Annivyrsary: 1979
ISSUE #40
Today we swerve our focus to the end of the 1970's, the decade of Watergate, SNL, and punk. A surprising amount of iconic albums came out in 1979, and it's hard to say anything about them that they couldn't absolutely say for themselves. It was the year of London Calling and The Wall and Unknown Pleasures—yep, everyone's favorite t-shirt design is now forty years old. In fact, Hot Topic's entire aesthetic might be traced back to 1979. It wasn't merely Joy Division—Goth itself emerged through the Curtain of the Underworld with Bauhaus's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" and The Cure's "Boys Don't Cry."
It doesn't stop there. Right beside Goth, two other huge genres planted their flags firmly in 1979: Hardcore with "Nervous Breakdown" and Hip Hop with "Rapper's Delight." It's like everyone looked around and said "Fuck it, we're doing it our way." There was a fork in the road of music, and everything was either taking a left to get groovy, or a right to get angular.
People also seemed more willing to accept the weird and singular artistic visions from bands like The B-52s and Talking Heads, especially after Bowie had paved the way with ten years of his cosmic ambitions. Our culture was gripped, in fact, by science fiction—ignited by Voyager 1's images of Jupiter and Pioneer 11 finally reaching Saturn's rings—and monumental works of sci-fi were released like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Alien, Mad Max, Moonraker, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Tarkovsky's Stalker. Our vision was getting darker, and much cooler.
The original Walkman was also introduced, and the compact disc was demonstrated publicly for the first time, sparking the next big revolution in listening. It raised a new generation to experience music much more intimately, paving the way for the high fidelity of Shoegaze and Dream Pop that would be coming in the next 15 years. Soon the introverts would be able to goth out to the fullest, a blessing bestowed upon us by 1979. To honor them, I suggest we all pick up a CD copy of the classics and listen with our headphones: London Calling, Unknown Pleasures, Fear of Music, The Wall, and Off the Wall.
Big year for walls, 1979. Let's pray it was the last.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.