ABSTRACT
A paradigm, as philosopher and popular music studies scholar Theodore Gracyk explains, is “an exemplary case or body of work around which a community organizes its practices and beliefs.”1 In the case of rock music, paradigms can emerge through specific artists (the Beatles), recordings (the Ramones’ first album), or even entire genres or styles (disco). At the time of its greatest popularity in the early 1980s, few paradigms rivaled the growing use of synthesizers associated with the rise of important new wave groups like Depeche Mode and Soft Cell, both of whom had jettisoned guitars and drums entirely in favor of the new technology. Exploring the attitudes and aesthetics of the new synthesizer bands, Jon Young’s article for Trouser Press-one of the only magazines of the era with a specific new wave orientation-provides a thorough overview of the newly emerging style. As Young points out, synthesizers had already been established in the 1970s through such virtuoso progressive rock keyboardists as Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman. The new generation of musicians that Young profiles, however, had generally renounced the “synthesizer solo” as an outmoded venue of expression, turning instead for inspiration to punk’s DIY ethos and the more minimal sounds of creative experimentation of groups like Kraftwerk. Like many paradigms, the prominence of synthesizers in rock began to wane by the beginning of the 1990s, only to appear once more in the 2000s as various groups looked back to the 1980s as a point of musical inspiration.
