Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  As the MTV networks exploited music’s visual potential, it was inevitable that other industries would take note. The hottest NBC drama of the mid-1980s was Miami Vice, apparently commissioned with the simple premise: ‘MTV cops’. Its stars dressed and paraded like rock stars, made their own records, and shared screen time with rockers such as the Eagles’ Glenn Frey. NBC’s rivals readied their own imitations, such as Hollywood Vice and The Insiders. Hollywood productions followed suit, almost every feature boasting an anthem which could advertise the film on MTV. In September 1985, America’s top three singles were the themes to St Elmo’s Fire, Hollywood Nights and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The cross-pollination between music and film became so intense that it was common for directors to litter their movies with unrecognisably short snippets of contemporary songs, so that a star-laden soundtrack album would coincide with the premiere.

  Exposed in Hollywood smashes, let loose across entire TV channels, pop and rock were now committed to the grand gesture. As MTV boosted performers with a visual imagination and camera-friendly faces, its audience wanted to see these icons in the flesh. The cinemas, university common rooms and small dance halls of the 1960s were superseded in the 1970s by sports arenas, and in the 1980s by vast buildings better suited to staging trade fairs – even, for the most potent idols, stadia which might hold as many as 100,000 people. To ensure that those positioned a hundred metres from the stage felt involved, promoters routinely employed camera teams to reproduce the show on giant screens alongside the stage. Fans paid premium prices for what was effectively a television presentation, simply to feel the communion of participating in these vast exercises in hero-worship. Rock’s traditional reliance on spontaneity and even improvisation was erased by the need for musicians to programme their sequencers and lighting rigs in advance, leaving concerts as smoothly-rehearsed as any Broadway musical.

  The MTV generation, united by the medium of television and the vast camaraderie of the stadium gig, demonstrated in 1985 that it could wield more power than its politically committed late 1960s equivalent. The phenomenon of Live Aid, which involved outdoor concerts in London and Philadelphia and was broadcast livefn3 around the globe, transformed the image of rock from a symbol of teenage rebellion into the world’s most effective aid to charity. Involving many of rock’s most feted celebrities, including long-awaited reunions by Led Zeppelin, CSNY and Black Sabbath, Live Aid’s stature as a musical event paled alongside its financial impact. Proceeds from the concerts, the TV staging, phone donations and the heavily delayed DVD release are reliably claimed to have raised well over £100 million for famine relief in Africa.

  After Live Aid, there was scarcely a charitable enterprise which did not involve a tie-in rock gig or all-star single. The Prince’s Trust organisation, headed by the heir to the British throne, promoted annual concerts starring rock stars young and old – the veterans invariably clad in Armani suits and indulging in displays of self-congratulation. Noting that many of these icons had also signed up for TV beer commercials, Elvis Costello protested: ‘That Michelob [beer] music24 has absolutely NO relationship to rock and roll music. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers music. It came down and zapped Phil Collins and Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood, and left these people that look superficially the same as them, but play this kind of bland beer music.’ But the classical purity of his vision of rock ’n’ roll seemed woefully outdated in a decade of gestural politics and video posing.

  When the surviving members of the Who regrouped for a stadium and arena tour in 1989, three of the original quartet having endured prolonged battles against alcoholism, the band agreed for several of their shows to be sponsored by beer companies. Typically, Pete Townshend felt able to bank his proceeds from this lucrative venture, whilst undermining the entire enterprise in advance: ‘the name [of the Who]25 refers to the audience’s feeling about what the band means to them. And that’s got very little to do with what the band actually does these days, which is NOTHING … There IS no band … it ISN’T the Who. It’s a bunch of session musicians brought together to play Who material.’ The tour sold out almost immediately. As Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane (themselves reunited for a 1989 tour) noted with an ironic sigh, ‘Woodstock is what made26 the music business what it is today. Promoters looked at Woodstock and thought, “Oh, if we could only put walls around this.” So we ended up with stadium concerts.’ Whilst veterans of the 1960s counter-culture lamented rock’s decline, its audience and earnings ballooned.

