Is this decade more 80s than the 1980s?

Is this decade more 80s than the 1980s?

It's an undeveloped thought, but the notion just came to me as I took a look at the new Destroyer album, Kaputt. The LP is leaving the critics foaming at the mouth. Indeed, it sounds like a very decent album of its kind, but all the retro 80s music / video / imagery like it that has been swirling around in the last year or two is starting to seem a little like it's overpowering our culture.

Was the 80s like this? I was there, and I'm not sure it was. The decade seemed less obviously 80s. I don't recall this weird sense of revivalism being so obviously at play in so much popular music at the time. I'm not hailing that era as one that stands out in musical history. But it does strike me as strange that we are now mining it so savagely.

Three concepts - none of which I understand - seem to be behind this 1980s revivalism, or at least attempt to explain it. They will be familiar to anyone with an interest in the discourse of modern popular music criticism. Yawningly familiar.

1. Hypnagogic pop

This one comes from America, I think. Or most of the bands who bear its trademarks are from the US anyway. I think this is people like Toro y Moi, Pocahaunted, Ducktails - that kind of thing. Poppy, but nostalgic, with layers of fuzz / feedback / dreaminess. This one was cooked up by Wire critic David Keenan. On one level, it's a totally legitimate attempt to understand an important musical strand of the present day. On the other, it's a heap of blather-filled pseudo-profundity. I can't quite work out which. In his essay on the topic, which I didn't even notice in Wire when it came out a year or so ago, he talks of this then new musical sound seeming similar to - I'm paraphrasing - the phase between sleeping and waking that we all experience. It has something to do with Don Henley's Boys of Summer as well, I think I remember him saying. Anyway, irregardless of the clarity / credibility of Keenan's theories, it pointed to the fact that this 80s revivalism was live and among us.

2. Hauntology

I believe this was coined some time before Keenan's theory - back in about 2006, perhaps - by Simon Reynolds. I think this is supposed to be more British in sound, and includes bands like Broadcast and the Belbury Poly set. I don't think the principal difference is geographical, but it's the only one I can work out.

3. Chillwave

This is the vulgar younger brother of the other two, a sort of cheap, tabloid stain of a genre invented by those too thick to understand (1) and (2). As far as I can make out, it is a label that can be used with reference to people like Washed Out and Neon Indian, but not serious musicians like Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds or anyone like that. They're more hypnagogic - or H pop, as some people have taken to calling it now.

So those are the three strands of musical labelling used in discourse around the topic of 80s revivalism. What few seem to hint at is the possible sterility of this phase we are going through. I love it, and check out the new "H pop" bands hailed by Pitchfork every day. But it does worry me that all this revivalism hints at a larger cultural failure - the failure to conjure up anything new. I don't think it applies more broadly to other sounds - dubstep, for instance, is a fresh, vital force in modern electronic music - but the fetishism of this genre for the past is worrying.

Will it last, or are we in the middle of one of those phases like Brit pop that we all look back on and laugh about years later? I'm not sure. I like all this revivalism stuff. That's the problem. I just wonder what it says about where we are right now that the cultural world I live in is looking more like Miami Vice every day.