Podcast

In the 1980s, there were major changes in the music industry. The introduction of the Walkman gave listeners control over what they listened to. Blank cassettes allowed people to record their own music. Cable TV brought MTV, a revolutionary music video channel. Musicians needed to look good as well as sound good. The New Romantic movement emerged, with androgynous looks and elaborate costumes. The use of synthesizers and drum machines created a new sound. Bands like Kraftwerk and David Bowie were pioneers in this era. The 1980s brought significant changes to the music industry and popular culture. 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 jumped into this. Okay. Cool. Yeah, so everybody, please participate and ask some unexpected questions. It will be funnier, more exciting. So I think we can start. 26 people joined already. So 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. Yep, good job. 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 add 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, I 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. 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 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. So, this was happening also in Berlin, which at the time was very far away from the center of the popular music, like 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, take this idea. What was happening at that time was disco in the 1970s. So, in mid to late 1970s to early 80s was 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 kind of thing. So, this 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 the Moog synthesizers, and he 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 take Kraftwerk, and then it became something kind of else. So, you see in this, and this was when we have Two Way Army in 1979, with Our Friends 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, but 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. But 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 insane sorts of things. He starts to get into video, and this whole idea of this stylized music video that wasn't a performance, necessarily a straight ahead performance, became this 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 Cars 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, for 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 for specific favor to favor specific songs to get them more airplay, causing several scandals in the 1960s, which resulted into government hearings and changes in the laws. And the radio stations were, you know, 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, what is interesting is when we think about streaming now, you're paying per stream. So when people listen to it, they get paid. You know, 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 that challenged radio's dominance and completely changed the music industry, like, 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. Because 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 blank 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'd 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 kind of, that same amount of impact in terms of changes in user behavior and possibility. So another thing that was happening with this, you know, leading to this second innovation, which actually had as much of an impact, or 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'll kind of... This is the very, you know, at its launch, at the same time, you know, earlier 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 it seemed to, 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. 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 because 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, and to be able to show it on the radio, on MTV, so there was a lot of repeats. So 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. And 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 the commercials were like this. I want my MTV. I want my MTV. Call your cable company and say I want my MTV. So these campaigns were, it was constant and it was everywhere to the point where, I don't know if you guys, a lot of you remember Dire Straits, this kind of came into the song with Money for Nothing. Chris 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 the first, 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. And so it was also, 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 had video, and everything is about video, you know, there's this expression that someone says, you know, that when we talk about a musician that they say they have a face for radio. And meaning that that's not someone that they would want to put out there, could really promote, but they'd be great on the radio, because they sound good. Now musicians not only needed to sound good, but they needed to look good, and they needed to look interesting, right? And they needed to look like, so this kind of defined this new generation of what this pop star was. And so with MTV now driving record sales, the whole idea is to have looks and things that people would talk about, you know, have something that was, you're not going to get anywhere else. 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 Numan, and it started becoming more and more and more extreme. An example of this, you know, this gender bending thing started in 1981 with Duran Duran as one of the examples. So the hair, the makeup, the androgynous clothing. Then 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 for these guys and thought, hey, you know, we could actually sing too. And they tried their hand at it. So they actually became quite successful at it too. And it wasn't a bad band, by the way. So here's now you have that new sound, that new look and all these things from the most extreme example of haircuts here, I think, is Kajagoogoo. And Kajagoogoo is surprisingly a really good band. I mean, 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. But let's go back and get us some more Kajagoogoo here. So then we have Dead or Alive. That kind of capitalized again on this androgynous look. And in this particular case, they were, they looked better than they sounded. You know, and they were better performers and better showmen than they were actually musicians. And that was a big part of some of these things 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 these wild haircuts and makeup and all this stuff had already been done before. And this was all pioneered by David Bowie and all the early glam. And what's interesting here is that, you know, 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. Like, he was kind of like the, kind of Pied Piper in a way, some of this sort of thing. So with his video, Ashes, well first let's look at Life on Mars where we see, you know, the hair, the makeup and a really polished music video. And for the time, it being 1973, having this really polished video is 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 is one, that, you know, he's now returning to this kind of a 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. But 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. So if you look at, in this video you'll start to see very glammed up and stylized costumes. Okay, so these guys here in this video here, as you go through it, 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 called The Blitz and Blitz was 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. And so they would come to The Blitz and kind of as the popularity of this group had grown, they created these more, it got more and more experimental and people would kind of come to this. It was something similar to kind of Studio 54 in New York in the 70s, but