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Looper's Delight
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Emile wrote: "Some of us aging hippies were hoping the decade would signal a rebound from some unsatisfying (to us, at least) musical tendencies (disco, fusion, etc,) of the 70's. We were disappointed-:)" Respectfully, Emile, I need to agree to disagree with you: I am an aging hippy and I personally thought that the early 80's gave us some of the most innovative pop music since the late 60's. For me, the whole DIY ethic of new wave music (from the original impetus of punk in the late 70's) was wonderful , I believe and at least in my home town, there were far more bands playing all original creative music in night clubs that did not hire cover bands than any time in the next 25 years. Add to that the early 80's revolution in sampling that highly effected everything from motion picture soundtracks to pop group recordings............. The rise of MIDI which led to composers being able to flesh out full creative visions without necessarily having to rely on bands or orchestras to play them (which completely changed and made more egalitarian, the musical world because it changed the fact that you either had to be rich or very famous to flesh out ideas if they were grandiose ---think orchestral). The 80's also saw the rise of really affordable equipment and digital processing so that more and more people could make music without having to have a lot of money. The next things I say are Amero-centric so I'll apologize for that but it is all I can speak about because I was nowhere else in the world during the early 80's: The fact that Disco was forced to change to stay economically viable meant that tons of new rhythms and timbres entered music. particularly from the Caribbean.........Rap and Hip Hop also added incredible new rhythmic sophistication to popular music........ ...........indeed, the whole world fusion (or world beat, a term that I hate) in popular music occurred in the first few years of that decade as well...............which meant that (in my country) African, Middleeastern, Aisian and Caribbean musicians began to perform in large numbers all over the western world whereas before that there was very, very little of this influence in popular music, statistically speaking. Suddenly, in popular music (everything from motion picture soundtracks to commercials to pop groups), there was an incredible explosion of new rhythms (with world music and rap/hip hop roots) and new timbres (sampling). In fact, there probably has never been a decade in American music history where there was such an explosion of rhythm and rhythmic variety. I honestly think of the early 80's with great fondness and consider it to be one of the more fertile early decades in American and British popular music. At least this aging hippy thinks so (hell, I don't feel aging in the slightest but I am over 50 years old which probably seems like aging to some of the younger members of our community).