Jam Session - Pop_Rock History 1980's

In the 1980s, there were significant changes in the music industry. Radio was no longer the dominant force, as new innovations like the portable Walkman and MTV allowed listeners to have more control over what they listened to. The introduction of cassettes and the ability to record songs from the radio gave users the freedom to listen to music wherever they wanted. MTV revolutionized the concept of radio by making it visual, introducing music videos as a popular medium. These changes marked a shift in the dynamics of power within the industry. And so feel free to also be able to jump in and answer questions or make comments or anything you want. Keep it free form. And that's the main thing I wanted to say before we kind of jumped into it. Thank you. Cool. Yeah. So everybody, please participate and ask some unexpected questions. You know, it will be, you know, funnier, more exciting. And so I think we can start. 26 people joined already. So then, Dan, the floor is yours. Okay. Let's go. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to share here. And assuming everyone here can see my screen. All right. Yes, you can. So I'm going to go ahead and hide everybody. So what we're going to talk about in this particular session is pop rock history, the 1980s. And this is, you know, this is a very, very, very, very big topic. So what we've done is we've kind of broken it down into what we will talk about. So what we're going to talk about here is how video killed the radio star, this new sound and this new look, kind of. And I'll tell you why it's kind of new. The new technology and how it influences a new sound, the PMRC and the filthy 15. So we're going to talk about censorship in pop and rock music starting in the 1980s, as well as glam rock part two. What we won't talk about, but I would love to at another thing here. So we're going to talk about, we're not going to talk about massive pop stars that you're already familiar with because, well, you're already familiar. Anything outside of pop and rock, I mean, I would love to get into deep into hip hop, metal, alternative, all these other things. As I know we originally said the topic was going to cover a little bit broader in that because as we got into it, there's so much information that it's just too much to pack into one session. When I talk about any of the trends in the song structure or techniques that were used, so no gated reverb as Lucas had hoped. And we're not going to talk too much about the impact of the 1980s on future genres with the exception of one small thing at the end. But first, what we want to talk about is how we arrived at this decade of massive change. And when we talked about, people said they wanted to learn about some things about rock and pop history. And so where to start, rather than starting at the very, very beginning, we decided to start where I believe the most amount of change was in the shortest amount of time. And I think the single most amount of change in the music industry in the shortest amount of time was the period from 1980 until 1989. And so to start this off, we want to talk about who the pioneers were. And it was bands like Kraftwerk. And Kraftwerk in the early 70s actually created this experimentation with all electronic music, which is what led us in to these trends that we saw later adopted in the 1980s. So this is Kraftwerk's Autobahn in the early 70s. So this is Kraftwerk's Autobahn in 1974. And what we also see here is that there's a lot of first use of real vocal effects like vocoders in an interesting way. And so much about this kind of led to this. And so this was happening also in Berlin, which at the time was very far away from the center of the popular music hubs, which were London, New York, and Los Angeles. As we also go here, this also coming out of Berlin, interesting enough, was the American singer Donna Summer who was working with an Italian producer in Germany, Giorgio Moroder, and came up and took this idea. What was happening at that time was disco in the 1970s. So in mid to late 1970s to early 80s was with disco. And so coming into this, they took this influence from Kraftwerk that was in Berlin, because at that time in Berlin you had Kraftwerk, you had Brian Eno, Roxy Music, all these other things happening there that kind of mixed this disco influence and came up with I Feel Love, which was really revolutionary here. And what we see is now it's coming in this disco beat, but a synthesized disco beat. And these arpeggios and the synthesizers are kind of driving this. So the whole thing is pretty much synthesized. And this kind of led to the next wave of things. So what was happening at that time, there were two interesting movements that were exactly the opposite. You had disco on this side and you had punk on this side. And what happened in the 80s is this kind of collision between disco and punk and these things that didn't seem like they were going together. And in London there was a punk band. It was called Two-Way Army. And the lead singer and the songwriter and sort of the creative visionary behind Two-Way Army, he just suddenly discovered Moog synthesizers and discovered the synthesizer sound and took this punk