for more of an art crowd. And 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 and 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, kind of put them in there. And 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 that they were creating at the time and 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 Groups of Blitz Kids to kind of make it in the mainstream, came up with the Fade to Gray. And you see it's very synth driven and it's also this kind of, it looks like performance art stuff. And so the videos here are things that look like what would have been on the stage at Blitz in those, 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 and all that kind of thing, breaking of these norms. But the thing is that 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 Fantasie, 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 the, it was about how you looked and 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 out, you know, not from London. Some of those bands, you know, Duran Duran was an example of that, Spandau 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, as if you were in the session last week when we talked about the drum machines, you know, the Linn drum being a big component of this. And when we go back to this whole point with, where, you know, you had with Gary Newman, where Gary Newman says, hey, you know, his band quit. And he's like, okay, well, I'm just gonna do this myself. So he used the drum machine because he didn't have a drummer. And that became kind of this stylized thing. And then you have other guys, as we showed last week with Human League, you know, where this drum machine band 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 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, you know, all together. And it had this combination of this, you know, studio performer as kind of thing. So there were a few innovations with some of these synthesizers and had some very unique sounds. And so kind of what I want to do is just kind of 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. And what's funny about 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. You know, this is what plays, like the sound you get without adjusting or tweaking everything. And there's all these other musicians that go and they spend all this time, Prince for example, tweaking and tweaking, tweaking to get these sounds. And the patch mode goes, it just opens up the box and just starts plonking and the exact thing what you get out of the box. So this is in 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, you know, 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. You know, 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. He's doing exactly the opposite with the synthesizer here, the same synthesizer that the patch mode was. He's exploring all the kind of wild sounds you can get with it and kind of finding the limits. And then finally he's using the mod wheel and, you know, using it in things to bend the pitch similar to the way that Bernie Worrell, who was the synth player for Parliament or Funkadelic would use it. And that's kind of where he got this sort of thing from but use it in a completely different, use 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, you know, for a lot more expressive types of parts there. Next big thing was the Oberheim OB series. So it was OB, OBX, and so on that came in pretty quick succession in the early 1980s. You would hear it in the 70s. Like this was a popular synth. Like 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, you know, a lot of these other bands. I mean, yes, used it a lot. So, but now you start to 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. He's also probably the greatest master of the Lindrum that ever exist. 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 expose, get his music exposed to, you know, 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. And it didn't matter how hard he tried or what he tried to do, he couldn't get the same sound. And he would ask Prince, you know, well, what are you doing with this preset or how are you doing this? And he would say, you know, he wouldn't share his presets. So during a break in a tour, all the equipment stayed in the storage of the production company, which, you know, 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, you know, right in the break in the tour. It was a 1980-81 tour. And so when we listen to Controversy, which at that time was a very unique synth sound. So now what we do here is look at Rick James with Give It To Me Baby, which he recorded right after that with that stolen gear. So it becomes pretty obvious to people listening to that at the time that people could notice like, okay, well, you ripped this off, like literally ripped it off from Prince. And so what Prince had to do then 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 them to these presets that if you were copying him, it'd be so incredibly obvious that you were copying him. So with this, the next album here, it became really, really obvious. Okay, what do you think? So this is Delirious. Let's go back to hear this Prince sound. There was nothing sounding like that at the time. So then we have kind of a similar thing when we get into 1990. So again, Prince had no choice but to change his sound. We get into the next one, 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 had been a very, 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, became 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... They used two synths on this primarily. This was the Roland Juno 60 and then the Yamaha DX7-152 in a minute. So this is kind of hard to go through with 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. It was very innovative at its time, and very, very solid and reliable construction. And that's why 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 created some really, really interesting and innovative sounds. This was one of the first poly synths as well, so meaning that it's polyphonic. And then they have poly touch and all these things. That's something to discuss in a synthesizer kind of session. But this is something that, as you dive into this and get into understanding different synths and how things kind of work, you can understand what was so unique about the Prophet synthesizers. So one of the first really innovative pieces of it was, in the 1980s, was on Bughead's Once in a Lifetime in 1981. And then Men Without Hats, which was actually a really, really great band, a strange band. It was started by Ukrainian immigrants to Canada that moved to the United States, but it's just really very, very different. But that's just such a beautiful sound there. And the absolute classic here. And kind of what you can notice here as kind of time goes on, as we get through the 80s, 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 the song Enola Gay, it felt really, really primitive compared to what they were able to accomplish with this just four years later. 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 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'd look at the top of the pop charts in the top 10, on average, you'd have about 30 to 45% on a range of the songs that were on the chart at any given time that would have the 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 where he's using it on the organ and some of these other things where it's just a far different sound than the analog synths that they're so. You have Mr. Mr. Kyrie. And if you can feel, 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. And these stabs there became kind of characteristic of the DX7 and you hear them all over. So these long sustains and these stabs are like the, these are the things, the string like, the synthetic string like things and then these synthetic horn stabs are things. 