February 13, 2005, The New York Times
We Hate the 80's
By JEFF LEEDS
NIKKI SIXX, the bassist for the famously fast-living glam-rockers Motley Crue, believes that even 24 years after their debut, his band still has a certain timeless aspect. "If you want to drop the tailgate, get some beer and go to a strip club, that's the Crue," he said the other day before a rehearsal for the band's new tour. Yet Mr. Sixx's band, which just released a two-disc career anthology including 1987's "Girls, Girls, Girls" and 1989's "Dr. Feelgood," is returning at a particularly apt moment.
The music of the 1980's has re-entered the zeitgeist in a gigantic way. What began more than a decade ago with 80's nightclubs spread soon after through "flashback" lunch hours across the radio dial. After that came the retro-tinged success of blockbuster films like "The Wedding Singer" and pastel-saturated video games like "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City." On television, the hits of that decade now fill the soundtracks of countless popular series, like "The O.C.," which chose a cover of the OMD hit "If You Leave" for a decisive scene last season. And VH1, of course, has built a franchise on 80's exhumations, with "Big 80's" and the wildly popular "I Love the 80's." All together, it's proof that the synthesizer-powered pop songs and hair-sprayed headbangers of that era still have a strange hold on the 30-something demographic so desirable to advertisers.
The recording industry was slow to act, but over the last year and a half it has belatedly started trying to cash in on it all. Performers lost in the pop wilderness for a generation suddenly decided to get in touch with their old, often estranged mates, and get the band back together in the name of art, commerce or both. A raft of once-popular acts, from the danceable R&B group New Edition to the pop idols Duran Duran and George Michael to the more self-serious Tears for Fears to the standard-bearers of teenage angst, the Cure, all shook off the dust and signed new recording contracts in the past 18 months or so, releasing CD's of new music in some cases for the first time in 15 years. In the footsteps of Motley Crue's double album, the stylishly snarling Billy Idol, the dark darlings New Order and the famously burly rapper Heavy D will be releasing new albums as well.
All have returned with attendant fanfare, sweeping across red carpets and past screaming fans at radio station visits and showcase concerts.
Yet despite the grass-roots enthusiasm and VH1 dogma - not to mention millions of dollars in marketing - the 80's are not selling. People may be donning the once-again fashionable styles of the era (even leg warmers and Flashdance tops) and dancing to the bands of their youth, but they are not going to the store to buy the albums. For the industry that bet on the revival, it's mourning in America.
Take Tears for Fears. After scoring huge hits with the melancholy anthems "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and "Shout," they broke up. Their subsequent decade of silence was broken about five years ago when one member, Curt Smith, sent a fax to his former partner, Roland Orzabal, and the two started writing songs together. They eventually received a six-figure advance from Universal's New Door label, and found themselves playing radio station-sponsored concerts and meeting fans at in-store appearances at Tower Records. According to Nielsen SoundScan data, through Jan. 30 their new album, "Everybody Loves a Happy Ending," had sold just 80,000 copies - a far cry from their last album, "The Seeds of Love," which sold about one million copies.
Duran Duran, who drew a fanatical following in the early 80's with their rogueish good looks and new-wave hits "Rio" and "Hungry Like the Wolf," made a huge splash last year when all five members reunited for a series of concerts (including five sellouts at Wembley Arena in London) and signed a deal with Epic Records for an estimated $500,000. Since then they have been back to woo their rabid female fans, making multiple appearances on "Regis & Kelly" and at fashion-industry events. But in contrast to their hits, which routinely sold one million copies or more, the band's reunion album, "Astronaut," had sold only about 199,000 copies in the United States. Motley Crue is expected to enjoy a strong debut, but after that, the precedent is poor.
"The 80's nostalgia boom is real, but it's not broad," said Michael Hirschorn, executive vice president of programming for VH1. "It doesn't apply to everything and not in all ways. It applies to a specific kind of Gen X, self-mocking, slightly ironic thing. For this group of people, you can't give them straight nostalgia of the sort of baby- boomer, "everything was wonderful and great when we were kids" feel. People Gen X and younger know that things weren't that great. We never thought that Motley Crue was saving the world. We identify with them passionately, but with a certain wink."
Reviving the careers of artists who have retreated from the pop music scene is never a simple affair, but it has been done - usually by updating their image and appealing to new fans at least as directly as old ones. The bluesy rockers Aerosmith nearly disbanded in the 70's, but they re-emerged in the mid-80's via the new medium of music videos, appearing with Run D.M.C. in the rappers' cover of "Walk This Way." They brought in outside songwriters to develop their next album, the hit "Permanent Vacation," and later produced a series of popular high-concept videos. More recently, the guitar virtuoso Carlos Santana, who had struggled to sell records since the late 70's, stormed back in 1999. Arista Records recast the rock legend as pop radio star, pairing him with a string of popular artists en route to releasing the blockbuster "Supernatural" album.
To a degree, the executives orchestrating the returns of the 80's artists are following those formulas, aiming to update their image and package them for new fans. Duran Duran brought in some very au courant producers - Don Gilmore, who had previously produced the band Linkin Park, and Dallas Austin, who has worked with Pink and TLC - for their album. Tears for Fears cast the it-girl Brittany Murphy in its new music video. Billy Idol, wary of simply performing a hits revue for older fans, has booked a date to play South by Southwest, an annual buzz-band conclave in Austin, Tex.
