"The Damned Don’t Cry": Melancholia and White British Masculinity in 1980s Synthpop Music

Abstract

In "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud describes the primary symptoms of melancholia as "a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity of love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings." This is also a fairly accurate description of early 1980s synthpop music, which was full of white male British singers who maintained a numbed affect as they performed lyrics about loss, inaction, and inability.

Although some critics have derided this music as unemotional, this article explores how 1980s synthpop songs dramatize a kind of self-splitting, wherein the intense affect of grieving is displaced onto women and machines, while the singer maintains his impassive melancholy. Examining such popular acts as Blancmange, Thomas Dolby, A Flock of Seagulls, Ultravox, and Visage, it analyses both the songs themselves and their accompanying music videos to examine the performance of masculinity within them.

Drawing from Derrida’s work on hauntology, it also considers how 1980s UK synthpop performers were both haunted by Britain’s past and frightened that it may have no future. Enacting a repressed affect"”the so-called "stiff upper lip""”that had served middle-class white men well in Britain’s imperial glory days but served little purpose by the 1980s, these singers dramatize the dilemma of not knowing how to develop alternative modes of sensitive yet emotionally direct masculinity.