Fueled jointly by MTV and radio, this sudden surge of exposure for new music, foreign and domestic, caused record sales for the first half of 1983 to jump up by 10 percent, breaking the steady decline of the last three years. The high turnover of unfamiliar (to most Americans, anyway) names in the Top 10—Adam Ant, Kajagoogoo, Eddy Grant, Madness—added to the sense of revolutionary upheaval. MTV reaped the lion’s share of the glory for being the savior of the record industry. A flood of pieces in mainstream magazines celebrated MTV and the Second British Invasion for bringing color and energy back to pop music. Newsweek placed Boy George and Annie Lennox on its front cover. Rolling Stone did an “England Swings” special issue (George on the front page, again) and hailed 1983 as “the greatest year for rock since 1977.” If closely scrutinized, this was a slightly odd analogy given that punk totally failed in America, whereas New Pop reigned triumphant, but the general idea that a revolution was taking place was communicated.
Ironically, back in England, many people had a totally different feeling about 1983, seeing it as the year it all went wrong. Nostalgia for 1977 blossomed (hence Orange Juice’s Buzzcocks homage in “Rip It Up”) and the backlash against New Pop started to pick up pace. All around London, a graffiti slogan started to appear on walls: “Kill Ugly Pop.”
Thatcher’s reelection in June 1983 was a turning point. Many on the Left had hoped that her first electoral victory was a fluke and that the “natural order of things” would return. But in 1983 it became clear that the old postwar consensus about the welfare state and interventionist government (propping up ailing industries in order to preserve jobs) had shattered. A hefty portion of the population—enough to secure Thatcher the election—clearly didn’t give a shit about the unemployed. All of a sudden, the gulf between New Pop’s luxurious imagery and economic reality seemed unconscionable. This was especially the case for bands from the North, such as ABC, Heaven 17, and the Human League, where the ravaging of heavy industry had the most devastating effect on local economies and prospects for young people.
After touring the world as a sixteen-piece band, ABC came home and found Sheffield decimated by unemployment and heroin. The aspirational imagery they’d been using started to seem questionable. Moreover, the sonic opulence that only a year before had been a striking gesture was now the norm. Spandau Ballet aped “All of My Heart” with the slick schlock of “True” and topped the charts. Pangs of social conscience, an unwillingness to repeat a successful formula, and a desire to stay ahead of their imitators convinced ABC to take a total career swerve. Instead of Lexicon of Love Part Two, they made Beauty Stab, a hard, stripped-down album with electric guitar at its center and overtly political lyrics. “With Beauty Stab, we probably wanted to make a record like the Gang of Four, really,” says Fry. “It’s a protest album. You’ve had the Technicolor widescreen with Lexicon, now it’s back to Sheffield black-and-white documentary style.” Ironically, at this very moment Gang of Four were desperately trying to gloss up their sound ABC-style with the disastrously unconvincing Hard.
ABC trumpeted their new direction with the single “That Was Then, This Is Now.” But fans were confused by the new raw, live sound. Beauty Stab’s ugly cover art of a matador fighting a bull gave the impression of a band that didn’t really know what it was doing. Inside, unwieldy protest songs such as “King Money” and “United Kingdom” sounded glib and phony because Fry laid it on too thick with Lexicon-style wordplay (“This busted, rusted, upper-crusted, bankrupted, done and dusted, no-man-to-be-trusted United Kingdom”). In interviews, Fry did some pretty undignified backsliding, telling NME, “The way I see the world is very different from that quasi–Las Vegas/tuxedo period before,” and claiming to have hung up his gold lamé suit. “There is too much gloss, too much technique in record making now,” he declared.
ABC’s Sheffield neighbors Heaven 17 and the Human League were also hit hard by what happened to their once prosperous hometown. Heaven 17’s own mini–Beauty Stab was “Crushed by the Wheels of Industry,” an exciting slice of electro-constructivist dance pop, by far the best thing on their second album, The Luxury Gap. They’d finally become pop stars, but at a terrible cost. Their breakthrough single, “Temptation,” owed too much of its impact to the hired firepower of singer Carole Kenyon (1983 was the year of the obligatory black female backup singer), and ultimately just seemed part of the lavish bombast of the times. The Human League, meanwhile, were doubly tormented, first by the challenge of following up a megasuccess, and second by the sudden prick of conscience and consciousness. Perversely, or perhaps perceptively, Phil Oakey decided he wanted to make the Human League less like Abba and more like Pink Floyd, a band of “substance” dealing with serious issues, not silly love songs.
