PPR Songs

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The 1980s are often regarded as a time when pop music became unbearably superficial. Legend has it that MTV produced an era that was style over substance, manipulated by over-involved corporate lackeys, which is how “We Built This City” happened. While there’s a kernel of truth to that assessment, the reality is far more interesting.

The “greed is good” decade was an unexpected golden age of protest music where no topic was off limits, usually with a danceable beat. Musicians that grew up on the countercultural soundtrack of the 1960s and 70s gave the 80s a lot more intellectual diversity than Top 40 radio would indicate. Spending their childhoods under the shadow of the Cold War and watching the folly of the Vietnam War on television, this generation of artists were often using their work to explore the consequences of what they perceived as avarice run amok.

As American punk emerged in the 70s, the first crop of artists weren’t apolitical, but not explicit in their politics. If American punk had a political perspective at this point, it wasn’t much deeper than the slogan of “the personal is political.”

When punk exploded in the UK, it was far more confrontational and defiant.

Elvis Costello wrote “Oliver’s Army” after personally witnessing young British soldiers walking village streets during a visit. Spandau Ballet’s “Through the Barricades” was created in tribute to a member of their touring crew that was killed in a Belfast bombing. The Police and U2 shared a common expression of exhaustion at the persistent violence. While “Invisible Sun” was highly introspective, U2′s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was far more direct in demanding “How long?” Simple Minds and Clannad provided songs of mourning rooted in Irish hymns, with “Belfast Child” and “Theme from Harry’s Game” becoming surprise hits in the UK.

At nearly seven minutes, Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” was, in 1980, an unusual song to crack Britain’s Top 40. Gabriel’s growing interest in African music and culture led to his learning about the life and death of anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko in police custody. Aiming to both inform and pay tribute, “Biko” became an entry point to Western artists paying more attention to South Africa’s human rights abuses. The song was seized by South African customs officials, as were subsequent anti-apartheid songs. As the movement coalesced around freeing Nelson Mandela from prison, the songs became more direct, with Stevie Wonder’s “It’s Wrong (Apartheid)” and the Specials’ “Free Nelson Mandela,” with Simple Minds celebrating “Mandela Day” by decade’s end.

In the U.S., E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt co-created Artists United Against Apartheid to promote a boycott of the whites-only resort, Sun City. Van Zandt assembled an impressive roster of musicians from several genres to participate, running the gamut from Miles Davis to Run-DMC to Stiv Bators, but the confrontational song failed to garner the kind of radio support that “We Are the World” enjoyed a couple of years earlier.

The Ramones continued to needle Reagan in the song “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” inspired by his tone-deaf visit to a military cemetery in West Germany that happened to be the resting place of many Waffen-SS. The Ramones weren’t alone

In Heaven 17′s “We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Thing,” they call out Reagan directly as a harbinger of doom, but I’ve always thought the song implied that they viewed Reagan as a twin demon to Margaret Thatcher. Genesis makes a similar case with “Land of Confusion,” and drives the point home with its video.

Elvis Costello and Morrissey took perverse delight in Thatcher’s death with, respectively, “Tramp the Dirt Down” and “Margaret on the Guillotine.” New Order was more constructive, taking Thatcher’s austerity policies to account in “State of the Nation.” The Beat simply demanded, “Stand Down Margaret.”

The most specific critique of Thatcherism may have been Boy George’s “No Clause 28,” condemning a loosely-worded statute that allowed local governments in the UK to ban materials seen as promoting homosexuality.

Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” cut to homophobia’s isolating impact. It’s a telling commentary cycle of liberation, backlash, and tragedy that the 1980s opens with Pete Shelley’s joyfully defiant “Homosapien,” which has evolved into an LGBTQ Pride theme song, and ends with the Pet Shop Boys’ mournful “Being Boring:” “All the people I was kissing/Some are here and some are missing...”

The Cold War, and its ensuing nuclear paranoia, prompted a strong wave of songs envisioning the end of the world. Lovers separated by war was a common theme, showing up in the Pretenders’ “Day After Day” and Nena’s “99 Luftballons.” Kate Bush’s “Breathing” pondered the after effects, where children will try to grow up in the poisonous air, while INXS considered the weapons themselves for “Guns in the Sky.”

A resurgence of anti-war songs ran parallel, often with first person narratives.

For much of the 1980s, metal was largely party music. In the documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, there’s a clip of David Lee Roth making fun of “bands like the Clash” for taking themselves too seriously. Yet heavy metal produced two ageless, blistering commentaries. “One” was Metallica’s anti-war epic, aided by a haunting video featuring clips of the film Johnny Got His Gun. Inspired by Dalton Trumbo’s novel about a horribly injured veteran, who has been left without arms, legs, a face, or a way to communicate, the end result is an immersion into the traumas of war. Megadeth’s “Peace Sells” takes an unusual approach. Where so many songs are promoting social justice, they question its commodification: “Peace sells, but who’s buying.

With “The Message,” Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five took the music of the block party and wrote about what was happening on the block. Subsequent artists like Public Enemy would cite the song as giving license to take hip-hop in a more militant direction, culminating in “Fight the Power.”

As homelessness and poverty surged in the 1980s, more mainstream artists were inclined to try to address the issue. Sung from the perspective of a woman in a homeless shelter, Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” ponders the life choices that keep people trapped in a generational cycle of poverty.

While those songs deal more directly with urban poverty, rural America was also seeing its standard of living rapidly deteriorate. The town in Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown” descends into irrelevance after the textile mill closes, and the farmers in John Mellencamp’s “Rain on the Scarecrow” and Don Henley’s “A Month of Sundays” confronts a future that doesn’t have a secure place for them.