  Much of that expanded income came from the most dramatic change in the technology of recorded music since the invention of the long-playing album. In October 1982, Sony in Japan issued their first compact discs – shiny five-inch circles of robust plastic, encoded with digital patterns which, when exposed to the beam of a laser light, could reproduce a facsimile of recorded sound. Although there was no consumer groundswell demanding a system of music distribution that would improve upon vinyl and cassette tape, the CD appeared to offer several crucial advances over existing formats. The discs were said to be virtually indestructible; they would offer perfect sound reproduction, without any of the surface noise or scratching of vinyl, or the telltale distortion of an ageing cassette; and they would offer a playing time of anything up to seventy minutes. (In fact, the system eventually grew to hold a little over eighty minutes.fn4)

  Initially, CD players were so expensive that they seemed like executives’ toys, but as their price fell by 1984, sales began to rocket. They were still an adult purchase, so the early years of compact disc were dominated by acts who would appeal to upwardly mobile consumers aged 25 or more. The same audience was targeted by Ford, who in 1986 became the first car manufacturer to instal CD players in its new saloons. Besides aficionados of classical music, who relished the opportunity to hear an entire symphony without needing to change the disc, CDs attracted a similar audience to those US radio stations offering a format called ‘classic rock’ – rock, in other words, which did not depend unduly on synthesisers, and did not betray any hint of cutting-edge black music. No act benefited more from the introduction of the CD than Dire Straits, whose pristine audio clarity and sharp separation of instruments might have been designed to show off the invention. Their 1985 album Brothers in Arms became the best-selling compact disc of the era, fuelled by the popularity of their MTV-baiting single, ‘Money for Nothing’ – the video for which went into heavy rotation on the channel. Mark Knopfler’s song equated commercialism with prostitution, and was sold with the dexterity and sophistication of a high-class hooker.

  No current act, however, could match the commercial potency of rock’s glorious heritage when it came to CD sales. Those who felt themselves excluded from the marketplace by recent developments in popular music relished the opportunity to purchase new compact-disc copies of their favourite albums. Stores reported consumers in their 30s and 40s marching to the till with fistfuls of CDs, reviving the obsession with music which had once made them feel young and alive. Glimpsing a marketing opportunity which perhaps they had not originally envisaged, record companies rushed to fill the shops with reissues and repackages of old material – usually without offering the artists any improvement on the exploitative royalty deals they had signed twenty years or more earlier. Having sold the same music again to the same audience, albeit at a vastly increased retail price, the companies then embarked on an endless succession of reissue campaigns, which would see some classic albums re-released five or six times over the next twenty-five years, expanded with bonus tracks from the archives, long-lost photographs and lengthy prose accounts of the record’s gestation. The logical next step was the box-set retrospective, a medium barely exploited in the days of vinyl. Once again, existing material could be presented in a fresh way, always with the persuasive inclusion of vintage rarities from the vaults. It is no coincidence that the rise of the compact-disc market should be accompanied by the launch of glossy publications devoted to music as a lifestyle choice, written and packaged wi
th the same sophistication as fashion magazines. The most successful of them catered for the post-teen purchasers of CDs, guiding them through the dazzling variety of new music towards records which might remind them of what they had loved in their youth, and convincing them that rock music was still a culture, even if it involved nothing more revolutionary than the flourishing of a credit card.

  Detractors railed against many aspects of the compact-disc revolution. Artists such as Neil Young (who also held out against corporate sponsorship of his consumer tours) complained that digital sound was soulless and unattractive, with none of the organic warmth of vinyl. Many consumers lamented the loss of the twelve-inch-square LP artwork, which sacrificed its visual power when reduced to 17% of its original size. One of the unchallenged advantages of the CD, its expanded capacity, also had a profound effect on the way in which music was presented to the public. The humble vinyl single – seven inches, two songs – mutated into an artefact whose temporal length was determined only by the random decision-making of the organisations who calculated the weekly pop charts. In place of the A-side and B-side, many CD singles now featured a succession of remixes of the same song, which exhausted the patience of all but the most devoted fan.

