He argues that heroes like Mick Jagger were being replaced by the computer and tech creators like Bill Gates and that the regime change from Democrats to Republicans helped speed along the corporate takeover. Ronald Reagan had been working for years leading up to this environment, fighting in the 1960s to outlaw LSD and push along the Vietnam War and crying for family values in the 1970s to replace the morally decrepit hippy takeover. He finally took over the whole she-bang at age 69 - the second-oldest president elect ever behind Joe Biden - which actually helped him in the eyes of many who had begun to distrust the youth culture that had supposedly ruined the country over the past decade-plus. Religion came back strong in the 80s as well, partly branded as a way to restore moral fiber, which could obviously be seen hanging by a thread in the parking lot of any high school in the U.S., with dope and acid and other poisonous gases porously escaping into the atmosphere.
Like with punk before it, certain segments of music started to happen completely outside of the mainstream. In the Bronx, DJs started talking over extended funk and disco jams, which was morphing into a new art form called rap. While it was Sugarhill Records that got the hip hop and rap balls rolling, it was Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin with Def Jam Records who “revolutionized the realm of recorded sound,” with the likes of the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, and Public Enemy, bands that all brought in dirty words to the genre as well. While criticized by Blacks and whites, the Beasties’ debut License to Ill was a major departure from their previous hardcore sound and turned rap into a money-making proposition for the first time.
Rock music, and music in general, was becoming less of a focus for consumers because video games and VCRs were now entering the picture and taking up people’s time. In fact, it was inevitable that TV and music would merge. USA Today’s Night Flight and HBO’s Video Jukebox preceded MTV. It may have been the blandness of FM radio at this time that also helped MTV succeed.
Rock criticism was changing too. Whereas before, a good or bad album review in Rolling Stone could make a real difference, now people were seeing the music they wanted to listen to and could make choices based on that. Dave Marsh had helped break bands like the Who and Bruce Springsteen, but his decrees that MTV was killing rock got him fired from Rolling Stone by Jann Wenner, who appreciated anything that made money. Kurt Loder was an example of someone who could swallow his pride and his tastes to become a regular MTV presence.
The consumerist mindset of the country took deeper root with the help of the first generation of MTV stars like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince, and the record companies loved that they could replace albums with CDs, were much cheaper to produce and distribute. While the Beatles, Stones, and Bob Dylan pumped out an album a year in the 1960s, by the 1980s, top artists were lucky to release one every four years, partly because they were all acting, doing TV shows, and making videos for optimal mass marketing.
The only guitar-based music still having major mainstream success began to be “poodle-haired bands like Bon Jovi, Poison, and Def Leppard.” Female empowerment grew by leaps and bounds in the decade, with Madonna leading the charge of women emasculating men in her music videos. Exercise also became big as the yuppies needed to alter their decadent behavior of the past two decades and find a way to clean up their acts and their minds and bodies. Many men were baffled by the newfound control that women were using and retreated into the world of porn, which would explode with the later introduction of the Internet. All this set up the right climate for Tina Turner to finally write her autobiography and hang her wife-beating former husband Ike out to dry.
Sonic Cool is a really fun book to read. In a way that's surprising because it's a fairly academic perspective on rock music's place in society, but nearly every paragraph offers a display of Harrington's cutting wit and discerning eye. He's strongly opinionated and I don't always agree with him. For instance, I still think rock is alive, but he has a point that it now occupies a far smaller percentage of the public's imagination than it did during its heyday of the 1960s through the 1980s.
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