band and converted this punk band into this synth band. And it was something that wasn't, you know, you took craft work and then it became something kind of else. And so you see in this, and this was when we had Two-Way Army in 1979. Our friends are electric. And this is one of their early live performances. So we see some of the punk sensibilities here mixed with the synth thing that kind of created this template for what was to come in the 1980s. And you start to see Gary Newman, who was the singer, wearing makeup, not wearing makeup in a stylized way, but wearing makeup with eyeliner and these sorts of very slick types of features and things like that. So what ended up happening is Two-Way Army, those guys, didn't really like the synth sound of the other members of the band and so he split off on his own and then created that very, very same year a new album and the single off of that, which is Chorus, which I think maybe some of you guys might be familiar with. Chorus set up the template for absolutely everything that was to come in the 80s. Since he no longer had a drummer, with Two-Way Army now he's using drum machines and he's using all these, the same sort of things, he started to get into video and this whole idea of this stylized music video that wasn't a performance, necessarily like a straight-ahead performance, became the template for everything for what was going to come. And so we can kind of thank Gary Newman for where we started in the 1980s and the big thing with that was the video, the video that he did with Chorus and where that went and this kind of sparked this new generation here where video turned out to kind of kill the radio star here. So in the 1980s, nearly every aspect of the music industry changed. There were new styles emerging, new types of instruments, the way that music was promoted and distributed changed, like suddenly. Previously, 60 years before that, radio controlled the music industry and the labels were dependent upon radio to promote a new artist and nearly all of the listening to music out of the home was on radio. So if you were in a car, it was the radio. If you listened in a bar or a cafe, it was the radio. And it was like that literally until the 1980s. And this control where radio controlled everything in the music industry caused corruption and radio stations required bribes to favor specific songs to get more airplay, causing several scandals in the 1960s, which resulted in government hearings and changes in the laws and the radio stations become a lot more restricted in terms of how they operate. And as a bit of background on how they operated just kind of from the music industry side, when we think about streaming now, you're paying per stream. So when people listen to it, they get paid. The artists are getting paid to that. Radio was exactly the opposite. So radio, the artists would give their music for free to the radio and the radio would generate the money from advertising to keep the radios going, but it was a promotional tool for the record sales. And it was the single, you know, the two promotional tools you had were, you know, the single most important was radio and the second most important was touring. And people would tour in support of the album, kind of where it's the other way around now. So in the early 80s, there were two innovations that were introduced to challenge radio's dominance and completely changed the music industry forever. It broke up radio's dominance and it shifted the dynamic of power. The first thing is in July 1st, 1979, Sony introduced the portable Walkman. And while we now kind of think like, okay, well, how is that that big of a deal, kind of looking backwards, but at the time, this was a revolution. For the very, very first time, listeners had control. It wasn't just whatever you listened to on the radio or you had to go get these bulky LP records that you couldn't go out of your house with, right? So not only what they listened to and where they listened to and how they got it, the user now had control. And when cassettes were on the market where you could go and record LPs or even sit and wait on the radio and when you knew a song, you could request a song on the radio and when you knew it was coming, you hit record. And then now you have your own copy of that song and you can go and walk around with it. So this was kind of Napster before it was Napster and had that same amount of impact in terms of changes in user behavior and possibility. So another thing that was happening leading to this second innovation, which actually had as much of an impact, possibly more, was that in the 1970s, cable TV started to catch hold, but first only in the metropolitan areas, in large cities. But by 1980, cable TV started to reach smaller towns and suburbs in the very middle of America. And with this new medium that emerged, a new possibility came. That's August 1st, 1981, was MTV. And MTV, if we look at the launch of MTV now, kind of looking back, it seems a little bit, well, very dated. But this was a completely revolutionary idea where you took the concept of radio and made it video. So this is the day that it launched in 1981. And we're kind of... About two seconds away from switching to the radio. This