1979-1981: Popular Modernism and Synthesisers
Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life offers some memorable and highly personal views on the development of popular music culture in the UK over the last 40 years. Published in 2014 the book provides a vivid reminder four decades on that the brief period either side of 1980 was a remarkable one for pop music. In a very short space of time, a wave of new artists and bands launched a Cambrian explosion of musical creativity that seized the post-punk landscape and legitimised the use of electronic instruments that would go on to inspire the rave and dance music scene years afterwards. Labelled synth-pop, the new movement embraced the use of synthesizers to create a spare and distinctly alien sound. It drew a line under the perceived indulgence of mainstream pop in the 1970s, particularly progressive rock and glam. The scene drew its energy and inspiration instead from a futurist ethic often expressed in a distinct look. In the pre-Internet age, many first encountered synth-pop though the medium of television and programs like Top of the Pops. The impact would have been profound on many of those watching as they would have had few if any reference points for what they were watching unless they were familiar with the work of Kraftwerk who were a primary inspiration for many of the bands though largely unknown in the UK.
The phenomenon was largely a British scene, arising from a peculiar creative ecology. This backdrop included a thriving audio electronics industry which had blossomed through the 70s and unique institutions like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The latter was an experimental audio laboratory where recording techniques and electronics were combined to create entirely new sounds. Synth-pop electronic music culture gained global cultural significance as a new decade dawned. The analogue technologies used to power the movement were emancipatory, serving as enablers to allow artists to express themselves through a new art that would have been strange and exciting to listen to. Instruments like the ARP Odyssey synthesiser used by John Foxx in his 1980 album Metamatic supplied a remote and angular coldness. When combined with his flat vocal delivery on his tracks Underpass and No-one Driving the overall sense is of a metallic sound of a machine future or what seemed to be a plausible vision of it at the tail end of the 70s when the imagination of JG Ballard loomed large over the cultural landscape.
The Minimoog used by Kraftwerk was another popular choice along with the Roland Jupiter 8 and the Yamaha CS-80 which was deployed by Vangelis on the Bladerunner soundtrack.
These instruments employed the same basic technique. They used electronic circuits to generate a characteristic tone which could be shaped by input typically via a keyboard. The approach wasn't revolutionary but having the means of production in the hands of music creators through the availability of affordable commercial products was. Those creators were channelling the same DIY ethic punk had a few years earlier. As Andrew O’Hagan points out in this London Review of Books review of an ‘oral biography’ of synth-pop, it was a time when anybody with determination, imagination and style could step out from the crowd and take the stage:
There was no difference between New Romantic bands and their fans: they had the same hair and the same talent, it was just that some of them happened to sell millions of records. (‘New Romanticism’, by the way, doesn’t mean anything: they could just as easily have been called Futurists, or Blitz Kids, after the club, or Dandy Highwaymen, whatever.) Making an exhibition of yourself has solid foundations in British popular culture, but with this lot it was linked on the one side to emerging technology (the synthesiser, the drum machine, home computers) and on the other to adventurous realisations about gender fluidity.
The sound seemed to perfectly reflect the spirit of time. The initial creative force of punk had flagged and the political landscape in the UK underwent regime change. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 chimed with the national mood. In received myth, at least in terms of the present-day neoliberalism which ascended to political dominance then, Britain was a dark and gloomy place prior to the arrival of the Conservatives after the Winter of Discontent. Social democracy with its emphasis on society and communitarianism had failed. People wanted change and Thatcher offered it with a future-shock agenda expressly supportive of individual talent, ambition and enterprise.
At the time, much of London was run-down and unrecovered from Second World War bomb damage. In common with other parts of Britain, even those areas that had undergone reconstruction suffered from the scarring affects of well-meaning but ultimately poorly thought-through social housing experiments frequently employing brutalist architecture. This grim grey world was inhabited at different ends of the cultural spectrum by John Le Carré's crumpled creation George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and by Joy Division. Smiley was an ambiguous figure, seemingly world-weary and worn down by his struggles to maintain the upper hand against the Communist espionage network and guided by a sense of duty. Joy Division too felt like a fragile creation struggling against hidden forces. This sense of possession comes across years later watching lead singer Ian Curtis jerking uncontrollably on stage.