And on some level, these strategies have been successful: consumer research by the New Door label showed that about half of the people who bought Tears for Fears' new album were new to the band's material, said Bob Mercer, a senior vice president for Universal. Promotion of the new albums has also helped these bands' sales overseas, or on older recordings. But when it comes to the new material, the 30-something American fans who should logically form the artists' core audiences just aren't turning up in droves.
According to Ann Fishman, president of Generational Targeted Marketing, the problem's not with the music, it's with the memories. The fans from Generation X, she says, "are not particularly grounded in their youth."
"Would you be grounded in something where you had divorced parents, poor schooling?" she asks. "We presume nostalgia is a great selling tool. It is to the baby boomers. It's not to Gen X. The history of their youth has forced them to grow up more quickly. Nostalgia is not necessarily something that's going to move them ahead. They enjoy the music of their youth, but it's not a need."
The theory might help to explain why Madonna and Prince had a very good year. They both made it big in the 80's, but (with the exception of a brief hiatus on Prince's part), they both kept performing, kept evolving, kept updating their image. Their recent albums weren't hastily convened revivals, they were simply the latest chapter in a long and varied career.
Making the odds that much longer, the long-lost stars of the 80's are returning to a music establishment they might barely recognize. The machinery that transformed them into mass phenomena two decades ago - mainly Top 40 radio and MTV - has long since been dismantled or redesigned. The radio dial has splintered into tightly managed formats aimed at specified niches, which may not be receptive to revivals. "There's resistance from radio to play some of these artists," said Jon Zellner, who oversees programming on so-called hot adult-contemporary stations for Infinity Broadcasting. He said he decided against playing Tears For Fears, among others. "I think programmers are potentially afraid of their radio stations sounding dated." As for MTV, and the music video itself, they aren't so new anymore, and the cable giant now devotes far more airtime to reality programming and lifestyle shows.
New bands now establish themselves through outlets that didn't exist five years ago, let alone 20, like AOL's "Sessions," a live performance for online viewers, or MySpace, an online community popular with music fans. And those formats don't favor bands in their 40's and 50's.
As a result, some label executives said they had turned away former stars who came shopping for new record contracts. "I just wasn't convinced that the songs were compelling enough to compete in today's marketplace," said Andrew Slater, president of Capitol Records, who says he passed on both Duran Duran and Billy Idol. "On the television side, you might have someone perform on a late-night show, but ultimately I don't think it's enough to drive a passive audience to all drop what they're doing in their lives and find that connection to the artist that they loved in the 80's."
But these bands are expected to do extremely well in their North American concert tours. Motley Crue, for one, will be paid minimum fees of up to $250,000 per night on their tour. Duran Duran, in addition to big appearance fees, is cashing in on the trend toward V.I.P. tickets, offering their most devoted fans the chance to buy travel packages, including a two-night hotel stay and signed memorabilia, for $2,590 per person.
But those lucrative concerts play to fans eager for one (or two) glorious nights of nostalgia, not those interested in watching the band try to grow.
"It's hard enough now doing any of the old material because obviously we just want to do the new material," said Mr. Smith of Tears for Fears. "It'd be horrible to be playing onstage and have all these people in the front saying 'play 'Shout.' The emotion in a lot of the songs we wrote back then really doesn't mean anything to us now. There are certain emotions you have in your late teens and 20's that really don't exist when you turn 40. There's a certain angst we had then that doesn't exist now. Now we have middle-aged angst."
The stars of the 80's also now have middle-aged bodies, and hauling them around the country on long tours isn't as easy as it once might have been. Mick Mars, the guitarist for Motley Crue, has undergone hip replacement surgery. Mr. Smith has two young children.
Still, you won't hear any of them complaining too loudly. Pop music has always been a young person's game, and for those who get a rare second turn in the spotlight, even tepid album sales and a backward-looking concert tour are a rush. But for many fans watching the marketing machinery creak into gear, the industry's attempt to catch up to what was once a just a kitschy, spontaneous goof feels all too familiar.
The age bracket that grew up with MTV, after all, has already seen more than its fair share of commercially driven revivals, from the re-release of "Star Wars" to the creation of Nick at Nite to a new music festival at Woodstock (twice). Perhaps after all those retreads, a backlash is inevitable.
In Baltimore, for example, Benn Ray, the co-owner of an independent bookstore, Atomic Books, has started up a regular "I Hate the 80's" party to mock the trend.
"The 80's nostalgia was starting to roll in, and I was like, 'Wait a minute! Did you people actually listen to the same decade I did? You had eight years of Reagan. There was cocaine everywhere. There were yuppies. We were oppressed by this whole notion of baby boomers trying to cash out." At past parties, attended by people wearing parachute pants and Members Only jackets, local bands performed their most hated 80's memories on Casio keyboards, which they promptly demolished at the end of their set. "One year," he recalled, "a performer called Evil Pappy Twin played Van Halen covers on a classical Renaissance lute."
In any case, the clock is running out. Whether you love it or hate it, the second coming of the 80's has already lasted almost as long as the original decade - unheard of in the ever-quickening cycles of cultural nostalgia. Mr. Hirschorn of VH1 admits that "the early 80's are sort of getting long in the tooth."
Besides which, the 90's - remember them? - are ready for their retouched close-up. "With the Lights Out," a box set by the decade's greatest heroes, Nirvana, ranked as one of the holiday season's best sellers. Trendy bars have started 90's nights, or even adopted entire 90's-revival décor themes.
And VH1, of course, has already brought out a new series called "I Love the 90's."
