenever someone uses the word "chintzy"

i feel like i'm the only person i know who loves Big Generator. i don't know why. it always sounds cool to me.

my buddy swears by "Love Will Find a Way."

There's a technological reason too, I think. The eighties got the flood of affordable digital gadgets, and it took a while to sort out how to use them most effectively. And 70s records are the zenith of electrical analog recording, a culmination of engineering starting forty years before, with multitrack recording finally accessible down the food chain. So the 80s are kinda like the 20/30s, you give the recordings a bit of leeway sometimes, and the tone can sound comical to those who haven't acclimatized.

― Terrycoth Baphomet (bendy), Wednesday, July 26, 2023 12:37 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is a great post. i hadn't really thought about it like this before

That would actually be awesome if Our Song's intro sounded more of that ballpark/cathedral hugeness, rather than the "oh shit, I accidentally kicked a toy that plays a loud song, hopefully there's only 15 seconds left" sound

this is on deck at my store right now and the 80s called and they want their 80s back because soooo 80ssssssss.............

https://i.discogs.com/OsyvbfYLql2v-K9d3qJCSGBcWDjMqOumP8sg2rKKqeY/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:597/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTM5ODkx/NzQtMTY3NTYyMTI1/MC00NTgzLmpwZWc.jpeg

Prefecture, your post is nicely detailed. But I love all those sounds that I first heard on a clock radio in 1980, and I have zero regrets.

I mean, "Shock the Monkey" and "We Belong" and "Rock the Casbah" and "Union of the Snake" and "Everyday I Write the Book" were right there next to everything from Thriller and Juice Newton. To me it was a magical time.

Cooper & Ross! A CBS sitcom after Simon & Simon in '81!

musically, i was just so in love with everything in the 80s. literally everything. i adored hardcore punk and metal and synth-pop. i blasted judas priest and bronski beat and blue nile and flux of pink indians and mantronix and they all lived together in my heart. i was fucking miserable and wanted to die but the music kept me going. for real! thanks, music! thanks, sinead!

i totally watched simon & simon every week...

My mom, who would've left my dad for Tom Selleck, watched Magnum P.I. and S&S back to back. It was the ritual. If you were a housewife, you drooled over Magnum, then cooled off with S&S.

i watched both too! kinda like how i watched love boat into fantasy island every week.

that cooper & ross record is really drippy and i'm trying to figure out why its a 30 dollar record because it was always a dollar record. what hepcat found something hip in it? i guess it has a couple of smooth moves. but that doing 60s covers in an 80s way was never a favorite thing of mine. they do "it's gonna take a miracle" and "anyone who had a heart" and "only the lonely". burt bacharach got love in the 80s.

(i did like Sybil's "Don't Make me Over".)

^^ first single released on cassingle without a 7-inch equivalent

new jackin' it in San Diego

There's a technological reason too, I think. The eighties got the flood of affordable digital gadgets, and it took a while to sort out how to use them most effectively. And 70s records are the zenith of electrical analog recording, a culmination of engineering starting forty years before, with multitrack recording finally accessible down the food chain. So the 80s are kinda like the 20/30s, you give the recordings a bit of leeway sometimes, and the tone can sound comical to those who haven't acclimatized.

― Terrycoth Baphomet (bendy), Wednesday, July 26, 2023 12:37 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is a great post. i hadn't really thought about it like this before

There are TONNES of (great) albums from the 80s that sound dated to me, either because they were recorded in suboptimal digital conditions (newly acquired DA-88s with not-great digital converters, see Siberry “No Borders Here” or Rickie Lee Jones “The Magazine”), or utilizing new digital synthesis in ways that would soon sound “bad” (Carlos “Beauty In The Beast”, Siberry “The Walking”, a run of Jarre albums); again, I love these albums but they are unmistakeably from a particular time

It is amazing in retrospect that Mike Post, relying on cheap General MIDI sound banks for so many of his classic TV themes, was able to achieve timelessness

i mean i'm assuming the DAC you'd find in a used blu ray player on craiglist would blow a state of the art studio DAC from the 80s out of the water

Precisely

Part of the reason musicians/labels were like “this 80s album got a new PURE ANALOG MIX AND MASTER line up line up” was to ‘fix’ a lot of the weird sonics

Just listen to any track on Siberry’s “No Borders Here” and you’ll hear what I mean— especially “Waitress” and “Extra Executives”.

I'm listening to Meli'sa Morgan's 1987 album Good Love. high gloss 80s soul. i love it! it sounds wonderful to me. but someone younger hearing these drums now, i don't know what they would think. She was in the group High Fashion. If you can find their two albums on Capitol you are lucky. They are tough to find in 2023. really good stuff. she sang on some Kleeer albums too i think.

Her Prince cover!

Also: she had a lovely cameo in a Cosby Show episode. Whatever else that monster did, he courted Black talent.

also wanna point out that format + setup seems to matter a lot with some of that 80s stuff, like for example the Emerson, Lake, and Powell album always sounded kinda shitty on headphones or in the car, but I recently got a vinyl copy which I played on the big stereo and I can finally hear what they were going for. dare I say it even sounds massive in certain spots.

sounds like someone's ready for some...Asia.