  More momentous still was the effective destruction of the album as a coherent art form. When sequencing a vinyl LP, artist and producer were dealing with a medium which involved two suites of music or songs, each lasting on average twenty minutes; each with a defined beginning and end. That time span was long enough to allow for changes or flows of mood and tempo; short enough to hold an emotional or physical shape in the consumer’s memory. In order to fit their work on to vinyl, musicians had to compress or edit it into its optimum form. On CD, all of these restrictions – and the need to make artistic choices – were abandoned. Every album could now last up to eighty minutes, so songs expanded (the average single now lasting five minutes, rather than three as in the 1960s) and multiplied. In theory, this benefited the consumer, offering more value for money; in practice, it turned the album into a sonic endurance test. Worse still, the album lost its familiar shape: it climaxed at the beginning, with its opening song, and then meandered until it reached its conclusion, more than an hour later. So simple was it to skip from one track to the next with the push of a button that consumers grew accustomed to omitting their least favourite songs – or merely letting the entire disc roll as background music to a dinner party or homework assignment. For those too young to remember vinyl, the CD offered simplicity of use, instant access to any song, the freedom to re-sequence any disc:fn5 a multiplicity of advantages. But it also tarnished a medium that had been central to a generation’s musical understanding of itself.

  Through the second half of the 1980s, there was a series of rapid changes in the way that music was bought and consumed. The industry embarked on a deliberate policy of phasing out vinyl releases, starting with singles. Rather than switching directly to CD, as marketing departments had assumed, most casual purchasers preferred the cheaper option of cassette, tape sales outnumbering the combination of vinyl and CD by more than two to one. As vinyl singles were removed from the weekly release sheets, and young listeners were still unable to afford CD technology, cassettes became the standard way of purchasing new songs. In an attempt to boost revenue, UK labels attempted to launch the videotape single – allowing purchasers to experience their favourite clip from MTV without having to wait. It proved no more successful than any of the alternative options tossed at adult purchasers during the 1980s, in the hope that they would buy anything. There were three different formats of the laser videodisc, only one of which would also play audio CDs; the CD-video (twenty minutes of audio plus five minutes of visuals); and digital audio tape (DAT), intended to replace the cassette. DAT became a standard medium for preserving studio recordings (and unofficial concert tapes), but never prospered as a consumer format.

  Having invested financially and emotionally in CD, the adult audience demanded new music which would suit their established tastes, and the medium. The heroes of the British Invasion and the Woodstock generation had struggled to adapt to technological innovation and synthesised sound. Neil Young’s Trans was the exception, deliberately confronting his audience with the necessity for change. Other artists were less sure-footed, Bob Dylan’s Empire Burlesque and Crosby, Stills & Nash’s Live It Up demonstrating the consequences of sacrificing integrity in a vain quest for youthful acceptance.

  In their place, U2 and R.E.M. offered oblique lyrical integrity and crusading passion (‘I always want an outstretched hand28 in music’, declared U2’s Bono in 1985), while younger songwriters such as Tracy Chapman, Tanita Tikaram and Edie Brickell offered familiar pleasures in fresh clothing. Paul Simon broke a United Nations boycott on working with South African musicians to produce Graceland, the borrowed rhythms of township jive unblocking his own muse. The Grateful Dead achieved the biggest single (‘Touch of Grey’, its video clip symbolically populated by skeletons) and album (In the Dark) of their career, to their own bemusement as much as the industry’s. And in 1989, a succession of baby-boomer favourites, including Lou Reed (New York), Bob Dylan (Oh Mercy) and Neil Young (Freedom), appeared re-energised and focused after a decade of floundering out of time. MTV tapped into this renewed desire for ‘authenticity’ by launching their Unplugged concert series, removing performers old and new from the shelter of their synthesisers and sequencers.

