The 80s, myth and reality?

[LizzieMaine]

There is no modern-era video that can top the batty wonder that is "Gus Visser and His Duck," shot at the Case-Sponable studio in 1925 as a test of what would become the Movietone sound-on-film process. Gus was what they called a "nut comic" -- a deliberately-goony vaudeville performer whose particular act consists of singing Eddie Cantor-type songs with unique accompaniment.

Gus might have been a bit too outre for the MTV of the '80s, but I bet you could have dropped him in there in 1997 and Beavis and Butt-head would've loved him.

 

[Fading Fast]

There is no modern-era video that can top the batty wonder that is "Gus Visser and His Duck," shot at the Case-Sponable studio in 1925 as a test of what would become the Movietone sound-on-film process. Gus was what they called a "nut comic" -- a deliberately-goony vaudeville performer whose particular act consists of singing Eddie Cantor-type songs with unique accompaniment.

Gus might have been a bit too outre for the MTV of the '80s, but I bet you could have dropped him in there in 1997 and Beavis and Butt-head would've loved him.

With that quality of sound on film in '25, I'm surprised it took almost five more years for talkies to take over.

The duck stole the show.

Agreed on both MTV's audience saying nyet in the '80s, but getting it by the later '90s.

Is his suit pocket - the lower one on his left - set oddly low in the body of the suit? It looks as if there isn't even enough room from the top flap of the pocket to the bottom of the jacket for a full-sized pocket to fit.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I wonder if it's a cut-down coat -- a hallmark of nut comics is their eccentric wardrobe, and it looks like that coat might have been altered to be tight at the waist and to flare out at the hips to give him an accentuated comedy silhouette -- possibly it was a longer jacket cut down at the bottom hem to create that flare. Harold Lloyd, in his "Lonesome Luke" persona of the 1910s, wore a woman's nip-waisted suit jacket to create the same effect.

An entire treatise could be written on comedy tailoring of the vaudeville era. Fred Allen remembered going on stage in a top hat, an Inverness cape, a cut-down coat, pegged pants, and flap shoes, with the handle of a toilet chain for a watch fob. Gus isn't quite going for that extreme an effect, but I suspect if you could see him full view his attire would not be entirely in line with the height of 1920s fashion.

The Case-Sponable process was a refinement of Phonofilm, which was successfully marketed on a roadshow basis to theatres as early as 1923 -- the DeForest company would install temporary equipment for each local performance and then pack it up and move on to the next town. Theodore Case and Earl Sponable made a few improvements in the basic system, but they didn't have the money to market their version -- that had to wait until William Fox got involved in 1927. It was mostly disputes over patents and the cost of marketing that kept sound from taking over in the early twenties.

 

[Fading Fast]

I wonder if it's a cut-down coat -- a hallmark of nut comics is their eccentric wardrobe, and it looks like that coat might have been altered to be tight at the waist and to flare out at the hips to give him an accentuated comedy silhouette -- possibly it was a longer jacket cut down at the bottom hem to create that flare. Harold Lloyd, in his "Lonesome Luke" persona of the 1910s, wore a woman's nip-waisted suit jacket to create the same effect.

An entire treatise could be written on comedy tailoring of the vaudeville era. Fred Allen remembered going on stage in a top hat, an Inverness cape, a cut-down coat, pegged pants, and flap shoes, with the handle of a toilet chain for a watch fob. Gus isn't quite going for that extreme an effect, but I suspect if you could see him full view his attire would not be entirely in line with the height of 1920s fashion.

The Case-Sponable process was a refinement of Phonofilm, which was successfully marketed on a roadshow basis to theatres as early as 1923 -- the DeForest company would install temporary equipment for each local performance and then pack it up and move on to the next town. Theodore Case and Earl Sponable made a few improvements in the basic system, but they didn't have the money to market their version -- that had to wait until William Fox got involved in 1927. It was mostly disputes over patents and the cost of marketing that kept sound from taking over in the early twenties.

Lizziepedia > Wikipedia

 

[Edward]

The first time I saw MTV was in a laundromat in Santa Barbara in 1983, where it played continuously on what passed at the time as a "giant" television screen suspended from the ceiling -- with the sound completely down. Seen silent, it was like viewing a mysterious alien transmission from deep space.

