The success of all these R&B-inspired Brits made sense in a way, because the backstory to New Pop was actually a black story. African American innovations in rhythm, production, and arrangement (Chic, P-Funk, the Michael Jackson/Quincy Jones sound, the New York electro and synthfunk of the early eighties) had been assimilated by the perennially quicker-off-the-mark Brits and then sold back to white America. Fittingly, the American press heralded the 1983 breakthrough of New Music as “the Second British Invasion,” a repeat of what happened in the sixties when the Beatles, Stones, Animals, and others sold American rhythm and blues back to white American teenagers.
Many of the Second British Invasion groups didn’t just borrow from contemporary black music, they also rifled through sixties and seventies soul. Wham! and Culture Club were the classic examples of this mixture of retro and modern. Of all the New Pop groups, Wham! had the least investment in punk. George Michael and Andrew Ridgely were basically Southern England soul boys. After two brashly likable and contemporary-sounding U.K. hits, “Wham Rap” and “Young Guns (Go for It),” Wham! dominated the English summer of 1983 with
Make It Big!
and the singles “Bad Boys” and “Club Tropicana.” Both were anthems of guilt-free hedonism for the aspirational youth of Southern England and the perfect peppy soundtrack to inaugurate Margaret Thatcher’s second term as prime minister. But Wham! really cleaned up in America when they started to recycle Motown with bouncily poptimistic tunes such as “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” and “I’m Your Man.”
Culture Club were more eclectic in their derivativeness, mashing together Motown, the Philly sound, and lover’s rock. “Plagiarism is one of my favorite words,” boasted Boy George. “Culture Club is the most sincere form of plagiarism in modern music. We just do it better than most.” In another interview, he described himself as “not a great singer. I’m a vocalist and a copyist. I can copy and adapt.” “Church of the Poisoned Mind” rehashed stomping sixties soul, “Time (Clock of the Heart)” harked back to Curtis Mayfield and the Spinners, and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” was like reggae balladeer Sugar Minott with one or two spoonfuls too many. What made such dilute fare so massively successful was Boy George’s charm, wit, and the novelty of his appearance, a cannily desexualized version of drag that mixed a hint of edge with a whole heap of harmless. Chubby and cuddly, androgynous George was an object of affection rather than desire. If he was subversive, George claimed, it wasn’t because he was gay (usually coy about his leanings back then, at his most candid he admitted to being “bisexual”) but because he was effeminate. Taking that teenybop tradition of pretty-boy idols one step further, Boy George was monstrously telegenic. The timing was perfect.
Kissing to Be Clever,
Culture Club’s debut album, spawned three
Billboard
Top 10 hits.
Colour by Numbers,
their second album, spawned three more and went platinum. The group sealed their triumphant run of 1983 by winning a Grammy for Best New Artist.
The United States really was swamped by the Second British Invasion in 1983. Thirty-five percent of record sales that year came from U.K. artists, and at one point in July, six of the Top 10 singles were of British origin. Some of the biggest video hits of 1983 came from people barely known in the U.K., such as synth boffin Thomas Dolby and the bland dance rock outfit the Fixx. Even British old-timers came out of the woodwork: The Kinks, veterans of the first British Invasion, scored with “Come Dancing,” while David Bowie had developed a whole new New Pop–oriented sound and image with “Let’s Dance,” switching from his decadent, cocaine-ravaged Berlin-era look to a tanned, healthy image.
Commentators were quick to attribute the Anglo-pop hegemony entirely to MTV, but radio played a big role by switching to New Music formats. Although MTV’s success encouraged programmers to play more new records and less oldies, they were also inspired by certain pioneering radio stations such as KROQ, which became the most popular station in the Los Angeles area after changing its focus to “rock of the 80s” in 1981. KROQ’s success was not lost on radio consultant Lee Abrams, who early in 1983 instructed the seventy album-oriented rock stations across America he advised to double the amount of New Music they played.
Fueled jointly by MTV and radio, this sudden surge of exposure for new music, foreign and domestic, caused record sales for the first half of 1983 to jump up by 10 percent, breaking the steady decline of the last three years. The high turnover of unfamiliar (to most Americans, anyway) names in the Top 10—Adam Ant, Kajagoogoo, Eddy Grant, Madness—added to the sense of revolutionary upheaval. MTV reaped the lion’s share of the glory for being the savior of the record industry. A flood of pieces in mainstream magazines celebrated MTV and the Second British Invasion for bringing color and energy back to pop music.
