Tom Wilson's online emporium of fun

A Decade of Division

Despite the many new and exciting acts coming out at the moment, both in terms of new bands and dance music, there's something that's a little predictable about the new artists that are breaking into the mainstream today – namely, where they draw their influences. Right now, it's all about the 80s.

From MTV playlisted guitar groups like Franz Ferdinand and The Killers, to established dance acts like Prodigy, everyone seems to be pillaging the decade of Dallas , Pac-Man and Chernobyl for inspiration. In terms of bands, it's very difficult to get media attention unless you fit the contemporary vogue for that early-80s, stripped down and angular sound reminiscent of so-called ‘punk-funk' outfits like ‘Gang of Four' or ‘A Certain Ratio'. Various labels were dreamed up to categorise the sound (including ‘post-punk', ‘no-wave' and ‘disco-punk'), but the general idea remained the same – to make music you could dance to using guitars. In fusing driving dancefloor-tempo rhythms with aggressive punky guitars, these innovators established the blueprint currently being followed by guitar bands everywhere. Bloc Party, who've recently shot to fame in the UK with a top ten hit last week, are prime examples of this 80s musical legacy, as are Franz Ferdinand, the current golden boys of the moment.

Meanwhile, in terms of dance music, the synthesizer-sound of electro-pop acts like The Human League and Soft Cell is so in vogue that even established dance artists are queuing up for a piece of the action. The Prodigy's first single (‘Girls') from their new album again shows the band doing their best to emulate this fashionable 80s sound. Listen to the new Gwen Stefani single ‘What You Waiting For' and once more it's electro-pop, with its crashing snares and arpeggio melodies, that's being emulated.

And in this climate of 80s retro, instead of sit back and watch the youngsters get away with imitating their style, the original artists themselves have been keen cash in on the trend. Hot on the heels of the reformation of 80s pop legends Duran Duran, last year saw Frankie Goes to Hollywood reform for a comeback gig.

Amidst all this 80s worship, there's one key element that's been missed out of the picture. We might be borrowing stylistically from the 80s musically, but the factionalism and politics that underlay such styles has been glossed over.

The 80s was the decade of division; the decade of us against them . In America , it was the decade of unforgiving Reaganomics; in the UK , the year-long miners' strike; and all over the world, punitive new-right solutions, involving slashing state spending in areas such as welfare and education, were starting to be seen as viable economic solutions.

It was this kind of sectarian spirit that spilled over into the music scene, which was still reeling from the huge rupture that punk caused in the late 70s. Duran Duran, for example, pop products being given the hard sell by an industry considerably less sophisticated than today, represented the antithesis of everything that serious-minded young people with an interest in music were meant to stand for. With producers like Stock Aitken Waterman coming to the fore and making sickly-sweet pop like Kylie and Jason, Rick Astley and Samantha Fox, audiences were divided. Listening to Duran Duran was, for many people, against the unspoken rules of the time. You were expected to listen to something more suitably serious-minded and miserable – The Smiths, for example.

It's only recently, and within a climate of supposed ‘postmodern irony', that liking pop music has become something that self-respecting people could admit to. If you don't believe me, then take a look at a back-issue of the famous music weekly newspaper the NME from the 80s, and you'll quickly see the genuine contempt which serious music journalists had for mainstream 80s pop like Duran Duran.

It's this sense of conflict that is missing from today's 80s revivalists. Franz Ferdinand's frontman Alex Kapranos, all good humour and media-friendly smiles, is a long way from the deadpan seriousness of a group like ‘Joy Division', or ‘A Certain Ratio', or any other number of the groups from which they draw their inspiration. For all their ‘coming up from the bottom' authenticity and retro appearance, Franz Ferdianad sit perfectly alongside pop acts like Gwen Stefani or Duran Duran. They're certainly no less mainstream– it's just that they're considerably more credible. By contrast, it was the mainstream, and a sense of absolute alienation from it, which drove the 80s artists that the band are most closely associated with. Entertaining and genuinely exciting as they might be, lacking the drive that comes from knowing that you form a fragile musical minority means that groups like Franz Ferdinand can only look drab and conformist in comparison to the sincerity and conviction of the groups that inspired them.