The spur for the Human League’s attitude shift wasn’t so much Thatcher-induced economic blight as the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. “I was baffled,” Oakey says now. “They came on TV and told you something really incredible and horrible, and they didn’t say what you could do about it.” The song inspired by Oakey’s sensations of paralysis, “The Lebanon,” finally appeared as a single in May 1984. It was the herald for Hysteria, the group’s disappointing sequel to Dare. Like ABC’s “That Was Then,” the single broke with the Human League’s classic sound and “no standard instrumentation” manifesto and featured electric guitar prominently. Also like ABC’s single, it failed to crack the U.K. Top 10.
Though they may have been aesthetic and commercial failures, “The Lebanon” and Beauty Stab were prophetic gestures. One could smell it on the breeze: the return of rock. Down in the various rock undergrounds, the early stirrings of a resurgence were taking shape. All those discredited concepts that New Pop tried to retire (authenticity, rebellion, community, transgression, resistance), along with all those outmoded sounds it had presumed dead and buried (distorted electric guitar, the raw-throated snarl), were preparing to strike back. In America, especially, the counterinsurgency was already brewing.
MTV WAS ALLOWED TO BASK in the glory of 1983’s pop boom for only a brief moment before the backlash against “English haircut bands” started in earnest. Within weeks of its “England Swings” special issue, Rolling Stone ran Steven Levy’s “Ad Nauseam: How MTV Sells Out Rock and Roll.” Levy’s main theme, that videos were just commercials, was the media meme of the season, its closest rival for borderline triteness being the “videos asphyxiate your imagination” complaint. Another common accusation was that videos put power back in the hands of the corporate record industry. Even the most basic video, comprised of concert footage, cost $15,000. Anything more creative could run anywhere from $40,000 to $200,000, way beyond the means of indie labels. However, the real animus behind Levy’s closely reasoned tirade was the way MTV had shifted the playing field in ways that favored the image-conscious, surface-oriented Brits, making it much tougher for homegrown music with “real content” to prosper.
For American trad-rockers, the prevalence of synths and drum machines in Britpop exacerbated their gut conviction that the video fops just hadn’t earned their success (synths and rhythm programming being nonstrenuous, white-collar work). Again, one heard the familiar Anglophobia/homophobia slippage that equated glamour and synths with effeminacy. Being the object of teenage female desire was intrinsically emasculating (and there was a psychosexual kernel underneath this prejudice, insofar as teen idols had traditionally been the protégés of gay managers, whose taste in boy toys coincided with teenage girls’ idea of cuteness). For many, the MTV-triggered shift in radio formats from rock to pop felt like a calamitous power shift away from the taste of young males toward that of adolescent females.
Levy’s Rolling Stone piece contrasted the eighties unfavorably with the sixties and found the Second British Invasion wanting in comparison with its precursor. “It is easy to get lost in the fun-house environment of MTV…[but] behind the fun-house mirror is another story, one that makes the musical energy and optimism of the Sixties seem a thousand li
ght-years ago.” Countercultural rock ’n’ roll had been replaced by a video channel whose business was “to ensnare the passions of Americans who fit certain demographic or…‘psychographic’ requirements—young people who had money and the inclination to buy [certain] things.” This was a bit rich coming from Rolling Stone, which by 1983 was hardly the vanguard of the revolution, or even cutting-edge music, and was certainly not the least bit averse to making bucks from generationally attuned advertising.
