Last Tuesday evening, a friend informed me that Washed Out was opening for Cut Copy at the State Theatre. A few phone calls and some extra daytime hours in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library later, I was in a car with four friends driving to Portland.
The prospect of seeing two popular musical genres—the "chill wave" of Washed Out and the electro-pop of Cut Copy—drew me to the concert.
But what exactly is electro-pop? For starters, one's ear will often be caught primarily by synthesizers, or by some computer generated sound. The ensuing pieces are composed of a variety of bass or electric guitar riffs, almost always rudimentarily constructed to fit in with each other, building toward a climax.
The force of electro-pop music derives from a pulsating beat of a live drummer or from the programming of the extremely popular drum machines.
The Australian natives in Cut Copy have been identifying themselves with and helping to construct this genre for sometime now. Their debut album, "Bright Like Neon Love," was released back in 2004. Both of their two latest albums, "In Ghost Colours" (2008) and "Zonoscope" (2011), have climbed to the top 10 on both U.S. and Australian dance charts.
Within their seven active years as a band, we have seen the birth of the electro-pop sub-culture in music. MGMT and Phoenix have produced some of the most recognizable songs of the genre in the past few years. And others have made the transition into the genre of electro-pop.
Back in the 1990s, a DJ named James Murphy was starting an electronic music label, and began making simply crafted songs featuring highly-acclaimed lyrics, and so LCD Soundsystem was born. Julian Casablancas, the front man of garage rock icons The Strokes, released a solo project in 2009 that was heavily constructed with synthesizers and simple guitar riffs.
Even pop icons utilize the catchy and enigmatic functions of electro-pop. "My Love," one of Justin Timberlake's most successful and most popular singles of the past decade, was constructed around a catchy synthesizer riff and simple programmed beat.
Rapper Kanye West's electronic influences are obvious (we have an entire album dedicated to a drum machine), and two of his major hits off "Graduation," "Flashing Lights" and "Stronger," are rooted in the formula of a driving synthesizer part and catchy hooks.
But how did electro-pop begin? Toward the end of the 1970s and at the outset of 1980s, the synthesizer came to be a staple element of myriad rock and pop bands. It wasn't so much because synthesizers needed to be an essential part of their sound, but more as a mode of exploration (many great '70s rock stars are generally thought to have a throwaway electro album in the '80s. For example, see Bowie's "Tonight" or Neil Young's "Trans").
Some of the critically-acclaimed bands who were fundamental in the development of music at the time were young artists like Blondie, Talking Heads and New Order. These were the bands that weren't just integrating synthesizers into their sound, but were building a new type of sound with an electronic component.
But the new sound was different and unnatural to some, and the music scene took a pretty major shift going into the '90s with the growing popularity of grunge.
Grunge is a genre based almost entirely on the feeling of disorganization. Like punk, grunge taught us to be weary of anything clean, pretty and repeatable.
Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Stephen Malkmus of Pavement added more distortion to their sound and never made it about playing songs perfectly, maybe not even about getting bogged down in tuning their instruments.
The other major musical development of the '90s was the evolution of rap. Nineties rap was raw; it was about telling the truth, regardless of how dark and illicit the truth might be.
Toward the end of the decade, the music industry was booming, MTV was bigger than it had ever been, CDs were very popular, and stores like Tower Records were reaping enormous gains. The emergence of boy bands and teen pop icons who gave us simple, lyrically shallow music made to showcase young singers' talent (and sex appeal). Synthesizers loomed large in the background behind the teenage pop stars and computers were developing such that producers could wield these generated sounds to compose songs quickly and mindlessly.
In October of 2000, there came a record that changed everything; Radiohead released their highly anticipated album "Kid-A." No one saw it coming, but the smartest band in the business was experimenting with how to make beauty out of electronic instruments coupled with lyrical darkness and introspection.
It took some time to get used to, but in the following few years the current stars of electro-pop began to emerge, with lyrics centered on self-reflexivity, youthful guilt, and nostalgia, all back-dropped with an electronic soundscape.
Is it such a mystery that the magazine that put Britney Spears on their cover six times listed Kid-A at the top of their Albums of the Decade list?
Does all this history play into a simple Cut Copy concert? No. A good electro-pop show is simply about dancing and singing. Yet at the same time, my friend couldn't help but note the way in which the lead singer moved like Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. It will be interesting to see the next piece of musical evolution.