Freaking Out Vs. Keeping Cool

An investigation

On October 14th, 1985, the number-one single in the German charts was ‘Cheri Cheri Lady’, by electro-pop duo Modern Talking. The song, a fine slice of prime synthfluff, was a Europe-wide hit, and it was promoted with a video featuring the two members of the band, Dieter Bohlen and Thomas Anders, exploring a semi-abandoned countryside mansion and vamping for the cameras.

As they prance, it soon becomes apparent that there are two distinct personalities on screen. Bohlen, grinning and jumping, looks like a kid in a sweet shop. But Anders, austere beneath his fake tan, is dead cool – icy to the point of disdain. And, although they might not have realised it at the time, their video represents a rare moment of a particular kind of juxtaposition in twentieth-century pop music: a collision between the enthusiastic and the deadpan.

A pop star plays it cool. This presumption is so much a part of our collective cultural wiring that it seems to barely even need mentioning. Lady Gaga strides into the awards ceremony, clad in meat, looking bored. Michael Jackson moonwalks effortlessly across the television screen, passive-faced. Jay-Z’s worldly gaze meets the crowd for an instant, then moves away again. It’s sometimes difficult to remember that it was not always so.

Elvis is certainly familiar to us as the smouldering, radiant bad-boy. But we easily forget that he was more familiar to his contemporary audiences as the joyous, whooping, grinning, gyrating boy who couldn’t stand still. The Beatles, pre-Rubber Soul, were smiling, waving, cheery lads, happy-go-lucky to the point of dorkiness. So where did it come from, this iron law of blank cool? Who is culpable for making our pop stars into mannequin-faced ice queens?

Certainly Bob Dylan seems to bear some responsibility (though his sunglasses-indoors schtick was leavened with occasional outbreak of self-deprecating humour and stoned giggling – and he always struck the pose of poet more than pop star). And both the Velvet Underground and Kraftwerk pioneered unique variations on the theme of glacial stoicism (though neither could really be considered as pop stars of their respective eras, regardless of subsequent influence).

But ultimately, this law was not carved into stone by any one artist. This law, if it came from anywhere, emerged from the brief dadaist outburst of late-1970s pop music (usually taxonomised in weighty tomes as punk, new wave, krautrock, and their myriad subgenres). And it is defined, ultimately, by contempt.

Sometimes performed, sometimes genuine, this contempt radiates from every action of the contemporary pop star (and wannabe). Though it had its antecedents in rockabilly and jazz, this haughty sneer was finally, comprehensively bestowed on pop music by the Sex Pistols, probably some time around mid-February 1977, and has been part of the cultural lingua franca ever since.

This is not to say that the deadpan stance is triumphant. The turbo-caffeinated enthusiasm of David Lee Roth shouting at us to jump, or the cartoonish nerdiness of the Beastie Boys fighting for our right to party, or Britney Spears smiling meekly out from the television, all give the lie to that. But it does tend towards being dominant – the default option for every starry-eyed kid striking a pose in the bedroom mirror. And it does tend, like oil in water, to try to repel its opposite: enthusiasm.

And that, finally, is what makes Modern Talking’s video so unique. Imperious contempt and dorky whimsy are almost never combined in the same package. The only other notable double-act to deliberately combine the goofy and the cool was Public Enemy, though Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s antics were more of a deliberate good-cop-bad-cop device for ramming home a political message. Modern Talking managed, for a brief moment, to pull it off. Will we see its like again?