sadmanbarty

Well-known member
if you got a 'hits of the decade' for each decade, would the 80's come out on top? it's the best pop decade (while interestingly being the worst decade for everything else).

the death of easy listening is maybe a part of that.

also the pop machine really at full strength, not letting people come ruin it by trying to make art. stock aitken and waterman. lyndsey buckingham getting paid loads to make something pretty. the coopting of john peel by putting him on top of the pops.

pop was like america in the 90's. the lone, unchallenged superpower. the end of history.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's not so much the 80s is the worst for everything else it's more that it is a decade of births and deaths. The black instrumental tradition dies (jazz/trad r&b) but hiphop, house and techno are born. Huge epochal change.
 

luka

Well-known member
In fact, we're still living in the 80s in as much as we are still living under the regimes of hip hop house and techno
 

luka

Well-known member
The sudden rise in the use of anti-depressants, SSRIs and the rest, may have narrowed the bandwidth of emotions of artists and audience. Made emotional displays less potent. Lower peaks and higher troughs, smoothing of the emotional landscape and an overall loss of consciousness from the 90s onwards.

HMG's been on form recently. I choose to read this post as positing a World Soul, a collective soul from which artists draw so that the question of whether any individual is on anti depressants is almost irrelevant. The use of of these drugs blunts all our responses. There's no private citadel safe from these depredations.

This is the thread which has lodged most firmly in my imagination recently. The more I think of it the more haunting it is. I really do think some crucial threshold was crossed at this point.
 
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pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
HMG's been on form recently. I choose to read this post as positing a World Soul, a collective from which artists draw so that the question of whether any individual is on anti depressants is almost irrelevant. The use of of these drugs blunts all our responses. There's no private citadel safe from these depredations.

This is the thread which has lodged most firmly in my imagination recently. The more I think of it the more haunting it is. I really do think some crucial threshold was crossed at this point.

It's interesting how third would have me believe dissensus is anti soul when in fact it pines for it just as hard as soppy ol moi. This is the question for me. Wtf happened? It seems as though many threads are orbiting this very question lately. Even if only a side glance
 

version

Well-known member
My mental image of the 80s is drastically different to how it actually appears to have been and it's incredibly jarring when I see images of England in the 80s and it rubs up against the stuff in my head which all looks like Scarface and Michael Mann films.

F6c7KxW.jpg
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
The shift from mdma to amphetamins in the early 90’s is crucial. MDMA is a soul boy drug. It managed to turn a bunch of yobs into patty cakes for two years at the end of the 80’s.
 

version

Well-known member
Speed is such a gnarly, squalid drug. The people who sell it are always a textbook example of the creepy drug dealer in educational videos.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
As it happens, “speed” (as in velocity) is a crucial component in the acceleration towards the future.

Vocals become chipmunked. Breaks lose all that soulful warmth and earthiness and turn metallic and shrapnel.
 

version

Well-known member
There's a description of a fictional drug in Infinite Jest which made much more of an impression than the book as a whole.

The made-up hallucinogenic drug DMZ, which may ultimately be the cause of his teetering sanity, is described in an endnote as making the user feel like “a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes.”
 
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