That Curtis's lyrics were unrelentingly bleak is well-known however it is important to recognise that his melancholia, “an Eastern Bloc of the mind” as Fisher calls it, was primarily driven by depression and later on epilepsy rather than politics. Indeed Curtis famously voted Conservative along with many others in 1979. He was a neuromantic rather than an overt inspiration for the New Romantic movement that followed in early 80s. His suicide in 1980 forever gatefolded the era into before and after. It remains one of the great musical counterfactual history unknowns what the world would have looked like if Curtis hadn't died and Joy Division went on, as many expected, to dominate the musical landscape of the early 80s. Although commercial success seemed assured for the band on the back of Closer, the dark energy they conveyed on tracks like Digital felt increasingly outside the envelope of popular culture as the decade unfurled.
New Order formed from the remaining members of the band rose from the ashes after his death. They may have started out as "sorcerers without an apprentice" on the haunted Movement but throughout their 80's pomp arced towards a more outwardly mainstream sensibility culminating a decade later with an England World Cup anthem accompanied by Keith Allen. At first sight that outcome feels as far removed from what Ian Curtis was writing about as possible. However, it is entirely conceivable a more commercially successful Joy Division could have ended up following the same trajectory from synth pop to stadium-filling blandness taken by Duran Duran. They more than any other band were the musical emblem bearers of aspirational Thatcherism from 1982 onwards as O’Hagan memorably puts it:
Duran Duran – triumphant in pastel suits made by Antony Price – sailed into the charts on a windswept hash of lifestyle guff, poncing around the Caribbean on a hideous yacht. The romance went out of New Romanticism the minute the band’s bass player, John Taylor, in the video for the single ‘Rio’, crawled up the beach with a rifle to help a lady who was being splashed with champagne, followed quickly by their singer, Simon Le Bon, diving into the blue Antiguan waters
Fisher makes the case that there is an alternative reading of history from that promoted by neoliberalism which suggests that 1979 was the historic peak for a particular type of popular modernism in the UK. This modernism stemmed from a common shared experience provided by the limited range of television channels in the 1970s along with the lingering afterglow of the post-war social consensus. Synth-pop was a product of this context even if, like punk, it was conflicted by it. A key element within this popular modernist view was a belief in the power of social democracy to improve people's lives. In this analysis, the fictional master spy Smiley was arguably at heart a social democrat who believed in the importance of the common good above individual desire. Whether explicit or not, this worldview would have been familiar to anyone working in the creative industries in the late 70s. By the end of the decade, popular modernism felt exhausted and was ultimately washed away by Thatcherism. 1979 haunts our modern age particularly for those on the Left politically. It offers rich scope for hauntology. Ghosts of the past representing lost futures forever closed to us. Modern culture rehashes the past as retro while we face “the slow cancellation of the future”. It is this morose shadowland which Joy Division persistently roam 40 years on. Others live on in perpetuity here too. Tracks like Electricity by OMD or Open Your Heart by Human League exhibit an optimism that presages the energy of the dance music scene they helped spawn in the late 80s. In this music, it is still possible to detect the sense of a future past that positively embraced the new.
Another echo of the social democratic fabric of the time was to be found in the blurring of identity so important to many in the scene. It was a period when one's origins seemed less relevant than what they could become. Being curious about the alien, the exotic and the android were central to the zeitgeist. Gary Numan and David Sylvian of Japan were key exponents. Born Gary Webb and David Batt respectively Fisher describes how they entirely reinvented themselves:
As with most English art pop, Japan found their environment only a negative inspiration, something to escape from. … Pop was the portal out of the prosaic. Music was only part of it. Art pop was a finishing school for working class autodidacts. … Changing your name was the first step. … Like art’s first pioneer, Bowie, it was about identification with the alien, where the alien stood in for the technologically new and the cognitively strange - and ultimately for forms of social relations that were as yet only faintly imaginable. … Identifying with the alien - not so much speaking for the alien as letting the alien speak through you - was what gave 20th century popular music much of its political charge. Identification with the alien meant the possibility of an escape from identity, into other subjectivities, other worlds.
