Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Such paper-thin posturing left the field open for an act who could enact this outsider fantasy in real life. They arrived at the perfect moment to capitalise on MTV’s new metal show, Headbanger’s Ball, which consolidated hard rock as the most popular genre on the network. When Guns N’ Roses emerged from the mid-1980s Los Angeles metal scene, a majority of the band were indulging in heroin use, and one of them was a dealer. Acolytes of both punk and metal, they were shunned by both camps, despite the fact that their sound merely sampled hard-rock signatures from the previous decade – the raunch of Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones, Van Halen’s shredding virtuosity, the telltale vocal bleat of extreme metal anguish. What marked out Guns N’ Roses as superstars was their ability to erase the chasm between image and reality which had undermined their predecessors. Like David Bowie, they acted as icons before they were famous, and as soon as their success matched their self-image, they immersed themselves in a regime of self-destructive zeal which rapidly became the stuff of legend (and ensured that they would never quite create music as devastating as their lifestyle). The fifteen-year gestation of their Chinese Democracy album began as mythology and ended as an industry joke, vocalist Axl Rose demonstrating a diva-like compulsion to sabotage his career and alienate his perennially loyal audience.

  While Guns N’ Roses acted out their cartoon roles as the incarnations of 1980s metal madness, another Los Angeles band stole the future from them. Eight years after their formation as effectively a NWOBHM tribute band, Metallica’s 1989 single ‘One’, from the platinum-selling … And Justice For All album, offered music that offered no nostalgic resonances. ‘One’ was an epic canvas reminiscent of the conceptual reach of progressive rock, describing the agony of a military veteran trapped in his shattered body. But as a rock band, Metallica paid no homage to the Stones or Zeppelin, the Faces or Aerosmith, let alone the 1950s rock ’n’ roll and electric R&B which had been their original inspiration. Where old metal swaggered, new metal lumbered, lurched, ground its opponents beneath its tank tracks – remorseless, crushing, nihilistic. In its refusal to employ syncopation or any other traits associated with African-American genres, it signalled its alienation from decades of popular music. Its roots lay in British metal, back to Black Sabbath; in punk; above all, in a generation’s growing sense that it had not inherited the liberation promised by their parents’ culture, but had been abandoned to fend for itself while the adult baby-boomers still gloried in their own perpetual youth.

  We came up with some fast15, catchy tunes and modern, futuristic sounds, and I think we’ll have at least seven hit singles off this one.

  Michael Jackson on Thriller, 1982

  [He] fascinated the female16 patrons and mystified the males … He wore purple tights and leopard-skin shorts.

  Billboard magazine on Prince, 1980

  The lure of electronic sound was so compulsive – and all-pervasive – that by 1982, everyone in popular music was working with essentially the same tools: synthesisers, sequencers, syn-drums, and soon samplers as well. Musicians’ interviews were now filled with references to the Yamaha DX7, the Emulator II and the Fairlight CMI, rather than the Fender Strat or the sunburst Les Paul. Tuning into Top 40 radio, everything merged into one, so that it was impossible to tell whether one was hearing Rush or Billy Joel or A Flock of Seagulls. (As an example: Phil Collins could lead Genesis through ‘Abacab’ in 1981, as if a tribe of robots had been let loose in the studio with the instruction to create danceable sonic mayhem; then within three years reappear as the most mellifluous of adult easy-listening artists on ‘Against All Odds’.) As the technology was fine-tuned, reduced in price and simplified, not only did pop become ever more homogeneous, but every mix was crammed and cluttered with sonic diversions which were no longer noticeable amidst the percussion clatter and keyboard burble and synthesised guitar roar. Each ultra-modern sound effect was like a distress flare let off during a firework display. The only solution was to make one’s effects noisier and more disruptive, crushing the song beneath the gimmicks that were supposed to enhance it.