is the very... At the launch, at the same time, early that year, they had the space shuttle was a big thing that was taking off and people would sit and watch the space shuttle. So the idea of the space shuttle and so on seemed very futuristic to people. And so they kind of connected the launch of MTV with this to where it moved into this launch segment. So the very first video that they put on here was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles. And so we'll just scroll through here just to see kind of what the first hour looked like. And at that time, there was only a handful of songs. There were not very many songs that they had videos of to be able to show on MTV, so there was a lot of repeats. MTV initially struggled, actually. So it was only available in a few regional cable networks. But the sudden expansion came through a really, really brilliant artist campaign that not only expanded MTV nationwide, MTV was actually the driving factor in the adoption of cable around the country because kids were pushing and pressuring their parents with this campaign. So what they would do, MTV bought commercials on regular television, the broadcast television, and they would run these campaigns on broadcast television and other cable networks that MTV was not currently on to have them call their cable company to get MTV. And so commercials were like this. I want my MTV! Call your cable company and say I want my MTV! So these campaigns, it was constant. It was everywhere to the point where, I don't know if a lot of you remember Dire Straits. This kind of came into the song with Money for Nothing. Where Sting is singing the intro to this, you know, parodying that MTV commercial. So this particular song was about the changes in the music industry from the 70s until the 80s. And interestingly enough, it was not only the first music video that featured digital animation, it was one of the first things out there at all that featured digital animation. So while it was a criticism of this futuristic stuff, it was something futuristic in itself, which is also interesting. This moves us on to the idea of when you have video, and everything is about video, there's this expression that someone says when you talk about a musician, they say they have a face for radio. Meaning that that's not someone who has a face for radio. Now musicians not only needed to sound good, but they needed to look good, and they needed to look interesting. So this kind of defined this new generation of what this pop star was. So with MTV now driving record sales, the whole idea is to have looks and things that people would talk about. So with MTV now driving record sales, it was all about this look, this gender-bending makeup and over-the-top haircuts and clothes and things that looked like they were from the future. Everything had to feel like it was kind of futuristic. So we took the things that started with Gary Newman, and it started becoming more and more extreme. An example of this gender-bending thing was the hair, the makeup, the androgynous clothing. was the hair, the makeup, the androgynous clothing. There's also a band called Flock of Seagulls. And Flock of Seagulls actually started with hairdressers. These guys were actually hairdressers and making these wild haircuts and so they actually became quite successful at it too. and so they actually became quite successful at it too. And it wasn't a bad dance, by the way. And it wasn't a bad dance, by the way. So here's now you have that new sound, that new look and all these things from MTV. The most extreme example of haircuts here, I think, is Kajagoogoo. And Kajagoogoo is surprisingly a really good band. They were really a good band. They broke up for a number of reasons. But they only did one album and had they done more, I think they would have been quite successful. Let's go back and get us some more Kajagoogoo here. That hair, though. That hair, though. So then we have Dead or Alive that kind of capitalized again on this androgynous look that kind of capitalized again on this androgynous look and in this particular case, they looked better than they sounded. They were better performers and better showmen than they were actually musicians. And that was a big part of some of these in the 80s. But none of this actually is really new. It was just for the first time at the forefront of everyone's TV and it was 24 hours a day. So all these kind of looks with these androgynous sorts of things and this was all pioneered by David Bowie and all the early glam. And what's interesting here is that David Bowie being a pioneer of early glam not only paved the way for this trend, he kind of got involved in it again and sharpened the focus. He was kind of the Pied Piper in a way of some of this sort of thing. Well, first of all, let's look at Life on Mars where we see the hair, the makeup and a really polished music video. And for the time of being 1973 having this really polished video was great. So then time came around for in 1980 we have Ashes to Ashes. And there's two things interesting about this Ashes to Ashes video. One, that he's now returning to this kind of little bit of a stylized glam look that he moved away from in the mid to late 70s and this