Relics from a deadly decade “the 80s at their best amounted to a few Madonna singles and the Smiths’ solipsistic neuroses. The decade simply hasn’t weathered well”: the biggest-selling musical style internationally is club-oriented dance music. The biggest-selling style in the USA is hip-hop. Both these styles had their roots in the late 70s, but flowered creatively and commercially in the 80s. Like them or not, and I’m sure a sad old punk like Caroline Sullivan doesn’t, but it’s apallingly lazy, with that in mind, to reduce the 1980s to a few synthpop bands with haircuts which look funny now.
All articles on 1980s music come down to one iconic video: Duran Duran, on a yacht, doing “Rio”. I can sympathise with the idea that when rich pop stars flaunt their wealth they tend to do it in crass and tasteless ways, but it’s hypocritical for journalists like Sullivan to pick on Duran Duran and not on the monstrous ostentation of, say, the Stones, or Noel Gallagher’s mod-target bathtub. Conspicuous consumption in pop wasn’t confined to the 80s.
And anyway, when I recently saw the video in full, I was amazed: it was obviously a joke, a self-parody. Everyone remembers Simon Le Bon on his yacht, nobody remembers him falling into the sea after striking his windswept pose. And one of the band is shot drinking a cocktail underwater, for goodness’ sake – this is a band taking the piss, not flaunting it! But I forgot, that can’t be the case: irony in pop was invented with Beck, and Duran Duran were thick Midlanders. How stupid of me.