Newsweek
placed Boy George and Annie Lennox on its front cover.
Rolling Stone
did an “England Swings” special issue (George on the front page, again) and hailed 1983 as “the greatest year for rock since 1977.” If closely scrutinized, this was a slightly odd analogy given that punk totally failed in America, whereas New Pop reigned triumphant, but the general idea that a revolution was taking place was communicated.
Ironically, back in England, many people had a totally different feeling about 1983, seeing it as the year it all went wrong. Nostalgia for 1977 blossomed (hence Orange Juice’s Buzzcocks homage in “Rip It Up”) and the backlash against New Pop started to pick up pace. All around London, a graffiti slogan started to appear on walls: “Kill Ugly Pop.”
Thatcher’s reelection in June 1983 was a turning point. Many on the Left had hoped that her first electoral victory was a fluke and that the “natural order of things” would return. But in 1983 it became clear that the old postwar consensus about the welfare state and interventionist government (propping up ailing industries in order to preserve jobs) had shattered. A hefty portion of the population—enough to secure Thatcher the election—clearly didn’t give a shit about the unemployed. All of a sudden, the gulf between New Pop’s luxurious imagery and economic reality seemed unconscionable. This was especially the case for bands from the North, such as ABC, Heaven 17, and the Human League, where the ravaging of heavy industry had the most devastating effect on local economies and prospects for young people.
After touring the world as a sixteen-piece band, ABC came home and found Sheffield decimated by unemployment and heroin. The aspirational imagery they’d been using started to seem questionable. Moreover, the sonic opulence that only a year before had been a striking gesture was now the norm. Spandau Ballet aped “All of My Heart” with the slick schlock of “True” and topped the charts. Pangs of social conscience, an unwillingness to repeat a successful formula, and a desire to stay ahead of their imitators convinced ABC to take a total career swerve. Instead of
Lexicon of Love Part Two,
they made
Beauty Stab,
a hard, stripped-down album with electric guitar at its center and overtly political lyrics. “With
Beauty Stab,
we probably wanted to make a record like the Gang of Four, really,” says Fry. “It’s a protest album. You’ve had the Technicolor widescreen with
Lexicon,
now it’s back to Sheffield black-and-white documentary style.” Ironically, at this very moment Gang of Four were desperately trying to gloss up their sound ABC-style with the disastrously unconvincing
Hard
.
ABC trumpeted their new direction with the single “That Was Then, This Is Now.” But fans were confused by the new raw, live sound.
Beauty Stab
’s ugly cover art of a matador fighting a bull gave the impression of a band that didn’t really know what it was doing. Inside, unwieldy protest songs such as “King Money” and “United Kingdom” sounded glib and phony because Fry laid it on too thick with
Lexicon
-style wordplay (“This busted, rusted, upper-crusted, bankrupted, done and dusted, no-man-to-be-trusted United Kingdom”). In interviews, Fry did some pretty undignified backsliding, telling
NME,
“The way I see the world is very different from that quasi–Las Vegas/tuxedo period before,” and claiming to have hung up his gold lamé suit. “There is too much gloss, too much technique in record making now,” he declared.
ABC’s Sheffield neighbors Heaven 17 and the Human League were also hit hard by what happened to their once prosperous hometown. Heaven 17’s own mini–
Beauty Stab
was “Crushed by the Wheels of Industry,” an exciting slice of electro-constructivist dance pop, by far the best thing on their second album,
The Luxury Gap
. They’d finally become pop stars, but at a terrible cost. Their breakthrough single, “Temptation,” owed too much of its impact to the hired firepower of singer Carole Kenyon (1983 was the year of the obligatory black female backup singer), and ultimately just seemed part of the lavish bombast of the times. The Human League, meanwhile, were doubly tormented, first by the challenge of following up a megasuccess, and second by the sudden prick of conscience and consciousness. Perversely, or perhaps perceptively, Phil Oakey decided he wanted to make the Human League less like Abba and more like Pink Floyd, a band of “substance” dealing with serious issues, not silly love songs.