thin white duke era that he had. So now he's kind of returning to this and the people that are in this video kind of talks about this next rabbit hole that we're going to go down here. In this video you expect to see very glammed up and stylized. Awesome. Okay. So these guys here in the video here if you've seen this video you'll see these kind of characters moving in and out in these elaborate costumes and makeup and all that stuff. Where this kind of came from was there was a club in London in the early 80s situated in between two famous art schools. And there was another club in London at the time called Billy's and Billy's was where all these guys from these art schools would hang out and there was some problem with one of the owners so all the guys from both of the art schools ended up coming over to one night a week to kind of increase the sales they made Tuesday a special night for these art students. As the popularity of this group had grown it got more and more experimental something similar to Studio 54 in New York in the 70s but for more of an art crowd. So these were fashion designers art students and musicians and all this kind of mixed together and they were trying to create something just new. Heavily influenced by glam and the stuff from the David Bowie era there and this crowd came to be known as the Blitz Kids. And if you look at a lot of these trends where they actually came into the mainstream a lot of them really started with the Blitz Kids. This androgynous looks, the colorful makeup the crazy hair and the stuff that David Bowie took these kids literally out of the Blitz and put them into his Ashes to Ashes video. So he saw them and kind of put them in there. The next step in this is that some of these Blitz Kids started to get into music and started to create bands themselves which were picked up by labels and promoted because it was kind of this feedback loop of the things they were creating at the time that they had initiated that got into the mainstream and then they were the ones to push it even further. So Visage, which was one of the first Blitz Kids to kind of make it into the mainstream came out with Fade to Gray and you see it's very synth driven and it looks like performance art stuff and so the videos here are they look like what would have been on the stage at Blitz at that time. So again you see the elaborate makeup and all that sort of thing. Next band coming out of Blitz was Culture Club and again you see the same kind of stuff with all these androgynous performances and gender banning and breaking of these norms. But the thing is it actually ended up that Boy George was a good singer and it was a really good band surprisingly and then there were some people that were not really great singers that were more about the flashy stuff that came out of the Blitz and one is Hazy Fantasy which is kind of a more extreme version of this stuff or kind of a caricature of that. So that kind of tells you at that time it was not really about how you looked in the style of this and so this led to kind of a broader movement which was kind of categorized as New Romantic Movement which toned down some more of the elaborate costumes but kept the makeup, the androgynous looks and also expanded to include bands that were from beyond the Blitz and even not from London. Some of those bands, Duran Duran was an example of that and now Ballet you have a number of these different types of bands that got further into the mainstream. So that's kind of about the look and the style of things but then this is new technology that created this new sound and this is all about if you were in the session last week when we talked about the drum machines the Linn drum being a big component of this and when we go back to this whole point where you had with Gary Neumann where Gary Neumann says his band quit and he's like okay I'm just going to do this myself so he used the drum machine because he didn't have a drummer and then you have other guys as we showed last week with Human League where this drum machine is part of a stylized thing in these very synth heavy bands but then there's some key synthesizers that came onto the market in the late 70s and the early 80s that they became available to people and really drove this new sound of music where people could create without having to put the whole band together and sometimes they'd have the parts performed live by other people but if you're the person that's going and writing the songs and creating you don't need to have the whole group together to write and put things all together and it had this combination of this studio performer kind of thing and there were a few innovations with some of these synthesizers and had some very unique sounds and so what I want to do is show some of the there's so many of them that were in the market but some that were some of the key ones and how they were used on particular songs so this was the Roland Jupiter 4 and this one everyone's going to recognize this when you open up a Roland Jupiter 4 and you go to play it this is the default patch like when you boot it up this is what plays the sound you get without adjusting or tweaking everything and there's all these other musicians that only spend