I started watching Lisa Frankensteinon the plane a couple of weeks ago. It was a quirky movie that came out last year about a weird teen girl, Lisa Swallows, played by Kathryn Newton, who is an outcast in her school and her own family, composed of her father, stepmother, and step-sister. Lisa is a nerdy girl who loves reading, graveyards, and the New Romantics, a sub-genre of the more popular New Wave and part of the second British Invasion—think Spandau Ballet, A Flock of Seagulls. Her step-sister “Taffy” (Liza Soberano) is the exact opposite of Lisa—popular, pretty in an ‘80s teen film kind of way, socially keen, a cheerleader. As I was watching this movie, I wasn’t thinking about the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley-driven plot, but rather about style and how perception about style changes throughout the years. In the ‘80s, the English New Romantics and the darker post-punk bands were not as mainstream in America in the ‘80s as television suggests and only started coming to prominence at the end of the decade with pop hits from Love and Rockets and The Cure. Hipsters in the ‘80s listened to Siouxsie and the Banshees and the earlier work of Joy Division, but the beer-chugging John Hughes jocks were probably listening to Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, or Van Halen. Maybe U2’s popularity paved the way for the English Alternative Rockers, but U2’s Christian identity and radio play distinguished them from the “cred” British bands.
YOU KNOW IN THE END, I’LL ALWAYS BE THERE. The Napoleon Dynamitevibes Lisa Frankenstein gives are more than its inclusion of the one-hit-wonder “The Promise” by When in Rome, but music is the discussion of the day. This supernatural teen romance between Lisa and a reanimated corpse (Cole Sprouse)—think Dr. Frankenstein’s creature—didn’t keep me watching until the end, but it got me thinking about the ‘80s movie tropes, mainly the social bifurcation between the nerds and the popular kids. The 1984 comedy Revenge of the Nerdsexplored what would happen when gawky young men used their skills to outsmart the jocks. Then twenty-three years later in 2007, CBS aired The Big Bang Theory, a show about socially inept young scientists and their nerdy interests and their (in later seasons) hot girlfriends. What was more interesting than the show itself was the mainstreaming of nerd culture. Suddenly, it was cool to spend your Saturday night playing Dungeons & Dragons or vegging out on video games or collecting comic books or even cosplaying. But what was the ultimate revenge of the nerds? Brains really did beat brawn as the ‘80s nerds are rich from developing our digital world. With that wealth, some of them have bulked up and look much better than the former high school quarterback. Nerds have helped to rewrite our understanding of the ‘80s and what was popular, as they have included some of the more niche bands and cult films into our cultural canon.
WHEN YOUR DAY IS THROUGH, AND SO IS YOUR TEMPER. I was born in the late ‘80s, so take everything that I just wrote as just pure speculation. I didn’t grow up during that time, and my earliest memories of the ‘80s were sneaking my dad’s coffee, eating dirt, and my parents watching The Cosby Show and Alf—nothing related to music. My understanding about the “weird” music of the ‘80s that has become more popular in post-80s revivals comes from podcasts and conversations with my parents and older friends who lived through that time. Hit Parade’s 2019 episode The Lost and Lonely Edition helped to tell this story. The fact that these groups never got as much radio airplay as the popular music makes the bands feel more legendary. But if you watch revisionist ‘80s shows, Netflix would have you believing that all the cool kids were constantly vibing with New Order or listening to Kate Bush in their bedrooms. In 2014, Taylor Swift released the song “New Romantics.” The title of the song was a nod to the distinctly British movement during the ‘80s with the synth pop and post-punk bands of the time. As a songwriter, Swift has taken an interest in this movement, even drawing parallels between this time and her associations in London, particularly on her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. Whether or not she pulled off the artistic fête is a discussion for another day. But like the music director of Lisa Frankenstein and a number of other films and series, Swift participates in musical revisionist history, elevating the niche ’80s genres to seem bigger than they ever were. You can also find this in the music of bands such as The Killers, particularly in their earlier music. The band named themselves after a fictional band in New Order’s 2001 music video for “Crystal.” Anberlin is another band that derives much of their influence from ‘80s post-punk and the New Romantic pastiche. You can also find post-punk influence in surprising acts as the sound has become intertwined with what we think is cool in the 2020s, from The Weeknd’s “Gasoline” to Chappell Roan’s Kate Bush aesthetic. The nerdy and weird went mainstream, and computer geeks rule the world. But what makes our culture keep digging in this well of ‘80s nostalgia? The ‘80s revival of the ’00s didn’t end in the ‘10s and continues into the ‘20s, giving us more and more experience with lesser known groups, further distorting our memories of that decade.
Read the lyrics of When in Rome’s “The Promise” on Genius.
Mixtapemotions 