Upbeat Music - What the Hell Happened?

Here I am in my so-called office, situated in a corner of the living room I carved out for myself, cleared of random children’s toys and lego blocks. This is only right, I think.

Being a little more cozy with the family, a little tighter than normal, is a good thing.

Let’s be honest. Home offices are a terrible idea.

Let’s remove dad from our space, stick him into the basement dungeon. It’s dehumanizing. I would rather suffer the constant interruptions and noise than be a worker bee away from the brood. Tangent over.

Presently, in order to be able to think in this noise, I have chosen to write while listening to Phil Collins stellar Sussudio. Written in the 80’s, and I won’t bother the check on the details, it was all over the radio. As were other songs of a similar style, which are now long gone.

Why? Who killed them? What does their absence mean for us?

The Death of Upbeat Music

Obviously, upbeat music is a relative term, which I, a solid Gen Xer, use. Nonetheless, my generation may have something to say on the matter because we precede big tech and canned tunes.

So what caused the demise of this style?

Think of Collins, and ELO, and the impossibly upbeat Howard Jones. I have a feeling it has something to do with Sweden, but I could be wrong.

Sweden, of course, birthed ABBA - definitely an upbeat band. But the writers of ABBA, as far as I remember, went on to dominate the music industry by writing….well, lots and lots of shitty, same-sounding music. Thanks a lot Sweden.

Jokes aside, there is something deeper here.

I remember in high school - one moment we were all into the awesome 80’s Brit pop, and next moment everyone seemed to have found loose-fitting clothes and started listening to grunge. Def zero uplifting feels there.

I am a slow-adopter, in this case a non-adopter, and teenage Rob was left wondering why a lot of the friends were suddenly more troubled. More edgy. Like they were rebelling from the laissez-faire of the 80’s, and graduate to the more grown-up, suicidal sounds of grunge.

Some say art is downstream from culture. This may be the case. But it might work the other way at the same time. Kids were less happy, so was the music. Which came first does not really matter. What matters more is that the music had no redemptive qualities. It’s like listening only to blues when you are down.

The 90’s were not a particularly bad decade, in a societal way. Remember that some of the best music was made when two nuclear superpowers were threatening to blow up the world. The 90’s did away with that.

The Soviets fell, and the world was not going to blow up any more. You’d think the music would reflect this. Instead, we got grunge (which, as a musician, I still declare to be awful), and some really shitty canned pop. Thanks again, Sweden.

Are Tree-Huggers to Blame?

Probably. It’s at least a safe bet. If in doubt, blame the tree-huggers.

I was a tree-hugger. We all were. But we were taken for a walk in the land of innocence and idealism.

Good intentions, as all young people have. Just terribly misguided. Misguided by whom?

Well - it’s quite a coincidence that as the communists seemed to have lost, the Green Mafia appeared. The totally non-charismatic Canadian tree-hugger extraordinare - David Suzuki - was already peddling his doom and gloom.

There will be no more Canadian forests in 20 years, he would say. Acid rain was poisoning every lake and river in the country. We - the young generation - would inherit a barren wasteland of dead forests and poisonous water.

Suzuki was, of course, totally wrong and deluded. Probably a liar too. Canada has more forests than ever.

By the by, it turns out the world is actually greener now than in the 80s. But let’s not allow facts to get in the way of fear and gloom.

Suzuki has since hitched his tired horse to the climate-change band wagon. The deforestation wagon fell apart. While scaring the crap out of a whole new generation of impressionable youth (who are primed for nu-komunism), he is investing in lots of ocean-front properties in British Columbia.

This was the mood then. The kids would have no trees, no food, no water.

Can you blame them for switching Brit Pop to West Coast Depression Grunge?

Is Fashion to Blame?

Yeah. Probably. It’s a least a very good indicator of the internal mood of a generation.

The first concert I went to (with my mom) was Robert Palmer, in Ottawa. Probably 1989. Man, what a cool dude.

His slick music, racy lyrics and style left a huge impression on me. Palmer was known as the best-dressed rock star. It’s funny now thinking that this was even a thing. That music journalists found this to be a good thing to write about.

It was, of course.

Palmer was too cool for my school. No one really got his stuff. But maybe I was always Euro-centric, and this guy had it all.

He died too young. But unlike Cobain, who blew his brains out, Palmer died of the good life. In Paris, after enjoying a meal and good vino.

Or how about Terrence Trent D’Arby. The other best-dressed pop star that had a voice matching his impeccable style.

Hip Hop does not get off light either. The rage was all around prison attire, droopy pants, no belts. The most notable article of clothing was the name brand on the underwear. This sad style has yet to die out. As does the terrible R&B.

Motown Records artists must be spinning in their graves.

Is There Even A Future?

I have no idea.

But I can say this. The music outside of North America is definitely more fun. Radio stations in Southern Europe have no problem playing all the fun stuff from the 80s and even 90s. There is no notion that this is cheesy, or not edgy enough.

The result of less depressing music is that your average day is simply more pleasant. This thought came to my while driving with my family in Croatia, on the coast, and every single song was a fantastic relic of the 80’s pseudo-optimism.

Dolce Vita - the idea of a sweet life, or of at least a less bitter life, is real. It exists in places. It has everything to do with music, as well as the other obvious things like food, weather and architecture.

The international pop and rock scene is sick. It’s down with the flu. I think I will sit this era out on the peripheries of the action, where the echoes of the 80’s are still bouncing off the disco walls.