Still, other baby-boomer critics chimed in with this theme of New Pop as all style and no substance, edgeless and (in Levy’s words) “culturally harmless.” In a Christmas 1983 NME piece, former Rolling Stone staffer Greil Marcus fulminated against the invading Brits’ recycled Bowie-isms and secondhand black American beats, declaring, “Never before has a pop phenomenon appeared rooted entirely in the notion of vapidity, on the thrill of surrender.” All the Second British Invasion groups, he claimed, “will disappear and none will be remembered.” In his essay “It’s Like That: Rock and Roll on the Home Front,” another sixties veteran rock critic, Dave Marsh, placed New Pop in the continuum of British imperialism. In his view, the U.K. bands “import a raw and precious commodity—usually some form of black music—and sell it back, in ‘improved,’ processed form, to its native country. The natives then consider this ‘new’ commodity an example of the wonders that the Empire has to offer them.”
By the time Marsh wrote his nativist counterblast in 1984, a grassroots American intifada had been swelling for some time in the form of bands such as the Blasters, Violent Femmes, Blood on the Saddle, the Gun Club, and Lone Justice, who’d mostly come up through punk but by the early eighties had rediscovered various forms of American roots music such as country, blues, rockabilly, folk, and zydeco. Renegade rock historian Joe Carducci—no Anglophile himself—captured this inadvertently humorous backlash against “the limey fag-wave” well. Suddenly, he writes, it was “flag wavers vs fag-wavers…. Expunks and ex–new wavers were showing up in new bands trying to look like your average whiskey guzzlin’, range ridin’ shitkicker.” The mainstream version of the New Americana soon followed: John Cougar Mellencamp, ex–Creedence Clearwater Revival singer John Fogerty, and above all Bruce Springsteen with his stupendously successful Born in the U.S.A.
At the time, this rapid resurgence of trad rock felt surprising, and for New Pop believers, disheartening. In hindsight, it appears inevitable. As Simon Frith argued, “The strength of the rock and roll tradition lay in its fantasy of the streets [in the case of the New Americana, you could substitute the great outdoors, the frontier, the wilderness]…. The new pop music was, by contrast, mall music, shiny but confined. It is not surprising that the counter-sounds got louder and louder, that new myths developed of roots and region, history, authenticity. There is a limit to how long people can look as though they’re having fun.” That’s a little unfair to the millions who loved New Pop and weren’t pretending to have fun (not all of them teenage girls, either). But pop culture works through a kind of oscillating internal pendulum, swinging back and forth between extremes. Some kind of return to rock values (if not necessarily to guitar music) was bound to happen. In the long run, it was hip-hop that gradually took on the role formerly occupied by rock as the locus of those concerns about roots and authenticity, those fantasies of rebellion and street knowledge—a role it has yet to relinquish.
In 1984, the British Invaders were pretty much in retreat. A few hung in there—Duran Duran, Wham!, Billy Idol—but overall it was a year in which American artists seized back Billboard. MTV didn’t die with the New Music, though. On the contrary, it thrived like never before, because the new chart-ruling American stars—Cyndi Lauper, Prince, ZZ Top, Springsteen, and, by the end of ’84, Madonna—had all grasped the power of video and adapted well to the new MTV reality. Musically, many American artists either learned or benefited from the climate created by New Pop. The rock-funk fusions of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and most everything by Prince were American (and far more musically adept) versions of the disco-punk dreams of Brit New Popsters. As well as forging a signature video style that wittily compensated for the group’s lack of sex appeal, ZZ Top made their boogie more dance floor friendly by adding a metronomic, sequencer-driven pulse. Van Halen scored their biggest hit with “Jump,” driven by a synth riff rather than by Eddie Van Halen’s guitar. Even that touchstone figure for the New Americana roots backlash, Bruce Springsteen, developed a new keyboard-dominated sound on singles such as “Dancing in the Dark.” On the flip sides of the singles off Born in the U.S.A., you could even find disco remixes from the likes of Arthur Baker, the electro pioneer who’d worked with New Order.