The spur for the Human League’s attitude shift wasn’t so much Thatcher-induced economic blight as the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. “I was baffled,” Oakey says now. “They came on TV and told you something really incredible and horrible, and they didn’t say what you could do about it.” The song inspired by Oakey’s sensations of paralysis, “The Lebanon,” finally appeared as a single in May 1984. It was the herald for
Hysteria,
the group’s disappointing sequel to
Dare
. Like ABC’s “That Was Then,” the single broke with the Human League’s classic sound and “no standard instrumentation” manifesto and featured electric guitar prominently. Also like ABC’s single, it failed to crack the U.K. Top 10.
Though they may have been aesthetic and commercial failures, “The Lebanon” and
Beauty Stab
were prophetic gestures. One could smell it on the breeze: the return of rock. Down in the various rock undergrounds, the early stirrings of a resurgence were taking shape. All those discredited concepts that New Pop tried to retire (authenticity, rebellion, community, transgression, resistance), along with all those outmoded sounds it had presumed dead and buried (distorted electric guitar, the raw-throated snarl), were preparing to strike back. In America, especially, the counterinsurgency was already brewing.
MTV WAS ALLOWED TO BASK
in the glory of 1983’s pop boom for only a brief moment before the backlash against “English haircut bands” started in earnest. Within weeks of its “England Swings” special issue,
Rolling Stone
ran Steven Levy’s “Ad Nauseam: How MTV Sells Out Rock and Roll.” Levy’s main theme, that videos were just commercials, was the media meme of the season, its closest rival for borderline triteness being the “videos asphyxiate your imagination” complaint. Another common accusation was that videos put power back in the hands of the corporate record industry. Even the most basic video, comprised of concert footage, cost $15,000. Anything more creative could run anywhere from $40,000 to $200,000, way beyond the means of indie labels. However, the real animus behind Levy’s closely reasoned tirade was the way MTV had shifted the playing field in ways that favored the image-conscious, surface-oriented Brits, making it much tougher for homegrown music with “real content” to prosper.
For American trad-rockers, the prevalence of synths and drum machines in Britpop exacerbated their gut conviction that the video fops just hadn’t earned their success (synths and rhythm programming being nonstrenuous, white-collar work). Again, one heard the familiar Anglophobia/homophobia slippage that equated glamour and synths with effeminacy. Being the object of teenage female desire was intrinsically emasculating (and there was a psychosexual kernel underneath this prejudice, insofar as teen idols had traditionally been the protégés of gay managers, whose taste in boy toys coincided with teenage girls’ idea of cuteness). For many, the MTV-triggered shift in radio formats from rock to pop felt like a calamitous power shift away from the taste of young males toward that of adolescent females.
Levy’s
Rolling Stone
piece contrasted the eighties unfavorably with the sixties and found the Second British Invasion wanting in comparison with its precursor. “It is easy to get lost in the fun-house environment of MTV…[but] behind the fun-house mirror is another story, one that makes the musical energy and optimism of the Sixties seem a thousand light-years ago.” Countercultural rock ’n’ roll had been replaced by a video channel whose business was “to ensnare the passions of Americans who fit certain demographic or…‘psychographic’ requirements—young people who had money and the inclination to buy [certain] things.” This was a bit rich coming from
Rolling Stone,
which by 1983 was hardly the vanguard of the revolution, or even cutting-edge music, and was certainly not the least bit averse to making bucks from generationally attuned advertising.
Still, other baby-boomer critics chimed in with this theme of New Pop as all style and no substance, edgeless and (in Levy’s words) “culturally harmless.” In a Christmas 1983
NME
piece, former
Rolling Stone
staffer Greil Marcus fulminated against the invading Brits’ recycled Bowie-isms and secondhand black American beats, declaring, “Never before has a pop phenomenon appeared rooted entirely in the notion of vapidity, on the thrill of surrender.” All the Second British Invasion groups, he claimed, “will disappear and none will be remembered.” In his essay “It’s Like That: Rock and Roll on the Home Front,” another sixties veteran rock critic, Dave Marsh, placed New Pop in the continuum of British imperialism. In his view, the U.K. bands “import a raw and precious commodity—usually some form of black music—and sell it back, in ‘improved,’ processed form, to its native country. The natives then consider this ‘new’ commodity an example of the wonders that the Empire has to offer them.”