It's a standard in many bars - it was popular in Belfast, even, around the time I escaped (no idea if it still is) - having the radio or music on for sound.... and then they put on MTV's music video content for visuals. WTH? I mean... why? Why not just choose a classic film with some cool visuals and screen that instead, or a news channel with subtitles on, or.... anything. Why put on what is supposed to be a music channel..... and not use the sound? It's like holding a screening of Harold Lloyd pictures and using only the soundtrack while showing the visuals from an old episode of Dallas.

 

[Fading Fast]

It's a standard in many bars - it was popular in Belfast, even, around the time I escaped (no idea if it still is) - having the radio or music on for sound.... and then they put on MTV's music video content for visuals. WTH? I mean... why? Why not just choose a classic film with some cool visuals and screen that instead, or a news channel with subtitles on, or.... anything. Why put on what is supposed to be a music channel..... and not use the sound? It's like holding a screening of Harold Lloyd pictures and using only the soundtrack while showing the visuals from an old episode of Dallas.

There's a bar near us that has four or five screens (not obnoxiously, just medium sized screens - a few over the bar a few in the restaurant area) that usually has one set to TCM (I'm sure you know, but it's a classic/old movie channel).

Most of the time, the volume is off, but as you imply, it's still entertaining as the visuals of some of those old movies are stunning and, if you're like me, you know the stories of many of them. Even if you don't, it's a more interesting visual than the rapidly flipping images of a music video (which makes all but no sense to play without sound).

 

[HudsonHawk]

Although filmed music with visuals has been around that long, I think the term 'music video' became a thing when the piece of music with visuals was made to specifically stand on its own and broadcast in a specifically formatted channel (MTV). Prior to that I think the term 'music video' pretty much didn't exist.

MTV was the first channel dedicated solely to music videos, but there were other programs showing them, several years earlier. Video Concert Hall and Night Flight were two U.S. programs. The first music video broadcast on MTV, Video Killed The Radio Star, was made several years before MTV debuted (and obviously all videos broadcast during the start-up were made prior).

I agree with the statement earlier about how video sort of forces an interpretation on you, but I also remember the early videos having an almost "making it real" feeling for me. Most of the early videos featured the singing and playing instruments, either from live concert footage or simulated, and that brought a realism that wasn't apparent on records. I had seen variety shows and the like which featured some of that, but it was always high produced. Seeing it "in the raw" had a big impact on me, that music wasn't made in a black box somewhere, there were real people cranking it out in real time. "Seeing" the music made that point, at least for me.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Feels good.

 

[Juanito]

Feels good.

Good to see the thread brought back to life.

 

[Trenchfriend]

I read, that the Neo-80s music from the last five years is called "synthwave".

 

[Edward]

MTV was the first channel dedicated solely to music videos, but there were other programs showing them, several years earlier. Video Concert Hall and Night Flight were two U.S. programs. The first music video broadcast on MTV, Video Killed The Radio Star, was made several years before MTV debuted (and obviously all videos broadcast during the start-up were made prior).

Music videos as we think we know them are really a 1970s innovation, but the roots go back. It is often trotted out as assumed wisdom that the first music video was Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, though Alice Cooper made a promotional film for Elected in 1972. Jimi Hendrix was one of the first to play around with the format in the sixties; he made a few promo clips with Purple Haze, though I don't know if they ever saw the light of day. Then there was Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues and more... It wasn't until the early eighties, though, that many acts saw them as worth doing, hence the risible "innovation" of dance crews like Legs Eleven on the BBC's Top of the POps, designed to create a visual for the records they played when bands weren't available or declined to appear (Many big names, most notably The Clash, refused to ever go on TOTP because the BBC refused to let them play live. For many years, they even refused to allow the vocals to be live, demanding instead that acts lip-sync as well as miming their instruments. Needless to say, this was subverted in all sorts of ways over the years).

Back in the eighties in the UK, BBC2 for a while ran a show called something like Video JUke Box which showed a mix of, from memory, rare early music videos and their own, made-up videos for old songs that never had one. That was interesting.

I read, that the Neo-80s music from the last five years is called "synthwave".

