sadmanbarty
Well-known member
intimacy becomes inherently melancholic.
80's Pop Poignance
- Thread starter sadmanbarty
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sadmanbarty
Well-known member
maybe also a numbing nurturing quality to it; the music is so divorced from the zeitgeist.
it's the purification of 70's singer songwriter wallowing. with those fleetwood mac visuals you're getting this yearning towards something vaguely hippyish and pastoral.
it's the purification of 70's singer songwriter wallowing. with those fleetwood mac visuals you're getting this yearning towards something vaguely hippyish and pastoral.
yyaldrin
in je ogen waait de wind
does somebody know when colour film became the standard in music video's? or similarly, when did colour televisions became the norm? i have the feeling a surprising number of these songs have video clips shot in black and white or have black and white scenes and i think they are deliberate aesthetic choices. then what does this say?
blissblogger
Well-known member
I read something like that at the start of the 70s, 75 % of television sets in British were still black and white. That startled me because my memories of glam artists on Top of the Pops are in colour but i would have seen TOTP in black and white. I must have retroactively filled in the colour through later seeing the TV clips on VHS collections, or from magazine images.
In our house we didn't get a colour TV until the Eighties. That was a bit on the late side, but there were still quite a few people who had black and white sets even then. i seem to remember my granny getting a color TV in the late 70s and it was a treat to go round their and watch the Muppets in colour.
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.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Parts of this album are an amazing time capsule to the mid-80s - it's like the Edge of Darkness of pop.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
flattening out of emotion that was mirrored in the loudness wars
firefinga
Well-known member
Color TV was introduced in the late 1960s in (western) Europe, although you had black and white programmes untill the mid 70s. Of course costumers lag behind a couple years (with TV it's usually 5-10 years) until the proles also have what was heralded the latest tech-fad. So it's plausible that around 1980 color-TV was also the norm with TV-sets of the viewers.
I also remember from my own childhood you'd see black and white movies still in the 1980s on regular TV. In the 90s then however, Black and White movies, no matter how much they were praised as "classics" got wiped out of the programmes.
Regarding music-vids however, I suspect lot's of black and white usage was for purposes to make it look more "artsy". As in photography. Color Photography = commercial, advertising. Black and white = "art".
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Have heard this theory put forward before. A sort of defanging of our collective spirit. Makes a lot of sense. You just don't get the same kind of performers now.
luka
Well-known member
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, that's a point - there were always old B&W films on in the afternoon over the weekend when I was a kid, less so as I got older.
Same goes for the difference between porn and "erotica", of course.
blissblogger
Well-known member
yeah definitely in the Eighties and espeically Nineties, the use of black-and-white was a deliberate choice and it became a real cliche - a cheap way of doing noir-ish mystery. black and white became the more naff option ultimately.
in the Sixties most promo clips were black and white but you had full-colour ones like 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and "Jumpin Jack Flash'. but things like the Pink floyd promo films are black and white.
i think by the Seventies most if not all promo clips were full colour.
blissblogger
Well-known member
re emotion and numbness = isn't a lot of today's Top 40 pop hyper-emotional? meaning Ariana Grande and that kind of thing. Crammed with tremulous vocal wobbles and quivery melismas and Autotuned glistens. And so many hooks and soars. That's what it sounds like me anyway - this very artificial exaggerated passion like nothing anyone actually ever feels in real life.
Aspartame-AdornopPop i call it - the Adorno cos of the way it's made out of components assembled by squads of song-doctors, vocal engineers, beatmakers etc, often operating in different studios scattered across the world. the credits for any given song are like those at the end of Disney movie.
the Eighties stuff in this thread rarely involves that kind of showboating vocal - at that time you did have Whitney and a kind of athletic soul-vocalism - but a lot of the poignancy in 80s pop is coming from the keys used and the tingling instrumentation and this airy breathy space in the sound. The voices are relatively small compared to current norms and they are not flexing their vocal chops to anything like the same extent.
New Order songs sound more like recognisable relatable emotions to me. Or Prefab.
A lot of contemporary pop is actually closer to musical theater than pop music in the rock era - long held notes, vertical melodies jumping up and down the scale.
Aspartame-AdornopPop i call it - the Adorno cos of the way it's made out of components assembled by squads of song-doctors, vocal engineers, beatmakers etc, often operating in different studios scattered across the world. the credits for any given song are like those at the end of Disney movie.
the Eighties stuff in this thread rarely involves that kind of showboating vocal - at that time you did have Whitney and a kind of athletic soul-vocalism - but a lot of the poignancy in 80s pop is coming from the keys used and the tingling instrumentation and this airy breathy space in the sound. The voices are relatively small compared to current norms and they are not flexing their vocal chops to anything like the same extent.
New Order songs sound more like recognisable relatable emotions to me. Or Prefab.
A lot of contemporary pop is actually closer to musical theater than pop music in the rock era - long held notes, vertical melodies jumping up and down the scale.
literally everything you want exists for the kids into music. literally all of it. the identification with the performer, the authenticity etc. you look at the beyonce fandom and it's exactly that. now you're going to hypothetically tell me thats a simulacrum. but it isn't for those kids. it's like beatles fans who said aaliyya wasn't real. what's the difference? What is it?