{"id":23650,"date":"2011-11-21T13:00:17","date_gmt":"2011-11-21T19:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=23650"},"modified":"2011-11-20T22:51:36","modified_gmt":"2011-11-21T04:51:36","slug":"the-real-eighties-beep-oink-squawk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=23650","title":{"rendered":"The Real Eighties: Beep Oink Squawk"},"content":{"rendered":"

All this month as we go through eighties music, I’ve been trying to establish that the one great stereotype of eighties music – that synth-pop was the dominant genre of the decade – is, at thirty years remove, overrated.<\/p>\n

Still, it is a fact that the ubuiquity of inexpensive new technology took a genre that was a pseudoacademic curiosity in the late sixties…<\/p>\n

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A 1970 Moog synthesizer<\/p><\/div>\n

…and an expensive art project in the seventies, became a mass-market musical commodity in the eighties.<\/p>\n

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A 1983 Yamaha DX7. Digital, light, reliable, and $2,000, it was the basis for much of the sound of the1980s.<\/p><\/div>\n

It got to the point, with instruments like the Yamaha DX and Roland Juno-series synths, that synths became replacements for conventional instruments like pianos, basses,organs, and (more or less) horn and sections.<\/p>\n

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And in and among the “Men Without Hats” and “EBN-OZNs” and other assembly-line synth-pop detritus, there were a few artists that stood out, to others, and to me.<\/p>\n

There was Thomas Dolby, most famous for the iconic synth-pop top-forty hit “Blinded Me With Science”. Here’s a recent performance of “One Of Our Submarines”, another early ’80s tune…<\/p>\n