I’ve always been a huge fan of Steve Winwood. Even as a kid, I loved how clean and bright his songs were, without ever being sappy or trite. Rather, they kept an edge somehow. Eric Clapton once said that Winwood was like a young, White, British Ray Charles. I kind of think he was right.
Not long ago, I stumbled upon one of Winwood’s music videos. It was for “Valerie,” one of his greatest solo hits and one of my favorite songs of all time. The video was on YouTube, of course, and whoever posted it included lyric-captions. Normally I don’t like to follow the captions on a music video, but for some reason I did this time. And as I followed Winwood’s phrasing, I noticed something I had never seen before. Namely, the way he often splits single syllables into multiple notes. Take the line: “Music, hi and sweet.” It’s five syllables, but he sings it as six notes.
If you are a music major, or anyone who knows a bit about voice training, you are probably rolling your eyes right about now. The technique that Winwood is using is so basic that it’s been around for thousands of years at least. But, being a musical ignoramus, I never thought of it before. It is, I just learned, called melisma and is usually contrasted with syllabic singing, in which notes and syllables match each other one for one.
Ironically, as I did a bit more searching on the internet, I found a Facebook post by Winwood himself, mentioning melisma. It was in reference to the passing of the great singer Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac. Winwood commented on how McVie stood out from many of her contemporary singers by virtue of her syllabic singing. And he’s right. McVie’s phrasing was so sharp it was almost like that of a jazz singer.
And yet, off the top of my head, I can think of several instances of when McVie used melisma to great effect. My favorite example is in “You Make Loving Fun,” when she splits the word “believe” into so many notes I can’t even count them. And each one goes right through me each time I hear it.
It’s taking me this many years to learn the definition of melisma. Go figure. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can teach them some new words.
If you had a clever and edgy punk/garage band back in the 1980s, and if that band got picked up by indie college radio stations, you were likely to get slapped with the label of “college rock.” Many great bands suffered this fate. Some, like R.E.M. and the B-52s, were able to grow beyond it. Others, like The Replacements, never really did.
I knew a girl who was so into The Replacements that she would only refer to them by the insider-fan name, “The Placemats.” She had great taste in music (and probably still does). I thank her, belatedly, for introducing me to one of their best songs, “Alec Chilton” (entitled, obviously, after another great indie rocker).
I thought I would use this Fourth of July 2025 installment of my Friday Night Rock-Out series to celebrate one of the greatest triumphs of enlightened American capitalism: Schoolhouse Rock! The brainchild of ABC executive David McCall, the series ran on Saturday mornings during cartoon-time and was seen, enjoyed, and effortlessly memorized by millions of America kids, myself included. Even kids today will be somewhat familiar with the series—mainly because their Baby-Boomer and Gen-X parents made them watch it on DVD!
My favorite episode is Verb: That’s What Happening, which was performed with great soul by Zachary Sanders, along with a little help from The Pointer Sisters (allegedly). After fifty-odd years, it still hits.
Let’s face it. New Wave music has a bad rap. It’s associated with bad 1980s movies and “Old Wave” nostalgia night at your local dance club.
Having grown up in the era of both punk music and New Wave, I can say with some authority that New Wave music, at its best, was every bit as powerful—and a lot more meaningful—than punk. In fact, New Wave gave us some of the best music of the 20th Century. The Talking Heads. Blondie. Gary Numan. And on and on.
One of my favorite songs of the era is this little number by Romeo Void. You might remember it from an obscure (but not bad) 1980s movie called Reckless starring Aiden Quinn and Daryll Hannah, who dance to the song in one surprisingly effective scene.
I like the song because it’s like a mash-up of The Sex Pistols and a San Francisco poetry-slam. It hits.
Forget Van Halen. Forget Hendrix. Forget Clapton. Lindsey Buckingham is the greatest guitarist in the history of rock music. Don’t believe me? Listen to this song, “Trouble,” from his 1981 solo album Law and Order. If it doesn’t transport you to another plane of existence—yes, forgive the cliche; to an actual soundscape—then you need to get your ears checked.
Buckingham was, of course, the driving force behind Fleetwood Mac’s second incarnation, when they produced one of the greatest rock LPs of all time, Rumours. (When he joined the band, he insisted they also hire his girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, who also had a bit to do with the group’s ultimate success.) As band leader Mick Fleetwood saw at the time, Buckingham is not just an incredible guitarist, he is also a phenomenally talented song-writer, multi-instrumentalist, and singer.
Getting back to his guitar playing, though, let me add that Buckingham uses an usual finger-picking technique—more like a banjo-player—which he employs in a variety of styles and with amazing creativity. That creativity is on full display here.
