What happened to the 1980s?

In economic terms the 1980s seem to be returning in my country – unemployment is increasing rapidly, factories are closing every day, and people are starting to feel poor again.

But although I remember the 1980s all too well for exactly those reasons, it seems that in one sense I slept through most of the decade.

I analysed the music on my MP3 player by date of original recording, to see if it would show a peak of musical preference at a particular moment in my life. The results are shown below (with the raw figures grouped in five-year averages to avoid a too-spiky graph):


What the results show is that, as is normal, I have a visible preference for the music of my teenage years (the peak on the left). However, I have almost as great a liking for the music of the 1990s and 2000s. The surprise (for me) was that I seem to have no great liking for the music of the 1980s. Apart from 1988, which is quite well represented, I have an average of two tracks per year from the 1980s on my MP3. The question, of course, is not why I have those tracks, but why I do not have the others. So I checked back to see what was popular during the 1980s, to find that it was the decade of: ABC, Tina Turner, INXS, Hall and Oates, Bananarama, Pat Benatar, Whitesnake, Duran Duran, Billy Idol, Whitney Houston, Thompson Twins, John Cougar Mellencamp, The Police, Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, Cyndi Lauper, Bon Jovi, Huey Lewis & The News, Tears for Fears, The Go-Gos, Run D.M.C., Culture Club, Bryan Adams, Prince, Billy Joel, The Bangles and Wham!

OK, that explains it then!

Culling my MP3

I usually run for an hour every Sunday morning in the Bois de la Cambre/Terkamerenbos in the south of Brussels. While running, I listen to my MP3 player. When you're running there is, of course, very little else you can do, so you tend to concentrate more on the music.

So during this hour or so I get the opportunity to really re-listen to my supposed musical tastes. Out of a large number of CDs I have had to select only 194 tracks to put on my MP3 (it is not, of course, an iPod); these 194 tracks should, therefore, represent those I like most; and to a great extent they do. But inevitably, the constant repetition of the same tracks over and over (I also listen to my MP3 on the way too and from work), makes clear that I don't, in fact, really like some of them. Some tracks I look forward to, and other I skip when they start playing. This has been a small revelation to me, as I had thought I liked them all.

So which are the winners and losers?

The tracks I skip past tend to be from Brian Ferry, Prodigy, and one or two from New Order. The current 'winners', that I look forward to, are also from the same era, and include Blondie, the Ramones, REM, and odd tracks by Black Sabbath (Paranoid, of course), The Buzzcocks, Tracy Chapman, and Steve Harley and the Cockney Rebels. Newer stuff includes NWA, Motorhead, The White Stripes, and the Cranberries. Some tracks by New Order and Prodigy remain among those I look forward to.

It's time for a cull. My MP3 is full to capacity, so I have to cut some tracks in order to make room for new ones. I think the old crooner, Brian Ferry is going to almost disappear. But who will replace him? I don't like a lot of the recent music, which I find fairly tuneless and dull (the Kooks, Coldplay, Radiohead, etc, though I increasingly like the Kaiser Chiefs), so I might have to go back and look through my CDs again.