It's important not to conflate the hauntology with reality. In other words to exaggerate the importance the synth pop movement through nostalgia. Synth-pop as a representation of popular modernism is limited as a parallel. Its themes weren't overtly political or revolutionary. Also, the world of electronic music culture wasn't particularly inclusive being almost entirely young, male and white at a time when the texture of British society was changing markedly as a result of several decades of immigration.
With hindsight, one discerns that synth-pop had a sense of its own ending from the outset. Japan's Ghosts today sounds like an eerie premonition of defeat inflicted at the very point of victory.
Just when I think I'm winning
When I've broken every door
The ghosts of my life blow wilder than before
Perhaps this was the real sound of the future - anxious and fearful of one’s true origin being found out and exposed. Movement, New Order's first album after Curtis's death provides a similar sense of paranoia and the outline of a new form of malevolence drawing in. It arguably marked the end of the era.
The playlist below tries to capture something of the spirit of the synth-pop period and includes a number of tracks that Fisher references.
1988-2010: The Haunted Ballroom
Synth-pop burned bright encouraging mainstream success for fast followers like Howard Jones before fading significantly by the mid-80s. However it was to have a rich and strange second life. Even though it didn’t resonate with the politically active or ethnic minorities in Britain, the music of Depeche Mode, Gary Numan and others was enthusiastically embraced by black musicians in the post-industrial wasteland of Detroit. Notably by the Belleville three of Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson who were inspired by it to create a new electronic music movement called Techno. This in turn spawned the House and Garage genres in the US which then radiated out to become global cultural phenomena. Synth-pop in that sense served as a critical land bridge between post-punk and the rave and dance scene that went on to transform UK youth culture by the end of the decade. For a brief moment in time in the late 80s it really did feel that rave would usher in an intoxicating mass participation movement built on the equality of collective experience on the dance floor. A new form of social democracy perhaps. The Haçienda in Manchester was at its epicentre. One of the earliest UK House tracks TCoy’s Carino was a big hit there. The original video of Carino is mesmeric, splicing recycled speeded up footage of New York between synchronised dancing:
We all know what happened next. The future hinted at in those heady and exciting first few years of rave never came to pass and the dance scene became progressively captured by commercial forces and excess.
In contrast to the synth pop era, Fisher sees the period from late 90s to the present as a cultural desert. He also highlights that it has also been a disaster for artists more broadly. Music has slid towards zero-priced commodity status as technology has changed the consumption and distribution of music accentuating the anguish and heightening the hauntology:
the hopes created by postwar electronica or by the euphoric dance music of the 1990s have evaporated - not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible.
Despite its elevation of futurism synth-pop was ultimately at heart human-centred. The technology was largely analogue not digital between 1979 and 1981 and hardware not software. The world we are now in is very different. Advances in computing have enabled the permanent preservation of cultural artefacts including those produced from the electronic music scene. They are endlessly mixed and recycled to through social media like YouTube. Instead of fading to grey, old content has been thrown in the mix with new to create a confused soup of the now. We've accelerated media access without necessarily going anywhere. Consumers today are offered infinite choice which is impossible to navigate for the average human being. So the task is outsourced to algorithms which offer to simplify the selection problem for us. What we listen to is now prescribed by the same advances in computing that created the content proliferation. Social media with its infinite scrolling plays an outsize role in our disorientation:
In this oversaturated culture, we feed on media to a point beyond fullness, and that can open up within the most avid media junkie an “abyss the dimensions of which are in proportion to the emptiness of your life”. Perhaps we can think of it as digital melancholia, the feeling of never being full, of never encountering an end to the information stream, of never actually catching up with all that culture we feel we must keep up with in the first place. It is a lonely, exhausting burden unique to our moment in history. … we surf the web alone and binge on media alone.
The result is often a form of regression to the mean in terms of popular culture which can be evidenced tuning into any mainstream radio station. Niche cultures exist but the collapse in communal experience of media over the last 20 years and the primacy of algorithm selection has resulted in atomised cultural microworlds gated off from each other.