See, that's the sort of revisionism nostalgia brings. Yes, the mainstream pop for much of the eighties was dominated by sythesisers, but I never liked "electronic" music, and spent the decade listening to guitar-basaed music instead.

 

[Juanito]

While I realize this thread is about the 1980s, I think one needs to understand the decades leading up to it to understand why the 1980s were what they were. It may be simply that this is the time period I have experienced, just as someone born 30 years prior or after would for their own era, but to me the 1970s were the trough, and the 1980s was the start of the turn around, or as I mentioned earlier, the optomism.

It also doesn't hurt that with all the music references the article is about Bruce Springsteen.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/402137/

 

[LizzieMaine]

The 80s were the decade that the Boys From Marketing got their second wind. The 70s were the last gasp of the original "motivational research" operators that Vance Packard had denounced in the 1950s, and you could see in the desperate grasping at straws that constituted early 1970s advertising and media that the Old Boys were struggling to cope with a world that they didn't understand. Note how late 60s/early 70s advertising doubled down on crude male-gaze sexism -- "I'm Doris -- Fly Me!" By the 80s women were making it clear that they weren't going to put with this crap, so we got The Boys: The Next Generation, the first wave of Boomer kids with their own ideas on how to sell -- sell the emotion, not the product.

You can see this shift most obviously in the way political candidates were sold: it wasn't enough to just put the candidate out there, or to criticize the opposition -- the candidate had to be wrapped in sunbeams, with soaring choruses, galloping horses, chirping birds, and perfect smiles. Sally Q. Punchclock might have just lost her job when the plant went overseas -- but when she turned on her TV she was implored to believe that it was "Morning In America." It might have been a gloomy November afternoon in Sally's town as the line burgeoned at the unemployment office, but the New Boys and their new approach proved very very effective.

 

[Edward]

While I realize this thread is about the 1980s, I think one needs to understand the decades leading up to it to understand why the 1980s were what they were. It may be simply that this is the time period I have experienced, just as someone born 30 years prior or after would for their own era, but to me the 1970s were the trough, and the 1980s was the start of the turn around, or as I mentioned earlier, the optomism.

Thnigs definitely varied by geography; the eighties was the last decade, really, before popular culture started to homogenise globally. Sure, we had Hollywood films and American rock and roll and McDonalds (in some places, at least - they didn't open in Belfast until 1992), but they were glossy imports. American magazines claimed Led ZEppelin as the root of all great rock music; few in the UK outside the metal niche cared about them - they certainly weren't the nostalgic affair they were later presented as in Dazed and Confused (though tbh how anyone could be remotely nostalgic about anything in that film...). For us, punk rock was the seventies, not the eighties. The seventies was an austere decade in the UK (as had been the fifties, the sixties a little brighter), especially in Northern Ireland with the troubles which peaked between 1970ish and 1987 (though dragging on until 1994). The eighties are often sold in retrospect as a bright and prosperous rebuilding, which they were for some, but for most - especially in the more deprived parts of Scotland, NI, they were times of factory closures, record unemployment, and the rise of substance abuse cominhg out of the hopelessness of the same. There was a massive resurgence in the 'them and us' culture in politics, with the rise of a hard government that was largely put in place by the more prosperous, and enforced policies of idealogical privatisation and closures. Whereas the previous govenrment had controversially closed coalmines that were no longer profit making rather than subsidise them for the jobs they provided, the post 1979 order closed viable pits leaving whole chunks of Wales and the North of England especially economically devastated as alternative jobs were simply not created. (This crreated the roots of many deproived, North of England areas where to this day it is not uncommon to see a third generation who have never worked a stable job and associated cultural problems). The Scottish heroin boom around which Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and its companion novels are based recounts this well, especially the prequel Sick Boys, which gives a strong sense of politics in Scotland in the esarly eighties, also in a wider UK context. It opens with the notorious Battle of Orgreave in June 1984, at which mounted police were charged against a hitherto non-violent picket of 5,000 miners - an event which remains controversial as much for its aftermath (media edited footage designed to presnt the police as reactive to missiles rather than charging first, provoking the riot; the collapse of trumped-up charges of 'rioting' against a number of individual strikers, and so on). Far from the first time that the forces of law and order had been used against the civilian population with an apparently political intent, but one of the first in living memory. For many 'who were there' in the UK these events are the defining moments of the early-mid eighties. I know I was incredibly lucky to be a child then (I turned ten in 1984) and to have the particular parents I did; I was shielded from a lot of the worst of the time. Even so, the eighties I see celebrated now as a retro fad are not the eighties I remember. That said, I'm sure a lot of people would point at those of us who like to revive styles from the twenties to the fifties and say much the same thing. Especially here in the UK, where the fifties scene in particular is heavily Americanised and bears little resemblence to the British experience of that decade. Which is fine by me, frankly; it's the same with the twenties and thirties, everybody wants to be Lord of the Manor, nobody wants to recreate the harde life of the servants. I'm grand with that, just so long as everyoned realises that it's a fantasy and not 'how things really were'. Certainly, I oftewn look at my own vintage-nostaliga in a different way now I have had the experience of seeing younger folks born in the nineties retrofy a decade I remember well, from before their birth.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think once all the nostalgia settles down the Eighties will really be remembered as the last analog decade. An adult from 1937 could have been set down in 1987 and, while there certainly would have been a culture shock, they still would have seen enough that was familiar to reassure them that they weren't on an alien world. People still talked on recognizable telephones, people still used recognizable typewriters, there was no significant difference in driving a car, television was still programmed in a way that would be recognizable to someone who was familiar with 1930s radio, newspapers were still the most important form of public media, and so on -- and computers were not a necessary part of life for the average person. The 80s were the last era in which all this was true. An adult from 1987 transported forward to 2037 would be pretty much completely lost.