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 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. But so getting into this, so the, we talked about before about the radio. So radio was the thing that was driving the music industry, was driving record sales 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 they, that were forbidden to broadcast. And so because of this, artists 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 this self-censorship approach. Because of this, and in 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 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, you know, they were his core 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 15 songs that they decided that were absolutely horrible and that everyone should be aware of this. And so they had a campaign of getting in media. It was two points of this campaign, is 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 in churches, then they'd have these sermons and all these things about how bad this music was and it led to all kinds of moral outrage, let's say. 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 so they had these particular categories in here. 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 and... 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, quote, 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, unquote. So it went on to say, if you watch this, 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 had to have a 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 didn't have, that would not trigger this advisory, then it could go on MTV and then the albums would not be, sales would not be restricted, they just had to have this warning label on them. You know, going to this transition from Dee Schneider and Twisted Sister and, you know, 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 and rock was getting pushed aside because, you know, you had all of this sort of androgynous look that was leading and so rock decided to put its own spin on it basically to keep up with MTV. You know, they were not looking as interesting, you know, or as shiny and so on. So this androgynous movement and the big hair, you know, saying here consume pop, it consume rock, it consume metal and all 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 70s glam rock. Here 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 this is 1973. So that transitions directly and influenced this, you know, this Motley crew 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 as the music and the hair, the hair was everything in this period. You look at by 1986, this is kind of refined a little bit more into just being so much about the hair. We like it, we have poison. And what's different here about this rock side compared and how rock, this glam rock too we're saying 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, the music didn't really sound that much different as it did before. I mean, you could close your eyes and this would sound, you know, 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. So it was just about the look, right? And so that's kind of the interesting thing and it was just simply because MTV forced them to do. When we look at by 1989, 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, like 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. So you had Pepsi sponsoring artists and tours and product placement. And then the second part of this is that you had Ticketmaster started to emerge. 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, Douglas Rushkoff, and he has a documentary that he did on MTV and kind of 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 Kurt, this corporate magazine still suck because it was these corporate magazines changed everything in the mid to late 80s, kind of after 86, 87. And then it really started going down. 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 was Alternative Rock and grunge of the early 90s that was a direct contradiction to the overproduced hair bands of the 80s 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 to this. 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. Then thanks very much. And also guys, I have updated slightly our survey. So there is slightly different question. Like what do you want to know on the next 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 hairs. Yeah, thanks. Well, guys, do you want to talk to Daniel about anything? Share your thoughts, comments. So do you have any questions or have you prepared crazy makeup and crazy hair during this hour? Anybody would like to show off? You can turn on the mics now. I don't know if you can turn on the mics and people can ask questions directly rather than chatting in there. No, I think everybody is just shy. Yeah, everybody is so shy. Okay, so Pietro, okay, you got to tell us about your Poison tribute band here, man. Oh my God. And Simon, Simon Hintz Poison tribute band as well. I think he had a Skid Row tribute band. So when you had this band, it was a Poison tribute band. Did you have the makeup, the hair, the... Yes, well, it was like 15 years ago and it was something really small scale. We didn't play for more than 100 people. No, maybe 50, 60 people. But it was a big, really fun. And, you know, we had that 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? Oh, you know, to be honest, we wanted to do some hard rock hair metal, but it's really hard to sing hair metal for most bands. It's really, actually, you need a really good singer. And the Poison 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 backing. But it was a lot of fun. Maybe I can find a video and post it for the next conference. Nice. I actually played in a band when I was a kid. I was playing bass in a band called Boomshanker. And we played mostly like Echo and the Bunnymen and all kinds of other stuff like that, like early 80s covers. But it was me and the guy who, the guy now who was the guitarist in the band, is the editor of Guitar Magazine. Fun enough. Who was one of my neighbors in my neighborhood growing up. Okay. Yeah, we got, all the equipment that we got was, we bought it from, used from the Osmonds. I don't know if anybody knows who the Osmonds are. But the Osmonds, so Donny and Marie Osmond, who had a recording studio, was near where we were. And so, Osmond, what is this, your favorite thing about the 80s here? What do we got? I'm sorry? We got Rittenlink. Cool. All right. Cool. Anybody else got, what do we got here? Did you play in your tribute band, Ring of the Dancing Horses? Of course. Of course. That's like the quintessential Echo and the Bunnyman. Wow. Killing Moon as well. And all kinds of really obscure stuff like that. Nice. Cool. So we're wrapping up here, guys. Maria? Yeah, I think so. Thank you very much, Dan. It was really cool. A lot of, obviously, a lot of nice songs. Cool videos. One quick thing. I don't know, Anita is sharing this form. Is there a way, Anita, to share the form if we're talking about some topics or things where people can just suggest some free form? Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, actually, I have added a question to this form I'm sharing right now. What about you want to hear on the next jam session? Particularly, like, not generic questions about Muse Unplugged, 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 forms as well. Awesome. All right, guys. I hope it was useful and we will talk to you soon. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Dan. Talk to you soon. Bye, guys. Join us on the next Muse Unplugged session. Bye, bye.