  Only the largest and most blatant gestures, the most intriguing personalities, the most daredevil images could hope to survive amidst this emotionally blinding chaos. In the mid-1980s, society had evolved into a position where it was possible for a pop star to demolish barriers of race, class and age, to conquer every form of media, from the movies to MTV, and to broadcast their one simple defining feature to the world – not in a slow succession of territorial gains, as Elvis Presley and the Beatles had done, but in one vast orgy of publicity, advertising and rabid self-belief. No wonder, then, that this era – with its rock fans now aged anything from 5 to 50 – should produce four of the biggest-selling artists of all time, their commercial peaks coinciding in two of the most lucrative years in the history of popular music.

  Of the four, the most compelling was Michael Jackson, a global star since the end of 1969. He had survived the difficult transition from childhood fame to a strange form of maturity, in which he was granted the total indulgence of every child’s dreams. He had outgrown two institutions, his family (the Jackson 5) and Motown Records; and aided by veteran producer/arranger Quincy Jones, he had fashioned contemporary dance music of remarkable finesse. With their 1983 album Thriller, Jackson and Jones surpassed not only Michael’s past but the sales of every other album in history.

  Of its seven hits, ‘Billie Jean’ was the most sublime: a masterclass in syncopation, vocal control, and a singer’s ability to stamp his authority on an era with a single trick. In the mid-1950s, it was Elvis Presley’s hiccupping, echoed evocation of sexual self-confidence, delivered through a snarling smile. In the 1960s, millions of teenage girls were aroused in ways they barely understood by Paul McCartney and George Harrison issuing a falsetto squeal, as they shook their moptopped heads in ecstatic union. Michael Jackson’s gimmick was even more direct: a yelp which was caught in the throat, and was accompanied by an almost instinctive grab of the crotch, like a small boy attempting to mimic adult sensations. Combined with the preternatural fluency of Jackson’s dance moves, it suggested a man freed from the normal rules of gravity and decency.

  For ‘Beat It’, Jackson and Jones hired Eddie Van Halen to deliver a distinctive guitar solo. MTV had previously chosen to ignore black music, though they denied accusations of racial programming, claiming that they were simply adhering to their design as an AOR station. A combination of audience pressure and record-company threat ensured that ‘Beat It’ would break the supposedly non-existent colour barrier, freeing MTV to experiment with other forms of black music later in the decade – and thereby widening their audience. As a final thrust, Jackson recruited movie director John Landis to create a thirteen-minute video epic for the Thriller title track. In future, pop stars would be limited only by their budgets, as videos transcended their status as visual accompaniment to a song, and became larger (and longer) than the music itself – fame transcending the means of its production, and ultimately sacrificing the cultural power of pop on the altar of celebrity.

  The consequences of that shift in emphasis were illustrated with an awful blend of comedy and tragedy. Having designed an album of cutting-edge black music that could be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of age or race, Jackson was unable to progress in any field apart from fame. As his music stalled into stale repetition (though Jackson’s stale was still more palatable than most artists’ fresh), he was consumed by his own success. He believed himself to be beyond all petty human boundaries of finance, morality and sanity, and came closer than any entertainer to illustrating the madness of unchecked wealth. At the time of his death, the self-styled King of Pop was a musical irrelevance, emaciated, drug-addicted, mutilated by plastic surgery, deeply in debt, and trapped into a future schedule of live performances which would have taxed a young man in his prime, let alone a 50-year-old who had long since abandoned the real world.

  Jackson’s decline into total self-gratification offered a grim warning to h
is fellow mid-1980s stars. For more than a decade, Prince’s career suggested that it was possible to wield totalitarian control over every aspect of one’s life while still growing as an artist. Perhaps the most self-willed and talented musician in the entire history of popular music, Prince could apparently master any instrument, summon up a variety of vocal personae ranging from raw masculinity to girlish femininity, write songs that were simultaneously playful and complex, and demolish every imaginable boundary – between sexual preferences, races, even genders. During the 1980s, he acted as a one-man Beatles, seemingly daring himself to take ever more risks with his music, like a blindfolded circus performer insisting on fire-eating while balanced by a single finger hundreds of feet above a pit of deadly snakes. Never shy of admitting his influences, he reconfigured them with stunning imagination, channelling the spirits of Jimi Hendrix, Smokey Robinson, Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, the Beatles and many more, all in their prime: ancient and modern, sexual and spiritual, bedroom and dance floor, all of pop’s possible playgrounds under his total command. Purple Rain, an album, film and song which coupled rock authenticity and pop sentimentality, was the moment when he rivalled Michael Jackson; the ‘Kiss’ single and the subsequent Sign ‘O’ the Times album marked the pinnacle of his artistic ambition. If his commercial and musical decline was less Icarus-like than Jackson’s, that was because he never lost his passion for music – however often he alienated his immensely loyal fan base by closing down their websites and threatening them with lawsuits.