Those that create music are under parallel assault. They have seen access to the means of production reduce over time and their personal circumstances become ever more precarious. The decline of social housing and relentless rise in property prices have squeezed physical access. At the same time, communication technology has overwhelmed consumers with a deluge of distraction and YouTube links making it hard to break through. Where are the equivalent of Kraftwerk today? How and where would they find the time and space to create something new? The end result of these forces is a blandly commercial transnational club music that sounds the same anywhere you go in the world, an aural analog to the AirSpace aesthetic deployed by global brands like Starbucks and McDonalds and frequently heard playing in them. Hedonism today fails to convince when 'partying' is more a job than a way of life blurring with PR and media exposure. Fisher is clear on the root cause:
Whereas the digital technology of the 80s and 90s fed the collective experience of the dancefloor, the communicative technology of the 21st century has undermined it, with even clubbers obsessively checking their smartphones.
Digital technology has become so powerful it has even started to undermine human creativity. One counterreaction has been vaporwave, a subgenre that samples and distorts music from the 80s and 90s embracing imperfection in the form of audiovisual glitches, effects, loops, crackle and other auditory weirdness like ASMR to create a jarring overall experience. Darkstar’s cover of the Human League’s You Remind Me Of Gold employs this approach:
AutoTune launched in the late 90s is an example of a technology that allowed artists to lower the quality bar and address the resultant gap with software. The backstory of how it was created by Andy Hildebrand, a research scientist with a background in signal processing in the oil industry, is highly illuminating. It illustrates how technology often doesn’t make things better. It also provides further validation of the particular and enduring American techno-utopian trope of a lone genius hitting digital gold.
Kanye West combined AutoTune and hedonic sadness to celebrated effect on Bad News from his 808s and Heartbreak album released 20 years on and a world away from the rave Summer of Love. This vaporwave version is slowed down with extra reverb accompanied by a washed out off-focus glitched anime on constant loop is better than the real thing:
Fisher sees this depressive hedonism as part of a broader pathological trend he calls “reflexive impotence” which he details in one of his k-punk blog posts as follows:
Reflexive impotence amounts to an unstated worldview amongst the British young. Many of the teenagers I work with have mental health problems or learning difficulties. Depression is endemic. The number of students who have some variant of dyslexia is astonishing. It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness. This pathologization already forecloses any possibility of politicization. By privatizing problems - treating them as if they were caused only by the individual's neurology and/ or family background - any question of social systemic causation is ruled out.
Meanwhile a concerted assault is being made on music creation, one of the last bastions of human creativity. The same OpenAI responsible for the GPT3 language model discussed in a previous post released Project Jukebox in April 2020. It’s a generative model that purports to be able to create music in infinitely many styles using machine learning and potentially the entire catalogue of recorded music as a starting point. It works by breaking its input into tiny blocks which are progressively adjusted during training. The approach can be extended to include singing. The blocks are created by a method called vector quantisation (VQ) and a type of neural network called a variational auto-encoder (VAE) is used to learn a reduced dimension representation then use it along with new input to create novel output based. OpenAI have smuggled this revolution in under the guise of respectable research. AutoTune has nothing on this:
We introduce Jukebox, a model that generates music with singing in the raw audio domain. We tackle the long context of raw audio using a multi-scale VQ-VAE to compress it to discrete codes, and modeling those using autoregressive Transformers. We show that the combined model at scale can generate high-fidelity and diverse songs with coherence up to multiple minutes. We can condition on artist and genre to steer the musical and vocal style, and on unaligned lyrics to make the singing more controllable. We are releasing thousands of non cherry-picked samples at this https URL, along with model weights and code at this https URL.
The samples available here are bewildering in their sheer range and quantity. They may be mostly dissonant and unserviceable but serve to remind us that once perfected these approaches will very quickly swamp the collective recorded musical output of humanity. This is a generated Bowie sample:
One senses Bowie at least would have been fascinated to hear an alien version of himself. The approach being taken is essentially identical to the automatic writing technique he used throughout his career albeit on a vastly more sophisticated and total scale:
The Verbasizer was a digital version of an approach to lyrical writing that Bowie had been using for decades, called the cut-up technique. Popularized by writers William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, the technique relied on source literary material—a newspaper article or diary entry, perhaps—that had been cut up into words or phrases, and re-ordered into new, random, potentially significant meanings.
