Glamour Life Vol. 1: Fashion, Nightlife & High Society In Library Music 1980-1990
A few of the more tiresome terms one comes across in reference to a lot of music from the 80s are “cheesy” and “corny.” I dislike these terms as much as “kitsch” when describing works with actual artistic value. These terms are especially irritating because they are an unthinking form of aesthetic distancing and an attempt to place the listener above the work. Much of this attitude, I think, stems from the 1990s and the excessive backlash the alternative generation (which is also MY generation) had against the previous one, reclassifying it as embarrassing. There’s an important distinction between bad music that happens to use dated and unrefined conventions and good music whose conventions have gone out of fashion. But this distinction was not noted during the 1990s, as there was an ugly policing of tastes that required an almost obligatory public rejection of the sounds and fashions of the 1980s. Anyone not alive and in their teens by the 1990s might find this chapter of Anglo-Amer...
