1985: What the f*ck is going on?
This was a chapter title in the interesting book by Bob Stanley, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, the Story of Pop Music From Bill Haley to Beyonce. I often reflect on the 80s, that tried so hard to be new, from post-modern art and architecture to the strange boxiness of car design.
(How did we go from the Cadillac of 1959 to 1986?)
Everything was inverted, leaving art, design (and music) in a slipstream. It didn't make sense for architecture and neo-expressionism (Basquiat, Guston, Schnabel) to suddenly add decoration, at the same time neo-geo was taking it away into the computer world, and music into MIDI synths.
We can always ask the same question, and perhaps 30 years in the future we'll have a book with similar chapter titles.
***
Another 80s watershed: Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985), the other "Revolution in the Head", from poppy Police to sullen introspection and dream diaries--conflating Jungian analysis (individuation) with the travails of being a rock star, for example the lyric and the end of "All This Time": "Men go crazy in congregations, we only get better one by one", that now has been flipped to focus on the group (social media). This is probably bound to flip again at some point when nothing seems to have changed, and we go...within.
(How did we go from the Cadillac of 1959 to 1986?)
Everything was inverted, leaving art, design (and music) in a slipstream. It didn't make sense for architecture and neo-expressionism (Basquiat, Guston, Schnabel) to suddenly add decoration, at the same time neo-geo was taking it away into the computer world, and music into MIDI synths.
We can always ask the same question, and perhaps 30 years in the future we'll have a book with similar chapter titles.
***
Another 80s watershed: Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985), the other "Revolution in the Head", from poppy Police to sullen introspection and dream diaries--conflating Jungian analysis (individuation) with the travails of being a rock star, for example the lyric and the end of "All This Time": "Men go crazy in congregations, we only get better one by one", that now has been flipped to focus on the group (social media). This is probably bound to flip again at some point when nothing seems to have changed, and we go...within.
