Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Organisation

Essential History of Electronic Music 

X. Those of Synth Pop and Other Melancholies 

The '80s were, essentially, the same throughout. Anyone who attempted to find any fragmentation in them received the most bitter disappointment: in the era of Siouxsie's Post-punk, Hüsker Dü's Hardcore, and the second Canadian industrial era, the unrivaled phenomenon capable of engulfing all other trends was Synth pop. Following in the footsteps of dance phenomena by KC & The Sunshine Band, Donna Summer, and the Bee Gees, popular music donned a synthetic attire without overdoing it, through a simplification of melody aimed solely at attracting the greatest possible number to the dance floor. It was the decade of padded shoulders, black vests, lacquered big hair, the era of few phenomena like Duran Duran, Tears For Fears, Spandau Ballet, Soft Cell, but also of the many flashes in the pan like Baltimora, a-ha, Q Lazzarus, Buggles. The formula was very simple: a collective with a very basic knowledge of music composition, a good sound engineer, a sex symbol updated to the '80s capable of reviving the clean and in-tune singing tradition of the '60s. Perhaps with too much self-indulgence, a sequence of numerous easy-listening phenomena emerged, all centered around the same few chords, similar sounds, and overall monotonous vocal timbres. The scene appeared paradoxically brutish, hopeless, too full of national-popular references inaccessible to investigation, an incense burner able to dispense the ephemeral scents of the ballroom. What remains?

Now, for those who lived through these years, such a question isn't even legitimate, because it's not legitimate to try to formulate a sensible answer. The '80s were, in their continuity of intent, the most identifiable years. In the blurred image of Tony Hadley trying to hum about the sound of the soul or in a cartoon where Morten Harket plays between the real and the surreal, anyone who lived through the '80s reflects jealously on their past, without logical connection, with an unsuspected attraction to the transience of time. These years sounded without highs or lows, so similar to themselves as to appear as a long melancholy lullaby, ordered by sequences of synths and electronic percussion: no longer the Malebolge of the '70s, the labyrinthine distortions, the taste for fragmentation, the chaotic experimentation. In the '80s, the decadence of modern popular music was manifest in action.

Nothing in the celebration of this era can be subject to concrete judgment: the task is entrusted to the memory of those who wore this decade. Those who haven't even been granted a shred of its garment, feel free to do so at your leisure with an album like "Organisation" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in The Dark, perhaps moving from the childish lullaby of "Enola Gay" to the caressing tone of "2nd Thought", from the restless fate of "Misunderstanding" to the minor prank of "Motion and Heart", from the D'Annunzian chiaroscuro of an arcane memory to the distinct notion of a sacred, inexplicable, interior belonging, to the ineffable myth that were the magnificent '80s.

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