Five Years 1980-1985

Though short-lived, the explosion of punk in the late 70s destroyed entire genres. Punk had an almost “year-zero” mentality, and hoped by cutting the fat down to three chords and two minutes they could drop the baggage popular music had been picking up since the 1960s. 

Overnight, the indulgent sounds of prog and bloated stadium rock were cast aside, and in their wake bands sought to take new directions. The bands that emerged in the wake of punk found themselves back at the drawing board, challenged with building something new to replace what had been torn down. These bands were helped by an environment infused with enthusiasm and possibilities, the D.I.Y ethos of punk made it seem that anyone could start a band, regardless of talent or whether there was even an audience that could possibly be receptive to their sound. 

In the U.K, the original bands that progressed from punk into something more had already poured out their finest offerings prior to 1980, with bands like Wire, The Pop Group, The Fall, Gang of Four, Public Image Ltd. and Joy Division having released their best albums already. It was the post-punk bands in America, mostly on SST records, who carried punk into weird and wonderful directions in the 1980s. 

That was Sonic Youth with Death Valley ’69, taking punk on an avant garde roller coaster through the murders of Charles Manson. The following are my picks for the best of American punk/post-punk in the 1980s.

Unlike the UK punk scene which was dominated by singles, making it difficult to properly get into now, all these tracks are cuts off of fantastic albums. The farthest out of the American post-punk bands, both geographically and metaphysically, was the Meat Puppets. 

Originally hardcore punks, as time went on they sunk into the baking sun of their native Arizona, propelled by a tonne of weed and hallucinogens. “We were so sick of the hardcore thing” the original drummer later claimed “we were really into pissing off the crowd”.

 Lead singer Curt Kirkwood moans like a wounded dog, his country influenced delivery leading to some critics labelling the band “cow-punk”. Their songs would often melt into formless soups and the lyrics concerned themselves with existentialism and the afterlife. 

On both sides of the Atlantic, bands were picking and choosing from the lessons and ethos of punk, picking up what they liked and ignoring what they didn’t. Brit bands like The Cure and Bauhaus utterly disposed with the straight forward, down to earth grittiness of punk and instead brought back arty glam-rock, albeit this time wearing only black and guy-liner. However, they held onto the energy and integrity that was the vital life-blood of punk. 

Bands looking for new sounds found themselves in a world ripe with possibilities. Synthesisers, sequencers and samplers were just becoming cheap enough to be practical options for musicians to explore. 

Joy Division had already explored the new possibilities technology had to offer in the late 70s, creating a cold, alien and distant atmosphere to complement Ian Curtis’ severely depressed musical direction. 

Following his suicide, the remaining members took influence from the New York City club scene and folded dance music into their sound, creating the band New Order. And while the abrasiveness of punk was absent from their music, New Orders status as the flagship of indie label Factory Records, their “no-image” image and reluctance to release singles with albums displayed their counter-mainstream ethos.

New Order were just one of the bands to return from the New York City club scene with fresh inspiration. In the left-field clubs of downtown New York, disco mutated and went underground, undergoing the long and mostly undocumented metamorphosis into hip-hop and rap music. 

DJs and MCs across the black and Caribbean neighbourhoods married turntable scratches, disco funk and dance with the first raps, creating something totally new. 

The problem is that these poor artists didn’t record, and much of the output associated with old-school hip-hop is nothing but record labels cashing in with poor imitations. The good-time raps and disco funk people associate with early hip-hop are completely artificial and much removed from even the actual process of recording hip-hop. Industry execs replaced DJs and turntables with session musicians, trying to shoe-horn in the sounds of motown and soul to peddle to a wider audience.

 Groups like The Sugarhill Gang, who are often confused as innovators, were nothing but a hugely successful marketing plan by Sylvia Robinson, stealing lyrics off of various rappers, most famously taking entire verses from Grandmaster Caz on their hit Rappers Delight, and never paying a dime in royalties. 

Unpretentious groups like ESG, however, managed to find themselves moderate success by virtue of their sheer talent and tightness, creating the dance music that would later make their way into hip-hop MCs  crates of vinyls. 

It was instead cultural appropriation by white artists that captured the best of this underground scene. One pair of famous millionaires living in New York at the time created the perfect underground disco track, only with a hit makers ear, art-punks ambition and studio slickness. 

While I’ve been talking about punk and post-punk and disco and hip-hop, I’ve been skirting around what I think first comes to mind whenever talking about the 1980s, the just incredible pop music of that era. 

Pop in the 80s was truly carnivorous, devouring all the influences of the punk scene and utilising the new technology, occasionally going so far as adopting something truly foreign, like the slew of intelligent pop that utilised the rhythms and beats of African music, or simply pioneering something new all on its own. 

Finally, some artists altered the underground world with their subdued songs of delicate pop and introverted world view. Bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, R.E.M, The Cure, The Smiths and The Feelies would take song-writing to a sensitive place usually reserved by singer-songwriters, but with a fuller rock sound. And while lyrics about social awkwardness and shyness weren't anything new, there’s something about the sound they created to surround those lyrics that was special. 

Indie, especially in these formative years, held no bile or angst, and restructured rock music from pushing a voice and an identity out, to an organised, collective sound. These bands were ethereal, jangly, mysterious and sometimes so modest as to make their lyrics inscrutable.