If you’ve ever gone to a dance club on “Old-Wave Night” when they play the greatest alterna-hits of the late 1970s and 80s, you’ve almost certainly heard this song. I, of course, am old enough to have heard it on its original run, when it still had complete cultural currency. (Personally, I think it still does.)
Killing Joke was not only one of the wittiest and most subversive bands of the era, they were one of the most talented. And hard-hitting. You know you’ve done something right when later classic bands such as Metallica, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, and Nirvana site you as an influence. In fact, Kurt Cobain liked Geordie Walker’s guitar playing so much that he borrowed from it heavily on Nirvana’s great hit, “Come as You Are.” As one of the song’s producers explained,
…we couldn’t decide between ‘Come as You Are’ and ‘In Bloom.’ Kurt [Cobain] was nervous about ‘Come as You Are’ because it was too similar to a Killing Joke song but we all thought it was still the better song to go with. And, he was right, Killing Joke later did complain about it.
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, right?
I have a confession to make: I dream about shopping malls. Specifically, one shopping mall, the Oaks Mall here in Gainesville.
The “Collapsed Time” Effect of Vaporwave
After my parents’ divorce, I saw my mother mostly on the weekends, and one of our routine activities was to go to the mall. We would have lunch, see a movie, and wander around. Later, when I got into my teens, I spent a lot more time at the mall with my friends. We hit all the usual spots—the arcade, both bookstores (Waldenbooks and B. Dalton’s), the record store, Spencer’s Gifts, the toy store. And we did anything else we felt like.
Trappings of the 1980s, along with “Broken Sun” motif
We weren’t alone, of course. After the collapse of downtown America, the mall was the last remaining public square. In suburban America, particularly, it was also the only fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon. Or a Saturday night, for that matter. When I entered high school and started going on dates, we often went to a movie at the mall. One of my most vivid memories is of how strange and eerie the mall felt after the movie let out at 11:00 or so, and we would walk through the empty, dark hall with all the shops closed and metal gates drawn down. It was one of my first experiences of liminal space, and it sticks with me even today.
In fact, it haunts my dreams. Literally. For when I dream of the Oaks Mall now, I often find myself lost among its corridors near closing time, the wings still busy with shoppers but with the crowd starting to thin out, little by little. Stranger still, my dream-mall is huge—the size of Manhattan Island, practically. A gigantic labyrinth of brand-name stores, all of which are in the early stages of shutting down for the night. (My subconscious, I think, is warning me that the mall is shutting down forever.) These dreams often end in a sense of panic as I realize I am on the wrong side of the mall from my friends, or my car, or whatever, and I will never be able to reach them/it in time before…what? Closing? It’s not clear, but whatever it is, it’s kind of scary.
Despite the disquieting nature of these dreams—or perhaps because of it—I find myself endlessly fascinated by what has come to be known as the Vaporwave aesthetic. Vaporwave is primarily a visual genre, marked by artistic images of 1980s culture. That is, computer graphics, shopping malls, the Miami skyline (alaMiami Vice), fast food restaurants, music videos, video stores, and old-style video games.
And neon. Lots and lots of neon.
Empty Mall / Liminal Space Vibe Typical of Vaporwave
The overriding effect is that of a hyper-real fantasy that feels like a time-portal back to the 1980s. I love these images because they somehow evoke the memory of that long ago time, at least for me. More accurately, they evoke the feeling I wanted to have at the timebutcould never quite capture. The feeling of an endless, prosperous, fun, high-tech future.
I think that this is the real power of nostalgia. A wise man once defined nostalgia as a fondness for a Time that never existed. I don’t think that’s quite right. Nostalgia is a fondness not for a lost time but for a lost hope—the hope one felt and in a familiar place and a long-ago time. A hope that, though never realized, still lingers in the heart.
That sense of lost opportunity is, I think, reflected in the very name of the genre itself, vaporwave, which is very similar to vaporware, a term coined in the 1980s to mean great-looking software that was promised by advertisers and corporations but which never actually materialized. It simply evaporated.
The same thing happened to our collective dreams back in the 1980s. My friends and I all hoped that we could look forward to a glorious future, one better than that of our parents’ and teachers’ generation. A future that would be made bright by the many technological revolutions (the digital revolution, especially) that were impacting every aspect of our culture: movies, TV, music, art, games, fashion, and even books. The haunting images of vaporwave reflect that lost dream—rather than the sterile reality—of the 1980s and ’90s.