The likes of GPT3 and Project Jukebox give rise to alternative futures of their own which feel much more dystopian. Ones in which the culture we consume is created, curated and selected for us entirely by machines.
We have collectively lost our way over the last 40 years in so many ways that become more apparent with each passing day. On the journey a future in which popular modernism bloomed into manifold creations has vanished. The spectre of those lost futures haunt those walking between the sleek metal and glass neoliberal victory arches of London and other major cities. Among them the progenitors of synth-pop themselves:
Kraftwerk are artfully posed as our last great modernists, serene ‘retro-futurists’ whose late 20th-century vision seems now to glow with melancholy for the harmonious collective future we failed to secure.
Fisher suggests the old was pulled down and buried so quickly that we weren't able to properly mourn its passing. Appropriately enough the UK dubstep artist Burial is one his few 21st century cultural heroes. Like Jack Torrance in the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, Burial morosely roams a haunted dancefloor in his 2007 album Untrue. In his case it is one left behind by departed ravers:
During rave’s early ’90s peak, a multitude of tracks featured the word “dream,” often with an undertone suggesting that participants in the movement knew deep down that it was all just a dream, that utopia built on a chemical could only be a flimsy and transitory construction. … Where dance music is generally about abandon, Burial’s music is about abandonment.
On the haunted dancefloor space and time are telegraphed to such an extreme extent it's hard to know what to make sense of anything any more. We are overwhelmed by the vast mausoleum of culture we've built. Without any shared basis for experience, relativism reigns opening the door "letting the randoms in" as Burial puts it in Ghosts of My Life. Out here Burial’s classic Near Dark from Untrue can effortlessly slide into Blade Runner 2049 without a join as vaporwave:
We are all of us out on the haunted dancefloor trying to find a future that has faded out. It had to move aside for the takeover that started with Thatcher’s arrival in 1979 and continues unabated to the present day. What we have in its place is a neo-Restoration. An oligarchy aided by technology and centred on making space for the rich and monstering social democracy. The strategy has been so successful for so long that the 70s continues to be regularly berated as the nadir of post-war Britain with no redeeming qualities. Social democrats, anarcho-punks, squatters, the mentally ill and ravers are consigned to the wastebin of history since none of them have any role in the new program. The hegemony is so complete that as Fisher reminds us in Capitalist Realism, "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. Neoliberalism has incepted our collective psyche to such a degree that capitalist realism, the belief that as Thatcher regularly asserted “there is no alternative” (TINA) to the market forces remains incredibly fixed. Even now after various global economic crises and in the midst of a global pandemic we are condemned to inaction:
Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.
It is not a given that any popular culture endures. The terrain is constantly shifting and success in one era has to be fought for anew to sustain revolution. Hardly anyone in 1979 could have imagined that neoliberal ideology would become so entrenched and mainstream by 2020. The pervasive view then was that the future would be more prosperous and equitable “all watched over by machines of loving grace”. We collectively ended up a long long way from there but the possibility of change remains. We have a unique opportunity in the crisis of the present pandemic to create a new direction. Plastic hour is upon us:
In such moments, an ossified social order suddenly turns pliable, prolonged stasis gives way to motion, and people dare to hope. Plastic hours are rare. They require the right alignment of public opinion, political power, and events—usually a crisis. They depend on social mobilization and leadership. They can come and go unnoticed or wasted. Nothing happens unless you move.
Hard though it may be on many levels, this is our “one shot” as Eminem put it to enact real social change. For that to happen, it is vital to resist normalisation by the forces of global capital and technologies of disenfranchisement. If enough people are able to act, the direction taken over the last 40 years may in time come to be seen as just a cultural cul de sac on the longer arc of history. Then we may once again achieve that sense of shared experience of curiosity and creativity that the synth pop pioneers left us with.