  By comparison with Jackson’s compulsive celebrity and Prince’s genre-free exuberance, Bruce Springsteen’s ascent to global success was as workmanlike as his carefully crafted image. Like Prince, he was addicted to performing and recording; unlike him, he spent his entire career (after the joyous expansiveness of his second album) refining and reducing his options, limiting his songwriting to the minimum of guitar chords and melodic variation. With Born in the USA, his defiantly nostalgic brand of rock ’n’ roll found its moment, not least in his homeland, where the title track became an anthem of Reaganite patriotism. It didn’t matter that Springsteen expressed his own distaste for Reagan’s policies at home and abroad. Audiences responded to the sound of that chorus, rather than its lyrical message, creating a roar of complacent national self-congratulation out of a song which had been designed to deflate exactly that response. D. H. Lawrence’s famous dictum, ‘Never trust the teller17, trust the tale’, had rarely seemed more pertinent.

  Lawrence, of course, never had to confront a phenomenon as baffling, and compelling, as Madonna. ‘Her voice is thin18 and not consistently successful in its search for the proper pitch’, said Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder in 1984, with cruel accuracy. ‘Take away the ravaged tart-trappings’, he added (Madonna was fond of posing in her scanties), ‘and there’s nothing else to talk about.’ In this instance he could hardly have been more wrong: that was precisely where the enigmatic appeal of Madonna began. Her music was never groundbreaking; her voice never a distinctive expression of personality; her songwriting rarely more than functional. By comparison with Cyndi Lauper, for example, who was her most obvious counterpart in 1984, she was a non-starter. Yet despite lacking any of the qualities on which musical fame had once depended, Madonna became arguably the most important pop performer of the last thirty years.

  In place of traditional artistic values, Madonna offered a rival set of coinage, which rapidly became the standard currency of global celebrity. Her assets were an instinctive command of visual style; a shameless self-confidence; and a total belief in her power as an icon. More than any previous pop performer, she transcended music: her videos counted for more than her songs, her deliberately outrageous (and playfully polymorphous) sexuality divided humanity into the bewitched and the outraged, and beyond a vague message of liberation (always centred around the bedroom) and a willingness to offend religious conservatives, she carried no deeper message than the wonder of being herself. In her early videos, an otherwise anonymous pop singer was transformed into an emblem of confrontational narcissism. She was always posing, always pushing for a reaction – pouting and flouncing, demanding to be desired. The clips for songs such as ‘Borderline’ and ‘Holiday’ nowadays resemble a collage of twenty-first-century ‘selfies’. She prophesied a world in which nothing would be more important than exhibiting one’s own face. The blazing image of the star was diminished into a flickering form of fake stardom which everyone could share.

  I do not cling19 to this antiquated hippie mentality that says it’s us against them. I personally do not consider Pepsi-Cola and Old Style Beer and the Health & Tennis Corporation to be the enemy. This is the age of adult rock stars.

  Glenn Frey, the Eagles, 1989

  I guess I used to think20 that rock could save you. I don’t believe it can anymore … as you get older, you realise that it is not enough.

  Bruce Springsteen, 1988

  The success of MTV signalled the death knell of popular music as a purely aural medium. On the surface, it marked the return of the old-fashioned, pre-technology entertainer, who was seen as well as heard. But the effect of the pop video was to skew the balance: to favour performers who could establish a single indelible image (Billy Idol’s snarl, Sting’s bare torso) over those whose personality was rooted in music. With Madonna as its guide, this tendency led inexorably towards Kylie Minogue and Paula Abdul, for whom singing and self-expression counted less than dancing and pouting; then, with the inevitability of a slide into the pits of hell, towards Milli Vanilli, a Grammy-Award-winning rock-dance duo who had not uttered a single note on any of their records.

