SAW : An Overly Long Consideration of a Pop Fad Gone By

Alright, I'm going to ask you all to listen, and listen closely.



What you hear? That's the noise that a sound makes when it's dying. The song may not be familiar, at least to our conscious brain, but the component parts, so naked and exposed that there is hardly a need to elaborate what they are, have been rattling around in the most visible puddles of pop music for the last two decades, without rest.

In the 1980s, the trio of Stock, Aiken and Waterman performed what for all intents and purposes turned into a complete domination of British pop radio, ratcheting up something close to a dozen number one chart hits in half a decade. In the process they managed to engineer chart success for any number of acts that we can more or less consider successful: Rick Astley , Bananarama, Kylie Minogue, the WWF Superstars, and Dead or Alive, whose song "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" was covered by Jessica Simpson, which seems very deeply appropriate. The video up top, from Boy Krazy, is basically the last single they achieved significant success with; you can hear the thinness in it, and it's kind of fascinating, like a Pop Flying Dutchman, steering itself through cursed memory alone.

If the history of factory made hit records starts (for the sake of argument) with Barry Gordy and Motown, and grows until it blossoms into the fully formed behemoth that is Disney right now, then SAW occupy a very crucial turning point. They famously sought to control every aspect of their artist's careers, designing them with airtight visual sheen; it's easy to forget that Kylie Minogue was originally a faintly promising actress languishing in the dire tv sitcom "Neighbours" (not to the length of building television shows around its bands, but we can't all be Disney can we?).

The fascinating thing about the SAW sound remains how in touch it was with the first stirrings of British club culture. Their unfortunate struggle with M/A/R/R/S over a single sample in the great "Pump up the Volume" notwithstanding, they had what seems to current eyes like a strikingly vital push and pull between their successes and the underground culture; it's hard to imagine Madchester blowing up the way it did without their priming the population, and there are things like this late '80s Momus track:



We hear about '80s revival all the time these days, and people are talking about a '90s revival coming soon, so I suppose we should brace ourselves for that. But what I'm wondering is, if all the kids of today are tuning into Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus, then where are the artists grappling with their influence the same way that someone like Momus did on his album "Don't Stop the Night"? Is it simply to daunting a prospect, or is there really such little water in that puddle that the blog successes of today have had to run, cringing, into the comforting arms of Rick Astley, and his warm glow of quality, the kind that time will never take away?