all this time, Prince for example tweaking and tweaking and tweaking to get these sounds and the patch mode goes and just opens up the box and just starts plonking the exact thing you get out of the box So this is 1981 and they created all that basically with the same synthesizer you have Duran Duran in 1982 and I want to just mention one thing about Duran Duran is I think that they have been dismissed or at the time they were also really dismissed as just pretty boys going out there and looking good and doing all this sort of thing but they were actually a really good band and they were really innovative John Taylor was I think probably one of the best bass players of all these bands in the 1980s and Nick Rhodes who was playing keyboards and writing a lot of the music incredibly incredibly innovative and so this is what he did with the synthesizer here the same synthesizer that Depeche Mode was he's exploring all the kind of wild sounds you can get with it and kind of finding the limits and incidentally he's using the mod wheel and things to bend the pitch similar to the way that Bernie Worrell who was the synth player for Parliament or Funkadelic he used it and that's kind of where he got this sort of thing from but used it in a completely different used the same thing in a different way where Bernie was using it for a lot for bass and synth bass parts on the Moog he used this for a lot more expressive types of parts there next big thing was the Oberheim OB series so it was OB, 1, OBX and so on it was a pretty quick succession in the early 1980s you would hear it in the 70s this was a popular synth if you listen to Rush, Tom Sawyer this is kind of the synth that drives that it was used by Styx it was used by a lot of these other bands I mean, yes used it a lot but now you see the same synth used in a little bit different way we're going to jump down a rabbit hole here with the Oberheim Oberheim synths were really powerful but extremely complicated to use and for example Prince was probably one of the greatest masters of the Oberheim like he's also probably the greatest master of the Linn drum that ever existed so he would take and spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours to create these very very specific presets and he would get sounds out of the Oberheim that no one else really had the patience or creativity as well as the technical understanding to be able to do in 1980 Prince was invited to go on tour with Rick James and at that time Rick James was huge he was absolutely huge Prince was just starting out, a lot of people didn't know who he was and so for Prince this was a great opportunity for him to go out and with this really big established artist on tour and get his music exposed to all of Rick James fans and so on, he was huge really at that time so Prince of course brings all of his carefully configured gear on tour that he used to create these incredibly unique and elaborate sounds Rick James was absolutely in awe of these sounds Rick went out and bought all the same gear that Prince had but he wasn't able to get anything close to the same kind of sound out of them that Prince was using it didn't matter how hard he tried or what he tried he couldn't get the same sound and he would ask Prince what are you doing with this preset or how are you doing this and he would say he wouldn't share his presets so during a break and a tour all the equipment stayed in the storage of the production company which was Rick's production company for the tour during this break Rick was going to go into the studio and work on a new album and so Rick goes into the storage and takes Prince's synths that had all of his presets in there and all stored in them to make his next album just using Prince's gear he thought no one would know and suddenly he's this genius that comes out so when we look at for example it becomes really clear when you start to listen to Prince's album Controversy which came out right that year right in the break and the tour it was a 1980-81 tour so when we listen to Controversy which at that time was a very unique synth sound so now what we do here is Rick James with Give It To Me Baby which he recorded right after with that slow-mo gear so it becomes pretty obvious to people listening to that at the time you rip this off literally ripped it off from Prince and so what Prince had to do is change the sound which he did in 1982 taking a little bit more and what's interesting here is Prince decided to become even more distinctive with his presets and make these presets that if you were copying it would be so incredibly obvious so with this the next album here it became really really obvious Delirious to hear this synth sound there was nothing sounding like that at the time so then we have a similar thing when we get into 1990 Prince had no choice but to change his sound we get into one of the next more famous and very very different uses of the OBX which is Jump and Van Halen and it's very interesting that they moved from the 70s into the 80s where they've been a very very guitar heavy band into starting to include synths and the decision and the drive to include synths was actually Eddie Van Halen who he was the one actually playing on these as well so