Prog Not Frog Radio Presents:The Voice of The Moon #014, With The Herbalist (Were the 80's really that bad?)

There is a common believe among popular music collectors about the 80's. Most will tell you that the whole decade was lost in terms of music creativity.

Some others might tell you that the 80's produced music for robots, or out-of-control punks.

These feelings have deep roots in several phenomena that happened at the end of the 70's.
One was the explosion of Disco, a music which lacks any kind of artistic value and which is devoted exclusively to make people dance while suppressing almost all thinking process at the same time.

The other trgedy at the end of the 70's was the catalepsy that trapped many of the great progressive bands of the 70's. Some fell into a cold fusion abyss, others simply stopped making records for sometime.

The political background wasn't too nice either. The whole planet was trapped between two opposite systems: extreme capitalism, represented by Reagan, Thatcher and their gang, and extreme communism, represented by the Holy Supreme Soviet. There were hot spots in Central America and Star Wars was not only a movie but also a defensive project. Nuclear Holocaust was very possible. Fear was our daily breakfast.

Add to this background a high rate of unemployment in Europe and what you get is that unorganized, anarchic movement in pop culture that eventually we came to know as Punk.

Punk was protest in its purest form. Its motto was "No Future". Its weapons: Ugliness, Violence, Radical and Free expressions of Nastiness.

Although Punk was not, musically-wise, a rich movement, some bands grew and matured with time resulting in interesting proposals like Gang of Four, New Model Army, etc.

Parallel to this, the 80's became the era of the pseudo-robots. The release of the album "Man Machine" by Kraftwerk in 1978, gave birth to a whole generation of techno pop androids like Fad Gadget, Orchestral Manoveurs in The Dark, Human League, The Vapors, Devo, and many others which, some more, some less, produced songs guided by the technology, especially drum machines and sequencers. To our ears that music might sound boring and empty of emotion. But of course that was not every case. We know that here and here there are hidden jewels inside techno pop, waiting to be discovered.

My position is that possibly, the most interesting music done in the 80's was composed and performed by those bands and artists inside the so called New Romantic Movement. They also used the technology at hand, but their approach was more poetic, aiming at a higher level or artistic achievement, using exotism, melancholy, and delicacy as tools to deliver not just pop songs, but cultural objects. We could say that the fathers of 80's New Romanticism are composers like David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Jhon Foxx, to name a few.

Finally post-punk and new romanticism had another child: dark wave. A morbid and nihilistic genre that in time evolved itself into goth rock, gloom, neo ritualism, and some other hyper-sensible ways of making music and poetry.

Of Course the 80's were much more than all this. There was also reggae, dub and ska from Jamaica, three genres that had enormous influence at global level. The 80's were also the background on which Rap had its infancy.

It wasn't after all a dry decade. But it was for sure a time of transitions, a decade of forking paths, many of them leading to dead ends, but some leading to our eclectic 2000’s.

So, maybe The 80's were not that bad. They produced the 90's. That's good enough I think.

Anyway, you don't need to believe me, do you?


Listen for your self here ---> Get your Voice of The Moon # 014