Fluxblog 521: first wave pop girls

Celebrating the unsung pop singers of the 1980s

This week’s playlist is FIRST WAVE POP GIRLS 1980-1990, a celebration of the under-recognized women who pioneered pop as we know it in the 1980s. The key word here is under-recognized – Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Whitney Houston aren’t included here because they attained mega-star status and are widely canonized. This is about all the other women who did their part to establish pop paradigms – Debbie Gibson, Taylor Dayne, Samantha Fox, Stacey Q, Kylie Minogue, Sheena Easton, Laura Branigan, Jody Watley, and a whole lot of freestyle artists.

While pop-as-genre has become very well respected and critically appreciated over the past 25 years, I find that overall we don’t give its pioneers the respect they’re due relative to the reverence for ground-breaking rock, R&B, and rap acts. Maybe some of this is part of the “flop” mindset endemic to pop fandom. It’s a zero-sum game where if you don’t attain lasting super stardom, you either get forgotten or outright disrespected. But if we’re going to take pop seriously as a genre, its origins are important and we need to see the artists featured in this playlist as crucial forebears to the likes of Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Robyn, Carly Rae Jepsen, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and Charli XCX. It’s all the same story.

[SPOTIFY | APPLE MUSIC | YOUTUBE]

For a different angle on this attempt at sketching out a history of pop that includes Madonna, Janet, and Whitney – as well as a lot of male artists – check out my previous playlist THE ORIGIN OF POP-AS-GENRE 1976-1996.

Thanks to Nicole for inspiring this one!

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• Here’s a fairly exhaustive list of “batshit insane pop star movies” over on Letterboxd.

• Pop Pantheon is now three episodes deep into their long-awaited Britney Spears retrospective!

• Evan Rytlewski wrote about his love of R.E.M. and catching Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy's R.E.M. tribute band in concert. Was it any good?

I will say that Michael Shannon really freaked it. He assumed the Michael Stipe role with a method actor’s commitment, recreating Stipe’s stage movements with studied precision — he even has Stipe’s sihloutte and bone structure. Yet at other times he looked like any other dude in the crowd three beers in doing R.E.M. karaoke. The show needed both: the performer and the fan. It had to be specific, but it also had to be free and sloppy. Michael Shannon understood this. He’s one of us.