this incredible guitarist who was known as a guitarist he was the guy driving one of the most memorable synth lines of all time next we have the Roland Juno 60 and I think everybody knows this one very very distinct kind of sound here and then so they used two synths on this primarily this was the Roland Juno 60 and then the Yamaha DX7122 in a minute so this is kind of hard to go through this video by the way one of the most legendary synths of all time and what's really interesting is that it's been brought back is the Prophet 5 and it's now back into production the Prophet 5 and the Prophet 10 by Sequential Circuits it is absolutely a legendary synth that was very innovative at it's time and very very solid and reliable construction and the reason that people used it so much is because they could have something in the studio that they could also take out on the road and it would hold up on the road and so a lot of the other synthesizers that people would use in the studio would not hold up well on the road and so this is one of the ones that kind of has stood the test of time and all these things, that's something to discuss in a synthesizer session but this is something that as you dive into this and get into how things kind of work you kind of understand what was so unique about the Prophet synthesizers so one of the first really innovative pieces of it was in the 1980's Tughead, once and a last time in 1981 and then Men Without Hats which was actually a really really great band a strange band that was started by Ukrainian immigrants to Canada that moved to the United States but it's really very very different we'll get back right here that's just such a beautiful sound there and the absolute classic here and kind of what you can notice here as time goes on as we get through the 80's people become more and more conscious people become more and more comfortable with synthesizers and more competent in what they can do at the same time the synthesizers are becoming more capable themselves and so you go from these more primitive types of sounds to really well produced and well orchestrated sounds in the way that Tears for Fears used the very same synthesizers we also have OMD and OMD is a really good example here of this evolution when you look at their very first use of synthesizers with Song and Ola Gay it felt really really primitive compared to what they were able to accomplish with this just 4 years later this gets us into the Yamaha and the Yamaha Yamaha Yamaha this gets us into the Yamaha DX7 which was released in 1983 and it completely changed synthesized music for two reasons one it was much much more affordable and the second it was an FM synth so without getting into the other the ways that that works analog synths you're starting with a sine wave and then manipulating it just so it's kind of a flat tone and then you're manipulating it and with the FM synthesis you're actually generating each of the tones in a different way rather than starting with one flat tone and manipulating it the Yamaha DX7 was everywhere and it was an interesting thing so by 1988 when you look at the top the top of the pop charts on average you'd have about 30-45% of the songs that were on the chart at any given time that would have a DX7 on them and that's just kind of crazy so Prince was one of the first ones to use this and also when you hear the sound you can hear the sound that was used on the organ it's just a far different sound than the analog synth that's there so you have Mr. Mr. Kyrie and if you can feel it the best way to describe it the best way to describe it here is that the FM synths feel a little bit more organic and less electronic than the analog like these stabs there became kind of characteristic of the DX7 and you hear them all over so these long sustains and these stabs are these are the synthetic string like things and then these synthetic horn stabs are things so and here you go this is probably one of the most iconic uses of the DX7 except for this one is I think this is probably the second most iconic use of the DX7 was Berlin and the most iconic use of the DX7 so now what we're going to do is we're going to talk about PMRC which is the Parent Music Resource Center and the Filthy Fifteen which actually sounds like a weird band in itself so getting into this we talked before about the radio so radio was the thing that was driving the music industry and radio was broadcast and the broadcast radio and broadcast television was governed and regulated by what's called the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Communications Commission or the FCC had guidelines of certain words and topics and things that were forbidden to broadcast and so because of this they used to self-censor their work so that they wouldn't be rejected by the government regulators that controlled radio because your album needed to get out on the radio in order to sell if you had content on there that wouldn't allow it to get on the radio it means you're not selling the albums and because cable was unregulated it didn't have the same censorship that the broadcast airwaves were this caused artists to kind of loosen up what was previously the self-censorship approach because of this and kind