Comment: 80s Music=Downer

I’ve been listening to the music that we listened to in the 80s. No wonder we were so depressed. New Order, Depeche Mode, Violent Femmes, The Smiths; there wasn’t a happy one in the bunch. (On the other end of the spectrum were the bubblegum pop stars like Martika and Stacie Q. (or L.) who were so sweet it hurt your teeth to even hear them blaring from the speakers at the mall.)

These were the musicians who influenced me the most in the 80s. Let’s not forget one of my all time favorites, The Cure, who are still making good and depressing music even as they physically atrophy. (My back hurts too, Robert Smith, but nobody looks as good as you with bedhead and eyeliner—we wish we did.)

Why was this music so popular? Teenage angst is certainly part of it, but it goes deeper than that. Because those artists made music about deep, non-age-specific angst. Because you know ultimately we all just want to be loved, and that’s why I think I loved The Cure (and their ilk) so much. It wasn’t so much that the world sucked, but it sucked to feel alone, to be alone, and Robert Smith and Morrissey really got it. Smith was more abstract about it. If you’ve ever heard “Like Cockatoos” you know what an unbelievably accurate and painful break up song that is. And a more mainstream hit of theirs, “Pictures of You” is filled with such longing and loneliness you hum along in recognition and nearly burst at the end when he kicks in with the harmonies. You wait the whole damn song for that part. It’s killer.

Morrissey just laid it on the line—life sucks, you’re alone, then you die, while other people are happy and not alone and have jobs they may like, but you don’t, and you never will. But on the up side, you can feel unrequited passion, nay, love, for someone, who will without a doubt not love you back.

No wonder we drank.

Somehow with the winter season approaching and depression creeping around dark corners and lurking in the sunset it seems fitting to talk about the blues a little bit. We all get them, some of us more than others. Listening to sad music can amplify the sadness, but it can also do the reverse. I’ve been cheered up by Morrissey, and The Cure too, for that matter. Sometimes naming the emptiness fills it up just a little bit. And belting out "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" can actually sometimes make you less miserable.

As you may infer from this comment, I’m listening to Pandora, which as I have previously mentioned, will create a radio station for you based on a band or even one song that you like. It’s kind of amazing. You start to realize how alike all those songs are. They have the same style of harmonies, the same harmonic intervals, the same formula and structure.

So when we say, “kids today, with their music, it all sounds the same and it’s all awful,” we’re actually being hypocritical because we like our music a certain way too. We feel comfort from the sameness. The market may be crashing, your plants may be dying, but dammit, you can expect a Cure song to sound like a Cure song and that’s something.

There’s a cool book I own but haven’t yet read yet called “The World in Six Songs” which, I believe, explores some of this territory. I’ll let you know more after I read it.

And on the topic of sadness, I read somewhere that people who drink more than one diet soda a day are more likely to be unhappy or depressed. Kind of interesting.