  With the video threatening to replace the album as the dominant currency of the 1980s,fn2 the entire music industry was tilted on its axis, throwing many of its denizens out of the spotlight. Even the traditionally stable arena of American country music was overturned, after the launch of the cable TV channels CMT (Country Music Television, devoted to videos) and TNN (The Nashville Network, promoting the country lifestyle) in 1983. Country had already been shaken by the swaggering iconoclasm of performers such as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, who brought the fearless confidence of the rock star to an industry which preferred to sell God-fearing humility. The Urban Cowboy fiasco had then left Nashville’s major-label offices uncertain of what they were selling, or who they were selling it to. Their initial reaction to the synthesiser-heavy MTV sound was panic, exhibited when they tried to impose a similar sound on their own artists. Then, when their audience complained that country had lost its identity, they opted to promote a collection of younger artists who revived the ‘classic’ sound of the 1960s and early 1970s, and who (not at all coincidentally) appeared very presentable in front of a video camera. As rock and pop clips grew artier, more narcissistic and more outrageous, country’s promo videos kept to Nashville principles by opting for simple, heart-warming narratives.

  The new generation of stars paid due lip service to country’s pioneers, from Hank Williams to Tammy Wynette, and also let slip their debt to the icons of 1970s arena rock. Most successful of them all was Garth Brooks, whose mastery of the grand gesture ensured that he became America’s best-selling artist of the 1990s in any genre. His arena shows mixed the hillbilly humility of Hank Williams with the AOR theatrics of his adolescent heroes, Styx and Kiss. Nashville was soon embarking on a series of multi-artist tribute albums which ranged from Hank to the true progenitors of the 1990s country sound, the Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd. (2014 brought Nashville Outlaws: A Country Tribute to Mötley Crüe, which seemed to demand a reprise of the 1970s Waylon Jennings hit: ‘Are You Sure Hank Did It This Way?’)

  The young male country stars of the 1990s were lampooned by veterans as ‘hat acts’, for their inevitable Stetsons and cowboy boots. ‘Is there anything behind the symbols22 of modern “country”,’ Johnny Cash mused, ‘or are the symbols themselves the whole story? Are the hats, the boots, the pickup trucks and the honky-tonking poses all that’s left of a disintegrating culture
?’ He lamented the fact that the country audience and its heroes didn’t ‘know or even care about the land and the life it sustains and regulates’. But that culture survived unchanged in video clips, enriching the country music industry on a scale which it had never known before. A succession of crossover stars – Shania Twain, LeAnn Rimes, Carrie Underwood, Taylor Swift – effectively erased the once-mighty gulf between country and pop. Meanwhile, the so-called Americana industry of the 1990s and early twenty-first century fetishised a bleached, enervated brand of traditional country music, which would have left hillbilly farmers too jaded to herd their cattle.

  MTV ignored the advent of the Nashville video industry, even when Garth Brooks was outselling all the network’s stars. It reacted more purposefully to competition in the rock and pop market by launching VH1, aimed at widening the video audience to include those old enough to remember the arrival of Elvis Presley. The new network featured videos by artists thought likely to appeal to the 25–49-year-old demographic, plus vintage live concerts and documentaries. There was even a show entitled New Visions, encompassing mellow modern jazz and that peculiar brand of neoclassical mood music known as New Age. Exploiting the commercial potency of those former 1960s radicals who had devoted subsequent decades to exploring their spirituality, it showcased the near-background music of such anonymous stars as George Winston and William Ackerman. The manager of the Police, Miles Copeland, was one of the first in Britain to recognise that ‘The New Age audience23 grew up on rock ’n’ roll, [but want something] aimed exclusively at the quiet side of their lives.’ Rock and folk performers from the 1970s, including Wishbone Ash and Michael Chapman, were reoriented towards the featureless sonic landscapes of New Age – the place where the quietly claustrophobic serial music of Philip Glass met the saccharine piano variations of Richard Clayderman.