of in reaction to some of the songs that were getting out there that were not as tightly censored as before conservative politicians pretended to be morally outraged by this and created demands for regulation of cable TV along with the recording industry and created this association to steal money and also to pressure the cable TV and recording industries to be regulated by the FCC this approach also was kind of contradictory this more regulation was contradictory to the approach where of the politicians at that time which was Reagan who was very much in favor of deregulation so less regulation and more kind of freedom on these sorts of things so it would have been at odds for him to do this with the money guys that were backing him but it was also the voters on the other side of it, his core of voters were these religious, very religious people who were quite socially conservative so what ended up happening is this Parents Resource Music Center created what was called the Filthy Fifteen and these were fifteen songs and they decided that were absolutely horrible and that everyone should be aware of this and so they had a campaign of getting in media there was two points of this campaign getting and distributing the Filthy Fifteen in media and talking about how terrible it was and how it was corrupting youth and they also had, they were distributing it to churches and so to parents and churches and they'd have these sermons and all these things about how bad this music was and it led to all kinds of moral outrage and so they classified in these ratings as something that is profane or sexually explicit relating to the occult which is kind of strange something that references drugs and alcohol or something that is violent and one of the songs here that was always highlighted as being very violent and anti-authoritarian was Twisted Sister's We're Not Gonna Take It and so they ended up having these public hearings in congress about this and so Dee Schneider of Twisted Sister showed up My name is Dee Schneider that's S-N-I-D-E-R I have been asked to come here to present my views on the subject of the content of certain sound recordings and suggestions that recording packages be labeled to provide a warning to prospective purchasers of sexually explicit or other potentially offensive content So it went on to say When we watched this I mean Dee was very very he presented himself very well really extremely well supported argument and kind of made them look a little bit like idiots but politics being what politics are there was a compromise that the SEC would not have any regulations on anything but each album that had this parental advisory with explicit content and that MTV was required to show only edited versions that would not be required to have this parental advisory so if they could have a version of their song that would not trigger this advisory then it could go on MTV and then the sales would not be restricted they just had to have this warning label on them Going into this transition from Dee Schneider and Twisted Sister and this whole theme of all this stuff was androgynous but going in a different way this is the Glam Rock Part 2 where it started with the early stuff in this new wave sort of thing where rock was getting pushed aside rock was getting pushed aside because you had all of this androgynous look that was leading and so rock decided to put its own spin on it basically to keep up with MTV they were not looking as interesting or as shiny and so on so this androgynous movement consumed pop, consumed rock, consumed metal for the very very same reason which is just MTV even Christian rock adopted this exaggerated style but rock, they arrived at this point from a very different foundation of the 70's glam rock so we have starting with T-Rex in 1971 with Mark Bowen kind of having that big hair and makeup and that kind of stuff and this was kind of this proto-heavier stuff that kind of went there and also the New York Dolls so it was in 1973 so that transitions directly and influenced this you know, this Motley Crue and all the things that came out of that which were a very very stylized or hyper stylized version of something like New York Dolls or T-Rex and because it was MTV the look had to be important the music and the hair was everything in this period by 1986 this is kind of refined a little bit more into just being so much about the hair we have Poison and what's what's different here about this rock side compared and how rock, this glam rock too we're seeing kind of evolved differently from New Wave and they both arrived at this androgynous look with the New Wave and these other sounds not only were they looking different but the sound was different and in this case of this glam rock the second era of glam rock sounds like late 70s not really that much different they weren't even incorporating synths a lot like other more mainstream rock like Van Halen and Rush and all this sort of thing it was just about the look and so that's kind of the interesting thing and it was just simply because MTV forced them to do a lot of the makeup had been toned down but the hair was still big the pants were still tight but music sounded really very much the same and the reality is