Interview with Rob Sheffield, Part Four

My interview with Rob Sheffield, author of the new book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, continues here. In this segment, we talk about the incredible cultural power of MTV in the 80s and 90s, the importance of pop stars, and the tacky brilliance of the cassingle.

Matthew Perpetua: It’s harder to imagine huge stars now, things keep fragmenting. Our biggest pop stars are people like Gaga and Beyonce, and their audiences are large but nowhere near how things were in the old days.

Rob Sheffield: I don’t know. the music audience is as large as it’s ever been, though, right?

Matthew Perpetua: I have no idea. It’s really hard to say.

Rob Sheffield: It’s just that the traditional music-delivery systems, like radio or MTV, fell apart and nothing has come along to replace them yet.

Matthew Perpetua: How do we measure anything? I think as a rule of thumb if you take any given artist’s sales and multiply it times four, that’s probably how big the audience is.

Rob Sheffield: Well, it’s hard to say how much album sales have to do with anything. Some audiences buy albums, some don’t. Sade and AC/DC fans buy albums.

Matthew Perpetua: Right. That’s just my way of guesstimating it. So, there’s probably around 2 million people who dig Phoenix a lot, their most recent album is about to go gold. That seems plausible. My perhaps hopeful guess is that one in four fans is still willing to buy a record.

Rob Sheffield: In the 80s and 90s, radio and MTV were a seriously lethal music-delivery system. Whether it was the Breeders in 1993 or Prince in 1983, you had a sense that you could turn on a switch and have audio access to the most exciting music that was being made anywhere in the world at that moment. I don’t know if anybody feels that way about any music-delivery systems now. Another transitional period, I hope.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, people act like Pitchfork has that power now, but only in a small way. There isn’t really any mass broadcaster of taste now. I don’t know if anything could replace the MTV of the late 80s through mid 90s. That was some serious power.

Rob Sheffield: Artists really used radio/MTV to be taste makers then. In the 80s, if you liked Prince, you liked all the stuff Prince liked. If you like Poison, you also like Britny Fox and Cinderella and Faster Pussycat. if you like Duran Duran, you also like New Order, and if you like New Order, you also like Arthur Baker and Jellybean Benitez and Shep Pettibone. You could just flip a switch and hear this stuff, all jammed together on the same station.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, I’d love to know more about the process and tastes of the people who programmed MTV in that era. Who were these people? Someone please write that book for me to read.

Rob Sheffield: In a way, the music programmed MTV, rather than the other way around. They had 24 hours to fill and nowhere near enough mainstream content, so they couldn’t have played the Top 40 if they wanted to. They had to scrounge around and play all this stuff because they needed 24 hours of video a day. Then in the late 80s and 90s, it’s more formatted, but they’re still the most eclectic nationwide Top 40 station in American history. Also, the only one. They were an amazingly rich database, if access to music was what you wanted.

Matthew Perpetua: I definitely got the impression in that era that MTV really cared about music.

Rob Sheffield: Yes. and Top 40 radio kind of followed that, so it became incredibly eclectic all through the 80s.

Matthew Perpetua: It seems like the 90s is where things start breaking down more around genre lines. You like alternative/indie, you like rap/R&B, you like pop, you like metal, you like country.

Rob Sheffield: Yeah, totally. By then there wasn’t a Top 40 station in the country playing the entire top 10! But there was still so much action muscling into the Top 40, often totally out of nowhere. Regional hits like “Tootsee Roll” and “C’Mon N Ride It (The Train)” and “Cannonball,” they became huge nationwide hits.

Matthew Perpetua: I think regionalism still exists but it’s so warped by how we experience music now.

Rob Sheffield: Do you feel like music is missing stars right now, real stars? And if so, is that necessarily bad for music?

Matthew Perpetua: For the most part, yeah. I think my experience of music in pretty much all genres is improved by having iconic characters at the center of music.

