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DARE: How Bowie & Kraftwerk Inspired The Death of Rock'n'Roll and Invented Modern Pop Music

Posted By: ksenya.b
DARE: How Bowie & Kraftwerk Inspired The Death of Rock'n'Roll and Invented Modern Pop Music

"DARE: How Bowie & Kraftwerk Inspired The Death of Rock'n'Roll and Invented Modern Pop Music" by David Laurie
2015 | EPUB + MOBI | 269 pages | ASIN: B016E5YSVQ | English | 0.9 MB

What is it about, then…?

It’s about Synthpop, more or less, and how David Bowie, Kraftwerk and the advent of cheap synths rendered Rock’n’Roll redundant, forever changed what it meant to be “in a band” and invented Modern Pop Music along the way.

It focuses on 1979-1982 and offers a perceptive and entertaining look at a Pop Revolution that played out on Top Of The Pops, rather than deep underground - and why the "plastic music" of the early Eighties is so very durable and influential.

Go on then, I'm listening….
DARE looks back to the dizzying excitement of Pop Music from 1979-1982. Punk and Disco had punctured the Seventies’ grey flab but the Top Twenty had stayed drab for the most part.

Seemingly overnight, microchips were everywhere: in the home, bleeping and flashing on your wrist and powering the synthesizers and computers that changed everything in Pop. Bold and bright Pop ideas leapfrogged musical ability and even the most austere bands started cracking smiles. Joy Division became New Order, The Clash took on hip hop, The Specials gave birth to Fun Boy Three, Neil Young made a Kraftwerk record and as for Adam’s Ants…

The Top Twenty filled up with more and more weird and wonderful singles, week after week. Each new Smash Hits and Top Of The Pops was an unmissable feast for the eyes and ears.

Our friends were indeed electric.

It really felt like the sic-fi future was finally arriving.

How so, David…?
A handful of ambitious electronic albums from David Bowie and Kraftwerk in the late Seventies, coupled with newly affordable computer technology, forever changed what it meant to be "In A Band" and taught Pop Music a whole new language. There was no longer a need for a drummer or indeed any band at all. Computers allowed one brain to make a record the way it wanted to.

This is the tale of how Synthpop rendered Rock’n’Roll redundant almost overnight and how Britain fell in love with the Bleep. The unprecedented genius of The Human League, New Order, Simple Minds, ABC, OMD, The Cure, Japan, Duran, Depeche Mode et al achieved what Punk had failed to. A massively successful and largely British musical revolution, packed with beautiful freaks, that redrew the generation gap and took Pop on a much needed quantum leap into the future.

This New Pop reached its dizzying creative peak in 1982 as band after band rocketed from the relative obscurity of a John Peel session into the flashbulb glare of Top Of The Pops. These Pop peacocks were splashed in brilliant technicolour over the covers of both Smash Hits and NME and soon set their sights on America…but at what price?

This very entertaining book describes how the exotic and enduring records of this incendiary Year Zero changed everything and continue to inspire your favourite new artists today.

1983 is painted very much as the villain of the piece for a number of reasons, not all of which have to do with Limahl.

Are you in the book, then…?
No. Not really. OK, a little bit. Music has been my life and this period changed everything for me. I was 14 in 1982, living in an endlessly damp, grey South Wales. This glittering New Pop music blew my mind week after week and the light from these distant stars led me down the rocky path to becoming an A&R Man and running my own label.

I tell the story of this computerised revolution, examine the records and the effect they had and continue to have. I'm an "insightful Music Biz veteran" now, with a fresh perspective on the art and business of Pop, but still addicted to buying new records every week and still very much in touch with that wide-eyed teen