it wasn't all that good really and it wasn't all that interesting the early and mid 80s were absolutely incredible all around but when we got to the late 80s pretty much everything in music started to suck and there's a reason why and the reason why and we're not really going to get too deep into this because this deserves a whole thing in itself is you started to have two things that happened one was the corporate endorsements artists and tours and product placement and then the second part of this is that you had Ticketmaster started to emerge and Ticketmaster and all these sorts of things started to kind of swallow up stuff and things became much more corporate driven and profit driven and they started doing market research and all these things to figure out what's going to drive the most profit in conjunction with MTV there's something that you should look at there is a sociologist that's Douglas Rushkoff and he has a documentary that he did on MTV and how it evolved there and talks a bit about this and how it was market research that killed MTV interestingly enough because it was no longer artists and creativity driving things it was artists reacting to trends to try to make money and that's all this sort of thing and this is what you see here with this corporate magazine Still Suck because these corporate magazines changed everything in the mid to late 80's kind of after 86, 87 and it was kind of you had things like Rolling Stone and all these things that were really well established that started to really suck at that time it all got quite miserable but the great thing is that reaction to this with Alternative Rock and Grunge in the early 90's was a direct contradiction to the overproduced bands of the 80's and we can really only say thank you to Grunge and those guys for that so we have some more put here, more information on this and we'll follow up with some links I put together some playlists that I'll share and then as always there is a link to this and so thanks Hey, cool, cool, thanks very much and also guys I have updated slightly our survey so there is a slightly different question like what do you want to know on the next jam session with Daniel, so feel free to fill up your answers and the topics you would like to talk about and listen to and also we are definitely waiting for those amazing playlists and actually we are thinking that making a YouTube playlist would be real good to see all that makeup and crazy hair yeah, thanks and guys, do you want to talk to Daniel about anything, you know, share your thoughts comments, do you have any questions or have you prepared crazy makeup and crazy hair and during this hour you would like to show you can turn on the mic now, I don't know if you can turn on the mic so we can ask questions directly rather than chatting no, I think everybody is just shy wow, everybody is so shy okay so Tantra, okay, were you going to tell us about your Poison Tribute Band here, man oh my god and Simon Hicks Poison Tribute Band as well I think it's a Skid Row Tribute Band so Lin, you had this band and it was a Poison Tribute Band, did you have the makeup, the hair yeah, well like 15 years ago it was something really small scale for more than 100 people no, maybe 50-60 people but it was really fun and yeah we had kind of a hair metal vibe going on but our hair was not so big and how did you decide that you wanted to do a hair metal tribute band to be honest to be honest, we wanted to do some hard rock and hair metal but it's really hard to sing hair metal for most bands you need a really good singer and Poison's singer doesn't have that much high range so that's why our singer was able to sing the songs what did you play in the band? guitar, electric guitar and some bass but it was a lot of fun maybe I can find a video and post it for the next conference I actually played in a band when I was a kid called Boonshanka we played mostly like Echo and the Bunnymen and all kinds of other stuff like that like early 80's covers so with me and the guy now who was the guitarist in the band is the editor of Guitar Magazine who was one of my neighbors in my neighborhood growing up all the equipment that we got we bought it from used from the Osmonds I don't know if anybody knows who the Osmonds are Donny and Marie Osmond who had a recording studio was near where we were what is your favorite thing about the 80's here? I'm sorry? Rhett and Link cool anybody else got did you play in your tribute band Ring of the Dancing Horses of course Killing Moon all kinds of really obscure stuff like that cool so we are wrapping up here guys Marie? I think so thank you very much Dan a lot of nice songs one quick thing is there a way Anita to share the form if we are talking about some topics where people can just suggest some free form yeah sure I have added a question to this form I'm sharing right now what about you want to hear on the next jam session not a generic question but very specific to jam sessions it's a free form question excellent it looks like the permissions need to be set somehow I will add you as an editor to those awesome alright guys I hope it was useful and we will talk to you soon thanks Dan bye guys join us on next News Unplugged session bye bye