Rob Sheffield: I would agree. I could be convinced I’m wrong… but I’ve always felt that. If you were a Replacements, Minutemen or Husker Du fan in 1984, no way did it have nothing to do with the personality in the music–you heard these guys and you felt like they were your surrogate big brothers or something. and these weren’t pop stars, obviously–but that charismatic quality was a huge part of the musical intensity.

Matthew Perpetua: I like having this pantheon of amazing pop characters. Why do you think we have fewer legit icons now? I think the 90s overflowed with them too, but you kinda get fewer in the 00s. Beyonce and Jay-Z, definitely huge icons.

Rob Sheffield: I agree. It’s amazing when you compare 1999 to 2000 in terms of music. in 1999, music was bursting with personality and energy, but within a couple of years it was very different. In 1999 pop music was funny, almost by definition.

Matthew Perpetua: When I think of the 90s, it just overflows — Kurt and Eddie and Beck and Malkmus and Bjork and Polly and Tori and Biggie and Tupac and Mariah and Liam and Damon and Jarvis and Guy and Ian and Corin and Carrie and the entire goddamn Wu-Tang Clan!

Rob Sheffield: Music was personality-rich in the 80s and 90s, that’s for sure. You had to scrounge harder for that in the 00’s, to say the least.

Matthew Perpetua: You know how a lot of the previous decade was about “fans want to have a connection with artists”? I think that’s the opposite of where things were.

Rob Sheffield: How do you mean?

Matthew Perpetua: It’s totally pointed that people like Beyonce and Lady Gaga reject social media. They are icons, they are private. Madonna and Prince wouldn’t have ever used Twitter. Kanye West is totally an icon and he does, but I think he’s more of this era. He’s maybe figured something out. I think if you’re going to be a big personality, you have to limit the public’s access to you. You have to exist in their imagination.

Rob Sheffield: True. But also, a pop singer’s Twitter is read by, what, a few hundred thousand people max? That’s not Madonna or Prince style stardom. Every time Prince sneezed, millions of people trembled in their nowhere-near-purple boots!

Matthew Perpetua: Do you think it’s even possible in the future for people to have that level of stardom? I feel like more people can be famous now but few people can be THAT famous.

Rob Sheffield: That’s probably true. At best, a pop star’s Twitter is like Missy Elliott’s liner notes on her albums.

Matthew Perpetua: Changing topic a bit, but you have a chapter in you book in which you include some information that blew my mind. I had no idea people were buying cassingles so late into the 90s.

Rob Sheffield: It’s weird, they kept making them for a long time. I’m not sure when people stopped really buying them!

Matthew Perpetua: I think tapes really stopped appearing in shops around 1997/1998, which is around the cut-off for your list of favorite cassingles.

Rob Sheffield: They were the perfect pop format in a way, and they suited what an eclectic time it was for music. You wouldn’t want to hear a whole album by Natural Selection, but that “Do Anything” cassingle…

Matthew Perpetua: I never had many cassingles. My sister had a bunch.

Rob Sheffield: I loved how they had “flip sides” too. So the Kris Kross “Jump” cassingle also had “Lil Boyz in the Hood,” one of the “serious” Kris Kross songs.

Matthew Perpetua: The funny thing about cassingles and cd singles is that the format is the exact same size as a full-length album. With vinyl, there’s this intuitive size difference.

Rob Sheffield: It’s funny. they could easily fit more music into a cassingle-size tape, but it just made it more cassingular to have one song.

Here’s a store-bought tape my little sister gave me for Xmas 1988, a K-Tel-style compilation called “Hot Moves.” Check out these songs:

Side One: Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up,” Sweet Sensation’s “Never Let You Go,” Kon Kan’s “I Beg Your Pardon,” L’Trimm’s “Cars with the Boom,” Salt N Pepa’s “Push It”

Side Two: Pebbles’ “Mercedes Boy,” Information Society’s “What’s On Your Mind,” Ten City’s “That’s The Way Love Is,” Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It To My Heart,” Erasure’s “Victim of Love”

That’s some quality pop trash, my friend. And it was all, to some degree, “dance music.” “Hot Radio” is what they called the format and it was perfect for cassingle-sized eccentrics. Some of them big stars, some of them basically totally unknown.

