…more or less–I entered a Ph. D. program and my life as I knew it came to a halt. I have, however, listened to a bit now and again. (“Missing You” below played incessantly as I packed to leave my doctoral program five years later.) So I drew up the list below, of songs I heard (mostly from the 80s and 90s, though “Where Do You Go To” is earlier-- I first heard it in Darjeeling Limited in 2007), and am wondering what songs or singers you think I’d also like from the subsequent decades.
A pattern I saw emerging, btw, was the rather disturbingly sexist one of many of the songs below were sung by, or featured videos of, lovely young women. Feel free to ignore, or to berate, if you must, but I don’t think it’s a necessary component, just what caused me to stop rolling my eyes and listen to (or watch) a new song in the past 40 odd years. I also realize that these are mostly big hits, which is also why I got exposed to them. The “Tears for Fears” one, for example, shocked my girlfriend in about 2009 when I told her that I’d never heard it before–it apparently was played non-stop everywhere for a while but I missed it in my ivory tower.
Gimme Sympathy
Good Girls Gone Bad
Where Do You Go To, My Lovely
Everybody Wants To Rule The World
Missing You
Walk like an Egyptian
Heart of Glass
Addicted to Love
She Bop
Hit me with your best shot
Complicated
Psycho Killer
I don’t think it’s the same at all. One OP doesn’t like music made since 1980, and this one just hasn’t been a consumer of hardly any music since 1980.
In response to the OP, I’m kind of envious that you have this totally unexplored world of fantastic music available to you at a time when it has never been so easy to access and afford. If you still enjoy female Rock acts without the visuals, there are a wealth of them from the Eighties and Nineties. Start with one of this year’s Hall of Fame inductees: The Go-Go’s. If you want something more recent, Blondie has been turning out some really brilliant albums over the last decade that sound as fresh and relevant as any other current music.
It’s the MTV Effect. MTV was launched in 1981, and within a very short time, it became tremendously popular, having the effect of imposing the need for performers to create entertaining music videos to accompany their songs.
And, it wasn’t just attractive women – there are absolutely examples of male groups from that era, such as Duran Duran, which could credit a fair amount of their success to the fact that they were very attractive, and looked good in videos (to be fair, they often had sexy female actresses and models in their videos, too). Meanwhile, there were other performers, like Christiopher Cross, who weren’t particularly photogenic, and whose careers faltered in the 1980s.
I guess I was trying to inquire if anyone saw a common thread (besides the attractive young ladies) that might suggest I give some other artists or albums a listen. Sort of like Mr. Fudd’s suggestion–I had no idea that Blondie was still around.
This is what I did.
There are youtube videos that have the top 100 songs for a particular year. They are about 15 minutes long and it plays about 10 seconds per song. I listened to one video for each year that I missed it and wrote down songs that seemed like songs I might like. Then I checked those songs out.
You could do what a friend of mine does: figure out what genre of music you are not up-to-date on, and systematically educate yourself. This is easier than ever today, thanks to the easy availability of Wikipedia and what not, with the caveat that not everything or every genre is represented there.
For instance, (to get past 1980) suppose you decide you are not sufficiently familiar with lo-fi hip-hop. Well, within the first few paragraphs of the Wikipedia article is the quote, "Vice contributor Luke Winkie… suggested that “if there is one shared touchstone for lo-fi hip-hop, it’s probably [the 2004 MF Doom and Madlib album] Madvillainy.” So now it’s clear where to start listening.