As American rockers grabbed hold of videos and synths, Devo—original homegrown pioneers of synthrock and video pop—found it harder to get on MTV. “Their playlist was suddenly based solely on what was already a radio hit, it had nothing to do with how good or innovative the video was,” says Casale. The crunch came with the single “That’s Good.” Neither the tune nor the promo was Devo’s finest hour. It was one of three same-looking and sounding video singles from their late 1982 Oh, No! It’s Devo album, all shot on the same unattractively carpeted soundstage, in more or less the same outfits, with the same camera angles. The only things that vary are the animations on the blue-screen backdrop.
It was one of the animated sequences in “That’s Good”—a french fry “fucking” a doughnut, juxtaposed with images of a half-naked, sweaty, and eventually dissatisfied porno babe—that brought Devo’s deteriorating relationship with MTV to its breaking point. The programming director told the group, “You can have the french fry, or you can have the doughnut, but you can’t have both.” Devo protested at first, then capitulated and re-edited the video. “By the time we got it back to them, they were looking at our ‘adds’ [the number of radio station playlists adding the single] and saying ‘you’re not getting enough,’” says Casale. “That’s Good” never made the MTV playlist. Ultimately, says Mark Mothersbaugh, MTV “became the Home Shopping Network for record companies. And instead of showing the bands with innovative videos, they pushed the bands with the expensive, bloated videos.”
JUST ABOUT THE FIRST POSTPUNK figure to start talking about pop as the way forward, Green Gartside was also just about the last of the New Pop fops to become a bona fide pop star. In an odd little coda to the Second British Invasion, Scritti Politti finally reached the Billboard Top 20 long after most of Green’s Limey contemporaries, such as ABC and Heaven 17, had been driven from American airwaves.
After firing his former squatland comrades and abandoning the independent-label scene, Green signed to Virgin and teamed up with two Manhattan-based musicians, keyboardist/programmer David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher (formerly of Material). Inspired by New York’s synthfunk and electro, Green and his dream team set about forging precision-tooled dance pop. All bright, chittering sequencer riffs and ultracrisp Linn beats, the new Scritti sound was pointilliste, a mosaic of hypersyncopations and microrhythmic intricacies. “We used to talk about it being like a Swiss watch,” Green recalled.
“Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin),” the first single from this third incarnation of Scritti, was released in early 1984 and became the U.K. Top 10 hit Green had craved for so long. “Wood Beez” and its even more stunning follow-up “Absolute” were still haunted by the old Scritti’s melodic strangeness, still audible relatives of “PAs” and “Skank Bloc Bologna.” But the sound of the records was slick, tough, and absolutely contemporary. Green had also finally worked out a way of writing lyrics that could pass for a normal love song. On closer inspection, though, they turned out to be pretzels of contradiction, with an aporia (the poststructuralist term for voids in the fabric of meaning) lurking in the center of every twist of language, sweet nothings that could wreck your heart.
“A Little Knowledge,” for instance, was a love song about the impossibility of love, with the rapturously distraught Green concluding, “No
w I know to love you is not to know you.” “Wood Beez” reprised the “Faithless” idea of losing belief but gaining soul, with Green crooning, “Each time I go to bed/I pray like Aretha Franklin.” For the secular Green, “soul” signified the sweet ache of an emptiness that was paradoxically also a fullness. In interviews Green described his pop songs as “hymns for agnostics, for the disillusioned like myself.” They were also tributes to the quasi-religious power of pop music, paeans that put into practice what they preached.
Scritti’s biggest U.K. single, the number six smash “The Word Girl,” was luscious lover’s rock that took a leaf out of Jacques Lacan’s book (literally, insofar as a page fragment from the French psychoanalyst’s Ecrits was reproduced on the twelve-inch single’s cover). The chorus, “How your flesh and blood became the word,” was both a question and an expression of wonder. Green, as always, was fascinated by the process in which an ordinary woman with flaws became idealized into a figment of the male romantic imagination (“a name for what you lose when it was never yours”), a de-realized fetish.
In the United States, the smash single was “Perfect Way,” which peaked at number eleven. Manager Bob Last fondly recalls the excitement of that moment in 1985 when Scritti finally “achieved this high-gloss sound that could penetrate mainstream American radio.” Indeed, the Scritti sound was so advanced it actually influenced the next wave of mideighties black pop, records such as Janet Jackson’s Control.
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