LOS 80AS

Muy bueno éste artículo de Esquire de cómo los 80as están volviendo. Habla de David Byrne, Blondie, Bryan Ferry, etc. De como Oasis no es más que "Journey meets the Beatles with a terrible hangover"

Les pongo un fragmento, y el link, por si quieren leerlo entero.


You knew that, sooner or later, there would be nostalgia for the jump-cut eighties, that moment when the REO Speedwagon slog of rock radio was eclipsed by a flock of the truly weird, many of them British and most extremely photogenic. These people didn't look like rock stars; they wore skinny ties and pointy shoes, did their hair all fluffy or spiky, played synthesizers as much as guitar. Championed by MTV, these voices of radical insurgency spread the frenetic aesthetic of the new wave from music video to prime-time TV, then to fashion, advertising, and filmmaking.

Now new wave and other bits of eighties culture are seeping slyly back into the public awareness, haunting the blanded-out boy-pop present with distant echoes of flamboyant otherness. There's evidence of it in the mullet cuts featured in those Gucci ads. In the return of Blondie and of the punk manqués on fashion runways. In peg-leg pants and glittery suits in bold colors. In the DJs embracing eighties sounds and using vintage gear to get them. In the resurgence of interest in painting and the prospecting going on in the contemporary-art market. In the worship of money and in the phrase "sudden-wealth syndrome."

Give thanks that the eighties haven't come back as a single Billy Idol sneer. Because what remains interesting about the period is its diversity: This moment in pop culture was category resistant and summary defying. The term "new wave" applied to Cyndi Lauper and Einstürzende Neubauten and Spandau Ballet, and as it went along, expressions from the threatening fringes--downtown jazz, graffiti art, lugubrious Goth balladry, hip-hop--found their way into the upheaval. It was the end of the reign of the three networks, the beginning of the splintering of the music-buying audience into highly specialized tribes whose vitality influenced the mainstream. Suddenly pop was poked and prodded by the overtly sexual (Prince, Madonna) and the archly intellectual (Talking Heads), artists who served as a counterbalance to the suffocating, inescapable bigness of Michael Jackson and Dynasty.