On a lovely summer late afternoon in 1988, I was accosted on the street by two people. They were a man and a woman about my own age, 24. They’d stopped to mock me about three albums I had with me—Notorious by Duran Duran, Scoundrel Days by A-ha, and Black Celebration by Depeche Mode.
The encounter was pleasant at first. I was friends with the two, who worked in a bar in Georgetown and were walking to work. I’d just gotten off work at Kemp Mill Records at Dupont Circle and had purchased three “cut-out” records. I’d plucked them out of the remainder bin, where albums that didn’t sell were left for customers to toss in their other purchases almost as an afterthought. They had a red $3.99 sticker on them and a hole punched through the sleeve to indicate their lack of value. These were “cut-outs,” records they had printed too many of and didn’t sell. So they dumped them in a black bin at the front of the store.
One of my interrogators, the man, asked me what was in the bag. I produced the three records. The reaction was intense and immediate. What was this? Duran Duran? Depeche Mode? A-ha? Those guys are fags! The cool bands were the American punk and alternative bands, R.E.M. the Minutemen, the Replacements, Bad Brains, Husker Du. One of my tormentors produced a camera, to take a shot of me in my 1980s sweater, cut-off Levis and New Wave haircut holding up a copy of Duran Duran’s Notorious. The mirthful a-hole across from me couldn’t contain himself—I even looked like one of the assholes in the band!
Forty years later, those albums have grown in stature, while the punk and grunge my friends championed is a memory. At the time of their release, bands like Depeche Mode, Duran Duran and A-ha were considered lame by a lot of heavy metal and “alternative” and “indie” rock snobs.
Today, with artists like Taylor Swift, CVRCHES, Arianna Grande and Cannons creating sound similar to the synthesizer 1980s—and shows like Rooster mining the 80s for its soundtrack—it’s clear who won the war and not the battle on Connecticut Ave. all those years ago.
1986 was a key year, and a great year, in pop music history. It was when Pet Shop Boys released Please, which featured not only the smash hit “West End Girls” but “Two Divided By Zero,” a great opening track, as well as “Love Comes Quickly,” arguably the best pop song of the 1980s. On New Year’s Day 1986 Talk Talk released its third album and first masterpiece, The Colour of Spring.
I loved R.E.M., the Replacements, U2, the Dead Kennedys and Husker Du, but when I went back to my basement room in the Georgetown house I shared with three high school friends that night in 1988, and I dropped the needle on Talk Talk’s “I Don’t Believe in You,” it was entering a different world. This was art.
Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration was panned on its release—reviews that I believed. My Bible in those days was the British weekly Melody Maker, and my favorite writer, Steve Sutherland, had dismissed Depeche Mode as "pussycats desperate to appear perverted as an escape from the superficiality of teen stardom.” Black Celebration is now considered a great record. Duran Duran was also underrated. Notorious is not only a great dance record, but also has sharp and clever lyrics. “Skin Trade” offers smart wordplay about the porn industry (pop singers today just get raunchy and drop f-bombs), as well as a great, thumping indictment of haters in “Vertigo (Do the Demolition).” It’s also possible that I love this record because it was playing on the night I hooked up with Kamala Harris.
As I once pointed out, the post-punk and New Wave music of the 1980s was initially supposed to be icy and detached, an indictment of the societal loss of feeling. “West End Girls” by the Pet Shop Boys isn’t about love but a series of arcane references in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.” Yet pop music modernism could never escape romanticism. “Love Comes Quickly,” the second single released from the Pet Shop Boys’ debut Please, is something that might’ve been covered by Sinatra. In his book about Roxy Music’s 1982 album Avalon, Simon Morrison explores how Roxy Music leader Bryan Ferry went from modernism to romance, covering songs like “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and “Don’t Worry Baby.” Morrison argues that the modernist poet Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new,” the slogan of so many New Wave musicians in the 1980s, has become, “over the course of Ferry’s career, an impulse to make it beautiful, sensual.” Ferry’s “creative impulse appears to involve stripping away the intellectual dressings of modernism and exposing its beating heart, knowing the body holds its own mysteries.” True in 1986, true in 2026.