Why does 80s music sound more futuristic than today's music?

What is it about music from the 80s that makes it sound more "futuristic" than the stuff that came afterwards?

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Comments ( 12 )
  • Grunewald

    Experimentation with electronic sounds with minimal digitisation.

    It's hard to make music sound the same today without what would seem like a disproportionate amount of effort and fuss, because back then almost everything was analog and depended on mechanical processes, physics and resonating components made of a variety of materials. The music sounds 'strange' because we're not used sounds that are produced that way.

    I know people who keep amplifiers that operate on 1970s/80s technology, just because nothing digital will produce quite that quality of sound.

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    • MonteMetcalfe

      You blinded me with science
      And hit me with technology.

      Good heavens Miss Sakamoto, you're beautiful.

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      • Grunewald

        Hahahaha I'm just a music teacher, that's all.

        It's Ruthie here. Udi kindly changed my username.

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  • radar

    Maybe for the same reason we still think things that are 50's retro-futuristic style look "space age" - when now that we are much closer to anything like a real space age, and technology has advanced to and even past some of the levels they were anticipating back then (cell phones, etc), things do not actually look like that.

    So, conditioning?

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    • The way we see the future has changed over the year. In the 50s and 60s, the future was always portrayed as extremely utopic and optimistic. In the 70s, however, that image seem to have changed to a more dystopic vision of the future. The 80s seem to have been more "mixed", portraying the future as both good and bad. In the 90s, the future became really really bleak again.

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      • radar

        Yeah, I never thought about that. It seems to correlate with the way things were going in society at those points in time, too. 50's & 60's were during/after the "boom", 70's hippie culture was turning sour and people were worried about Vietnam, 80's was mostly good economically but socially there was a lot of underlying unrest building up with AIDS and serial killers and whatnot, 90's was certainly a moody era.. I guess our anticipation of the future does reflect the mindset of the times.

        It seems to overall be trending towards more frequent pessimism though, as time goes on and we actually get more entrenched in using technology and what once would have been considered "futuristic," doesn't it? But maybe this is just part of a small downswing on an even larger graph.

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        • It's been going a bit in waves over the past 50 years. The early 90s were definitely more pessimistic than the late 90s, despite the late 90s being more entrenched in technology. The 80s had more technology than the 70s, but the outlook was still bleaker in the 70s. So it doesn't seem to entirely correlate with more technology.

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          • radar

            Good point. It would be interesting to see a chart of "optimism for the future" levels over time, but I'm not sure how exactly you'd quantify that.

            This reminds me of something I read recently about how apparently the length of women's skirts that are in fashion reflects how well the economy is doing. Shorter meaning better, longer meaning worse.

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  • Whatintarnation

    They were all high on drugs.

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  • libertybell

    I think people in the 1980's got really excited about synthesizers.

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    • Synthesizers are cool!

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  • Somenormie

    Instruments wise.

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