The Null Device

One Nation under a Moog

Simon Reynolds has a piece in the Graun about the history of synthpop in 1980s Britain:
In some ways the crucial word in synth-pop isn't "synth" but "pop". The British groups who took over the charts at the dawn of the 80s were catchy and concise. Here they followed the lead of Kraftwerk, who were not only the first group to make a whole conceptual package/weltanschauung out of the electronic age, but were sublime tunesmiths. It's righteous that Kraftwerk's long-awaited remastered catalogue is getting reissued at almost the same time as the long-awaited remastered catalogue of the Beatles, because Hütter & Co rival the Fab Four for both their transformative impact on pop and their melodic genius... Equally inspiring to the synth-pop artists was Kraftwerk's formality: their grey suits and short hair stood out at a time of jeans and beards and straggly locks, heralding a European future for pop, a decisive break with America and rock'n'roll.
Synth-pop went through two distinct phases. The first was all about dehumanisation chic. That didn't mean the music was emotionless (the standard accusation of the synthphobic rocker), but that the emotions were bleak: isolation, urban anomie, feeling cold and hollow inside, paranoia... The second phase of synth-pop reacted against the first. Electronic sounds now suggested jaunty optimism and the gregariousness of the dancefloor, they evoked a bright, clean future just round the corner rather than JG Ballard's desolate 70s cityscapes. And the subject matter for songs mostly reverted to traditional pop territory: love and romance, escapism and aspiration. The prime movers behind synth-pop's rehumanisation were appropriately enough the Human League (just check their song titles: Open Your Heart, Love Action, These Are The Things That Dreams Are Made Of).
"Electro" in the early-90s meant cutting-edge, the future-now; nowadays "electro" refers to the kind of sounds that lit up hipster bars in east London through this past decade and then went mainstream this year with La Roux and Lady Gaga, which is to say synthetic pop that doesn't use the full capacity of the latest digital technology, and is therefore almost as quaint as if it were made using a harpsichord.
The article ties in with a BBC4 documentary titled Synth Britannia, which airs next week.

There are 2 comments on "One Nation under a Moog":

Posted by: datakid Sat Oct 10 04:01:33 2009

Ohhh, share button! On the real topic, why is synth pop ok, but Yacht Rock not? My damn flatmate has Hall and Oats stuck in my head and I feel like a total outcast.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org/acb/ Sat Oct 10 13:05:57 2009

All the cool kids here were having Yacht Rock nights a few months ago. I imagine it was the same in Prahran/Fitzroy. (I saw a thread on M+N about it.) They play a lot of yacht rock at the Hangover Lounge here on Sundays (where the indie pop kids go to hang out and/or play Scrabble on Sundays).

AFAIK, Yacht Rock is in the hinterlands of the Goldmine (as per Momus' theory of retro), on the border between embarrassingly naff and post-ironic cool. Or it was. Perhaps it burned through its coolness without ever shaking off the naffness. Then again, isn't Phil Collins experiencing a period of quasi-ironic hipness nowadays?