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The lingering prevalence of the 1980s isn’t the usual form of cultural influence. There’s a blatant continued existence of so much intellectual property of that era, including “Transformers,” “Ghostbusters,” “Beetlejuice,” and numerous other examples. While those franchises and others have generally always been beloved, there are other aspects of the decade which were discarded soon after it ended. For a while, it seemed like the signature ’80s synthesizer sound was also out of vogue, both in popular music and in film scores.
Sunglasses Kid, a British music producer, electronic musician, and composer who’s contributed to the scores of “Cobra Kai” season 6 and “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” remembers a time when an ’80s sound was anathema. “The moment that we went into the ’90s, there was a lot of, ‘Oh, ’80s is bad.’ I remember when I first started producing music, people told me that my music sounded a bit ’80s, and I took that as an insult […] ’80s used to be like kind of a bad word […] It was code for cheesy, or embarrassing.”
Still, the popularity of ’80s media and its aesthetics have never really gone away, which is not all that surprising given how the pop culture of a generation’s youth tends to inspire a resurgence when those folks grow up and become the dominant artists. As Sunglasses Kid explains: “Those 30- and 40-year-olds have all moved into positions of being the creators and the creative decision-makers. So they start commissioning and controlling those movies, or whatever those art forms are. And then there’s a market of people also nostalgic for it.” He does point out that we seem to be in a particularly long cycle of ’80s appreciation, however: “I was really surprised that people are still interested in [the ’80s]. Because I was like, why hasn’t this died yet and been replaced by the ’90s? Why isn’t the ’90s [nostalgia] quite going as fully big as the ’80s has done in pop culture?”
He does have a more concrete answer for why the ’80s sound continues to be popular today, and it has to do with the way it combined new possibilities with limitations. “It was this real explosion of never-before-heard sounds. So there’s suddenly this whole new exotic palette. And [today] we’ve got to this stage where, with computers, you could literally create anything. So there’s a nostalgia for this time [where there was] a restricted palette of exotic sounds. Now, there’s so much choice.”
Thanks to the resurgence of the ’80s sound, Sunglasses Kid observes that what used to be looked down on is now increasingly appreciated and accepted. “I think, the further and further we get away from the ’80s, people like me are almost giving people permission to go, ‘Do you know what? That was actually awesome.’ And what may have, in hindsight, seemed cheesy or dramatic, now somehow seems actually kind of amazing.”
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