Transmission
The body of Ian Curtis, lead singer for the English band Joy Division, was discovered on May 18, 1980. Torn apart by love and epilepsy and crumpled by pressure, Curtis hanged himself with the rope of an overhead clothes rack in the kitchen of his Manchester terraced house. That year, the influential music magazine Melody Maker would vote “Love Will Tear Us Apart” the #1 single of 1980. The album Closer, released after Curtis’s tragic death, would become a testament to his journey to the dark side of life. It remains highly influential to fellow musicians and fans to this day. Joy Division was not a commercially successful band, but Bono, lead singer of U2, would call Curtis the Roy Orbison of his generation, thanks to his haunting vocal style.
The body of Kurt Cobain, lead singer for the American band Nirvana, was discovered on April 8, 1994 in his Seattle mansion. It was estimated that he had been dead for three days: suicide by shotgun was the official police verdict. Drugs, depression, and disillusionment with the shallow music industry that had made him a star were cited as reasons for him taking his own life. In his suicide letter, addressed to his imaginary childhood friend Boddah, Cobain wrote: “I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing…for too many years now.” He concluded with a quote from Neil Young: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Cobain’s death brought the grunge movement to an end.
These two deaths bookend the growth and development of what music critics call “the alternative scene.” At one end, Curtis exemplified a unique voice, stage persona, and poetic lyrics, and, along with Joy Division, might have harnessed the new energy and excitement of the eighties to become one of the period’s most successful artists. In fact, after Curtis’s death, the surviving members of the band — Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris — renamed themselves New Order and became one of the decade’s defining dance/rock bands. The dark themes that Curtis explored were later visible in groups such as Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails, who started off in the musical margins and made their way to the mainstream, as Joy Division might have done had Curtis survived his own personal troubles.
At the other end, Cobain exemplified how this huge new phenomenon of popular culture destroyed the outsider stance that gave the artist meaning and comfort. Nirvana became the mainstream success it had set out to attack. The anti-fashion of grunge became the fashion of the season. Cobain became a poster child for consumerism, not the hero of individual freedom that he, like all authentic rock and rollers, had set out to be.
In between these two tragic deaths a large, sophisticated pop machine was constructed: new sounds, new media, new technologies, new global markets, and new wealth. The symbiotic relationship between music and media companies became ever closer, and even more manipulated than in previous decades, until eventually both parties absorbed each other. The changes that took place in the eighties would position the music industry for enormous expansion, setting it up for the nineties, during which pre-recorded music sales would double in value in just ten years.
Death — in the falling out of vogue sense — is nothing new in pop culture; indeed, it’s intrinsic to its existence. Pop culture celebrates the “new,” which requires that the “old” be replaced. The artifacts and the stars experience death — either literally or metaphorically. The history of the music industry reflects the cycle of death and rebirth: old 78-rpm records are replaced by vinyl 45s, the Beatles displace Elvis, and punk obliterates disco. For the majority of artists, music careers appear and disappear as quickly as their youth. In the eighties, this cycle sped up considerably. Artists that were important in the first half of the decade, such as Gary Numan, Duran Duran, or Blondie, had little relevance after 1985. And cassettes, which replaced vinyl as the dominant music format during the early ’80s, had been condemned to the musical scrap heap by decade’s end, courtesy of compact discs.
There has always been interplay among politics, the economy, and culture. For instance, the German Weimar Republic and its massive cultural revival in the 1920s, and the cultural upheavals in Western Europe and the United States in the 1960s, with colourful fashions, recreational drugs, and modern music all against the backdrop of the Cold and Vietnam Wars. The 1980s offered a quite different and graphic example of this with political and social turbulence mirrored by upheavals in the music industry’s technology, production process, and musical/lyrical representation. Even copyright was challenged. It was a period in which — more than any previous time — music, politics, and the economy became intertwined. Artists became more involved with political and humanitarian causes than in any previous decade, with benefit concerts for everything from feeding the hungry and the homeless to saving the rainforests and the whales.Governments relaxed broadcasting rules, allowing more outlets for music in both television and radio. And consumer products allied themselves with music and pop personalities. Movies such as Flashdance, Dirty Dancing, and The Breakfast Club tapped into the young psyche, not only with story and pictures, but also with an infectious soundtrack. In the mid-eighties, Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola would start their soft-drink wars, recruiting stars such as Michael Jackson (Pepsi) — whose hair would famously catch fire during the shooting of the commercial — Paula Abdul (Coke), and Max Headroom (New Coke), to endorse their product.
(excerpt from The Republic of Rock’n’Roll: From Curtis to Cobain.)