 

[Trenchfriend]

90s born kids should hear this, day by day:

 

[Trenchfriend]

I don't know, if Lily & Madeleine wanted to do a reminiscence or a parody of the 80s, with their new video.

 

[Trenchfriend]

 

[MikeKardec]

Recently I've had an interesting "vision" (in quotes because it's all about hearing rather than sight) on the 1980s. In the last few weeks I have started restoring/re-editing one of the audio dramas I wrote and directed in the 80s and 90s. The story is very much along the lines of and Alfred Hitchcock movie or Cornell Woolrich novel; a noir crime story about a young executive caught in a spiral of malign fate after committing a petty crime. I produced it around 1986. As we've all noted before there was a resurgence of noir-ish stories in the '80s and mine was a very minor player in whatever that trend was. Stylistically, we set it in an unspecific past. It was audio, therefore like a radio play, the dialog and narration hearkened back to classic film noir, and the original story had been written in the late 1940s. Basically we just allowed it to exist in an imaginary "noir time." We did not use dated technology or old effects props but we consciously did not choose the most up to date sounds; the audience's imagination could set the era to whatever decade they desired.

Fast forward (suddenly an apt turn of phrase) 30 plus years and we are going back and stripping out the sound effects (this was an early effort, therefore they sucked) and music (pretty good but very dated with its 1980s samplers) which had a sax oriented club combo sound that was not unknown in the "80 (think Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes). We have cleaned up and re equalized the dialog.

My initial idea was to have our composer re-play/re-lay the music with modern technology and for my editor and I to redo the sound effects using classic Hollywood effects ... in other words not going out and recording them in the field as we usually have but to use vintage "canned" effects to allow it to have a sound that comes, literally, out of the past.

The surprising thing, however, is that the sounds of the world in the 1980s (the crumby effects we are replacing) is, just on their own, the sound of a vanished era. To our ears it is remarkably retro, seemingly older than our memories of when we recorded it. The existing tracks actually sells the "general noir era" concept very well (except for the poor recording and mix). Many of the effects we recorded were of technology that were not new at the time (elevators, cars, etc) or were things that were about to change. One of the first effects in the show is that of a dial actuated pay phone. It really brought home the fact that, though I feel the '80s were somehow "just yesterday," a great deal of time has passed. The 1980s are almost as far in the past today as the times we were using as inspiration for our show when we recorded it.

 

[Edward]

The relative time can be a shock. I realised the other night thst the late sixties shows I used to watch around 1991 were more recent then than Twin Peaks is now!