Robin Scott, of the Scottish band M, whose song “Pop Muzik” was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 3, 1979:
“I was looking to make a fusion of various styles which somehow would summarize the last 25 years of pop music. It was a deliberate point I was trying to make. Whereas rock and roll had created a generation gap, disco was bringing people together on an enormous scale. That’s why I really wanted to make a simple, bland statement, which was, ‘All we’re talking about basically [is] pop music.’”
That’s a very late-1970s sentiment, the touchingly naive and idealistic concept that people might be coming together on some global scale to fulfill, in some way, the promises of the 1960s (by dancing, I guess). I suppose that particular party came to a pretty abrpupt end almost exactly one year later with the election of Ronald Reagan on November 4, 1980. Morning in America! No more of this gay cosmopolitan utopian bullshit!
This optimistic, internationalist pop anthem that positions itself with one foot in the past and one foot in the future is thirty years old today.
And actually, so am I! I am also a relic of a forgotten time!