Many vaporwave images seem to have a psychedelic “collapsed time” feel to them, as did many of the music videos and computer-generated short films of that era. The hippie generation had the psychedelic flower as their symbol. We had the computer-generated sun—the so-called “broken sun”—which seems to have been pulled directly from of a film poster or a television commercial from 1982.
As attracted as I am to vaporwave, I am equally drawn to its parallel music genre, synthwave. Like vaporwave, synthwave is characterized by the early computer-era vibe, as symbolized in synthesized music. Not actual synthesized music from the 1980s, of course, but rather music that sounds a lot like it, yet is somehow drained of all melodrama and false tension that characterized synth-music back then. Synthwave has a kind of purity to it. A simple beauty that surpasses the actual music of that time.
In other words, synthwave is to actual 1980s music what Andy Warhol was to actual advertisements of the 1950s. His silk screen images of Campbell’s soup cans looked almost exactly like actual soup cans, but larger, stylized, more vivid. They made the world really see Campbell’s soup cans—the sublime nature of everything, even a mass-produced soup can—for the first time. Warhol’s genius lay in his ability to show us the beauty and promise of something that was once central and even commonplace in our lives, even as it mocked (lovingly) that very same thing.
That’s what vaporwave does, too. Through the alchemy of art, it somehow humanizes the relentless, corporate-controlled media barrage of the 1980s. For me, and millions of others like me, it is literally the stuff that dreams are made of.
Or were made of, that is. Back in the day.
Lo-Poly, Computer-Generated Background with Broken Sun
Blatent Consumerism of the 1980s, both celebrated and mocked
In any given decade, one or two musicians discovers exactly the right sound, look, and vibe to capture the spirit of the times. Such “triple-threat” artists are rare. Elvis Presley was one. David Bowie was another.
For many in my generation of kids growing up in the early 1980s, there were two such figures. One was Madonna. The other was Billy Idol. Unless you were a teenager in that dark, troubled time, you can’t imagine what a huge impact Idol had on youth culture. Let’s start with his look, an ingenious mix of pre-Goth romanticism (complete with black leather and rosary beads) and science-fiction cyberpunk (he had the same peroxide blond hair and chiseled features as Rutger Hauer’s Nazi replicant in Blade Runner).
Idol looked like…well…an idol. A pop idol, that is. But it was his sound that really mattered. Just as Elvis took the energy and soul of R&B and turned into something that middle-class, white American kids could enjoy, Idol took the punk sound of 1970s London and turned it into kick-ass American hard rock. His early hits like “White Wedding” and “Mony, Mony” stuck out a mile on FM radio (not to mention MTV, where they stuck out two miles). Not only were his songs vicious and fast, they had an actual beat; you could dance to them. And we did.
In short, Idol did what the Sex Pistols never could: he brought punk to mainstream America.
ZZ Top is the brainchild of lead guitarist and vocalist Billy Gibbons, who is a genius. Ever since I learned that he essentially named the band after his hero, blues legend B.B. King, I’ve always thought of ZZ Top as a kind of parallel-universe version of B.B. King. (In that other universe, B.B. King is a rock star and ZZ Top is a blues band. Pretty cool, huh?).
My favorite ZZ Top song is one a lot of young people have never heard, “Got Me Under Pressure,” which comprises one of my the simplest and yet devastating lines in the history of rock lyrics: “She likes cocaine.“
One of the many things I learned from Rod Stewart’s memoir, Rod: The Autobiography, is that the technical process of recording a studio album is very strange. For instance, the lead singer usually records his vocal track in a soundproofed room, by himself, wearing headphones so that he can listen to the band’s instrumental track.
It seems a very sterile and artificial process–not at all what one pictures when imagining a rock singer at work. And so I was impressed to learn that Stewart has always rejected this technique, insisting on recording all tracks directly with his band:
When we were recording, I liked to be in the sound room with the band, walking around with a microphone in hand, so that I could look them in the eye, interact with them, perform with them, basically. I think it slightly startled the engineer, who was more used to having the singer isolated behind screens, or in an entirely separate vocal booth. I remember hearing how Frank Sinatra had once been parked by an engineer behind a screen in a recording studio and he had made them take it down. In order to sing, he needed to feel the sound of the orchestra hit him in the chest. I guess this was my own version of that.
It’s interesting that Stewart draws a comparison between himself and Sinatra. As I learned from James Kaplan’s fine bio of Sinatra, the great crooner himself exerted tremendous effort when preparing for one his recordings. He was known to read the song lyrics aloud to himself, almost like prose. He felt he had to discover the emotional truth of the lyric before he could sing it, and if that truth was not forthcoming, he would nix the song.
Ash Clifton, Writer 