I'm not saying if you wanted to go look for it you could not go out and find good pop culture stuff in the 80s, I guess my point was you did kinda hafta hunt for it. I guess the thing is I just did not really dig the 70s guys I liked getting bit by that nasty 80s bug. I also just did not like a lot of the new music the 80s gave us. Hey, I was part of the high school class of 1985 and so I know there are people born within 10 years of me in either direction that really liked the 80s. Some sort of warm memories live there for them.

I certainly understand nostalgia and I don't want to mess with any warm fuzzies people have for certain stuff. That was not at all my goal. I suppose the way I stated it I sound pretty bitchy but I did not mean to offend anyone. Hey, I was using Robert Palmer, a guy I like, and sort of complaining about where his records seemed to go south for me. Let's face it too, Palmer should not have cared a bit for what I thought. His change in direction and sound paid off for him I think. I mean if I bring up Robert Palmer people don't say "Oh yeah, I love those records he did with Little Feat!" they say "He's the guy that did those videos with the hot chicks! Simply Irresistible!"

It is also all about personal preference too and so there is no reason why other folks can't love the stuff I don't like. I don't look down on anybody that likes to crank up 80s rock...well, with one exception, if we are going on a long car ride together I would ask you do not try to subject me to your best of the 80s collection. It could get ugly. To my ears the stuff just sounds off, like something has gone wrong with it. I think David explained it best in his post. On many 80s records it sounds almost as if there is nobody home to me.

I do think in the 80s they had got it all sorted it that they could make a lot of money off of pop culture stuff. There is art in pop culture stuff and I think that is why we respond to it in such a deeply emotional way but in the 1980s the commerce trumped the art in a big way. It seemed to me in the 80s the idea was to make everything look and sound the same. The movie business went sequel crazy because it made more sense to them to make 16 Police Academy films than to risk their money making something original. If some young filmmakers went out and shot a horror film on the cheap about a killer at a summer camp just buy that idea and make 12 more of the same film. You just change the number after the title.

I think with music it was sort of the same deal, with all the digital hocus pocus and the circumstances David describes there was a "sameness" to the sounds on a lot of records be it Palmer or Springsteen or Flock of Seagulls or The Psychedelic Furs. The songs and singers may have been different but the wank and clank and Teutonic churning was the same.

This was the big killer to me, I mean just from my perspective, all that sameness drained the feeling that there was a human being back there somewhere making all that noise. The other thing that is pretty obvious is that music that depends more on digital gimmicks than the sounds that humans make over the course of time ages in a nasty way. Sort of like the freakish looking people mentioned in the thread at the top of this page about plastic surgery.