Keats Symposium: Suzanne Barnett on Keats’s Influence on 80s New Wave, Post-Punk, and Beyond
Suzanne Barnett delivered a paper for the Roundtable on Keats's Afterlives at the Keats Symposium, "The Emergence of Keats as a Poet," hosted by Fordham University on October 7, 2017. Her paper addressed affinities between Keats and musical groups from the 1980s, such as Duran Duran and Adam and the Ants. Here she discusses Keats's influence on contemporary music and why he attracts some genres while others reject the Keatsian aesthetic.
Why do you think Keats was so amenable to 80s new wave culture, and not other genres or musical trends like “grunge” (which started in the mid- to late-eighties and shared its own set of stars who died prematurely)?
My initial reaction to this question was something like an audible “bleargh” because I did a good job of avoiding grunge the first time around, but I’ll bite: grunge’s primary aesthetic was, I think we can all agree, a self-conscious resistance to having a definable aesthetic, a raw realism that inevitably got commodified by popular culture into a “look” (I’m thinking, for example, of Marc Jacobs’s now-legendary “grunge collection” in the early 90s that first brought flannel and ripped jeans into Vogue). If punk was rebellious, grunge was the absence of active rebellion: anti-slickness, anti-consumerist, and characteristically apathetic (or at least affectedly so). As a result, I don’t see much Keats in grunge: I assume they would have found him too earnest, too dreamy, and, despite his preoccupation with mortality, too heartfelt. The (admittedly somewhat facile) musico-Romantic corollaries I offered in the Q&A last month were something like: new wave is Keatsian; progressive rock is Blakean; goth is Shelleyan; punk is Byronic. That would make grunge…I’m not sure, actually—maybe Godwinian or, as some friends just suggested, Clare-esque—but not especially Keatsian, in my estimation.
Have you found reference to Keats or his poetry in popular music today? Have any of the Keatsian conventions adapted by Adam Ant and Duran Duran mutated in the decades since the 80s?
Much of today’s popular and “alternative” music is undoubtedly Keatsian. As my talk suggested, it’s so heavily and self-consciously inspired by 80s new wave and electropop, which were themselves inspired by Keats. New York Magazine did an extensive feature last fall on the pervasive influence of 80s aesthetics on music, film, comic books, television, and everything else pop in this decade. We’re within that twenty-to-thirty-year cycle: just like the late 1970s and 1980s saw a revival of doo-wop and soda fountains and rockabilly and Back to the Future, this decade and the last have given us a host of musical acts—Chromeo, Daft Punk, Future Islands, Lady Gaga, Grimes, Bruno Mars, Neon Indian, MGMT, M83, and Taylor Swift, to name just a few—that could have been on the radio in 1984 or 1989. Call it Stranger Things nostalgia. I’ve come across only a few explicit musical references to Keats in the last decade or so—the noise pop band Medicine’s “Negative Capability” from 2003, Natasha Bedingfield’s “These Words (I Love You, I Love You)” from 2004—but if anyone finds any, I encourage you to submit them to Romantic Circles Reviews & Receptions’ “Romanticism and Popular Culture” page, where we compile such references.