  Listeners to this adult-oriented music usually ignored a technological innovation which altered the already complex relationship between young people, the music with which they identified, and the outside world. Utilising cassettes and then (after 1984) the CD, the Sony Walkman directed a personal choice of music from a portable player straight into the eardrum. Consumers could walk the streets, or sit slouched in the back of their parents’ car, lost in a world of their own creation; and all that anyone else could hear was the rattle and hiss of excess sound escaping from the headphones. This was the technology of solipsism, allowing owners to imagine themselves the stars of their own drama – or, perhaps, isolated from a hostile environment by the songs which symbolised their existence. It was the perfect medium for music which would place itself in opposition to the adult world: the soundtrack of violent dissent, or equally aggressive self-pity, turning the angst of adolescence into a lucrative and all-pervasive industry.

  * * *

  fn1 In fact, the clip had never been intended to promote the single. It was premiered in 1967, as the opening sequence of Pennebaker’s movie Dont Look Back.

  fn2 ‘Someday, Your Music Collection21 Will Look Like This’, promised an advertisement for MusicVision videotapes in 1985, picturing a shelf filled with VHS and Betamax videos, alongside a handful of vinyl albums.

  fn3 Although not in parts of Texas, where KAMC preferred to show the Miss Texas beauty pageant; while on ABC-TV, veteran presenter Dick Clark talked through Led Zeppelin’s performance.

  fn4 Some vinyl albums, such as Pye’s Golden Hour compilations and Todd Rundgren’s Initiation LP, had succeeded in squeezing more than sixty minutes of music on to a twelve-inch record, but only with severe diminution of sound quality.

  fn5 For those with sufficient capital, a similar facility had been available for vinyl in 1977 with the ADC Accutrac 4000 (‘Its father was a turntable27. Its mother was a computer’); and in the 1980s with programmable cassette decks.

  2

  1

  EXILED FROM NEW York, the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 hit ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was a playground novelty – first cousin, twice removed, to Shirley Ellis’s tongue-twisting ‘The Name Game’. If rhythmic rhyming was required, then comedians were eager to oblige, from Kenny Everett (as Sid Snot) to Alexei Sayle (‘Hello, John, Got a New Motor?’), Shawn Brown (‘Rappin’ Duke’) and Mel Brooks (‘Hitler Rap’). By the end of the 1980s, even Liverpool’s footballers were demonstrating their flow, with ‘Anfield Rap’.

  If you were anywhere outside the NYC boroughs, indeed, it was e
asy to believe that only white people rapped. There was Blondie, namechecking hip-hop luminaries on ‘Rapture’; Tom Tom Club, reviving the girl-group innocence of 1962; the Clash’s ‘Magnificent Seven’, Joe Strummer plodding uneasily across the beats; Adam Ant’s posse channelling the Sugar Hill sound on ‘Ant Rap’; soon enough, George Michael hanging tough on Wham!’s ‘Young Guns’ and ‘Wham! Rap’. Not content with selling the punk generation leftover scraps of 1960s situationism, former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren concocted 1982’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ with producer Trevor Horn, sampling the culture of the Bronx with the same shameless panache he’d soon focus on South Africa’s township jive (‘Double Dutch’).

  What did that Bronx culture involve? There were hints when Debbie Harry introduced the Funky 4 + 1 on Saturday Night Live in 1980, their youthful exuberance reminiscent of the Jackson 5 a decade earlier. But their adolescent versifying was a strip-cartoon of a multidimensional scene. It didn’t reflect the rap battles between rival sound systems in parks or warehouses, MCs striving to stake their superiority over their turf; nor the artistic one-upmanship of the graffiti which adorned most buildings in the Bronx, and the city’s subway trains, and was maligned as petty vandalism by civic authorities; nor the breakdancing by B-Boys and B-Girls, acting out the funky rhythms from DJs’ decks with breathtaking jumps, slides, twirls and dives.fn1 As rapper KRS-One explained in ‘HipHop Knowledge’, ‘Rap music is something we do, but hip hop is something we live.’ Rap was an element of hip-hop culture; hip hop was not just artistic expression, but a way of life which marked its juvenile adherents out from their elders and would-be superiors.