Matthew Perpetua: That is a great mix of songs I know by heart and a few I’ve never heard of! That’s my favorite Erasure song.

Rob Sheffield: My favorite Erasure song too. I love that acoustic country version you posted on Fluxblog once! It really does have a country sort of poignance to it! Goes well with a banjo.

Matthew Perpetua: I always love that he sings exactly like Cher.

Rob Sheffield: Vince Clarke is always the man. He’s never had an off season. Yet “Victim of Love” might be his finest moment.

Matthew Perpetua: That and “A Little Respect” and “Stop,” the holy trinity of Erasure.

Rob Sheffield: Kon Kan’s “I Beg Your Pardon,” do you know that song?

Matthew Perpetua: Never heard it!

Rob Sheffield: I guarantee you would love it. Made for you. A total New Order rip off, sampling the disco group GQ and the country singer Lynn Anderson, by a new wave synth duo that didn’t even exist, which is so new wave in itself.

Matthew Perpetua: I had never ever heard of Haysi Fantayzee until I read your book. I think the only other place I’d ever read about them was your previous book.

Rob Sheffield: I love Haysi Fantayzee!

Matthew Perpetua: That’s the 80s that didn’t survive.

Rob Sheffield: They definitely summed up a moment. Probably a moment nobody would ever live through on purpose, but a moment that just kind of happened to us! They never had their retro-chic comeback moment. It was such a rich time for one-off novelty shots like that, putting an entire career’s worth of dodgy ideas into 3 and a half minutes.

Matthew Perpetua: It’s funny to see the 90s slowly transform into the new 80s in terms of nostalgia. But you see the same thing of — well, that inexplicably stuck around, and that did not. There’s some people who were a big deal back that who have seemingly blinked out of existence. Remember when Ani DiFranco was a thing? My friend Chris who works in comics says she was “written out of continuity.”

Rob Sheffield: That puts it perfectly! Some stars, like Ani DiFranco, do get written out of the storyline. It is like the “Pam Ewing had a bad dream” season of Dallas. You can’t predict. Not at all. Like, imagine going back to 1996 and telling people Gwen Stefani and Paula Abdul and Rivers Cuomo would be famous in 2010, but Alanis Morrissette and Ani DiFranco and Paula Cole would not be remembered at all.

Matthew Perpetua: I think that’s unfair to Alanis — she’s still part of the cultural fabric. You’re absolutely right about Gwen and Rivers. No one at ALL took them serious when they came out. Which is why it is so hilarious and sad to me that people now are angry at Rivers Cuomo, as if that guy was a serious artiste. He was always a pop guy! Maybe he’s not as good as he was but he’s been doing the same trick for 15 years.

Rob Sheffield: Okay, I take back Alanis, but there are so many other examples. Hootie, I guess being the most obvious. Go back to 1995 and take bets on who’s going to be mega-famous in 2010, Hootie or the Flaming Lips?

Matthew Perpetua: Hootie and the Blowfish, it might blow some people’s minds now to know how huge that was back then. I bought a new copy of that Spin Alternative Record Guide you worked on in the mid-90s, and that’s full of artists from the 80s who got written out of continuity. Of course, in 2010 that book is most useful for highlighting those artists.

Rob Sheffield: The Afghan Whigs got their own entry!

Matthew Perpetua: The Afghan Whigs definitely have an enduring cult. Dulli stuck around!

Rob Sheffield: You are kidding, right?

Matthew Perpetua: No, that guy totally has a cult. I know some pretty hardcore Dulli fans. And 33 1/3 went ahead and did a Gentlemen book.

Rob Sheffield: Wow. Even at the time I thought it was hilarious they got their own entry. But then, I wrote the entry for the Bats, so what do I know. That Spin book really does sum up that moment though. You look at it now and it’s amazing how much excitement and enthusiasm is in that book.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, I love that about it. That book was a big deal to me when I was 15.