MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The most enduring visual legacy of the 1980s musical movement known as New Wave is the distinctive hairstyle of the lead singer of A Flock of Seagulls. Mike Score’s gravity defying ‘do – in which two sculpted waves of hair sprout upwards from either side of his head while an island of bangs stretches down to a point nearly to his lips – is an ‘80s version of Proust’s madeleine. Hidden within those complicated tresses is not only an evocation of the ‘80s at their most stylistically ludicrous, but lurking in those strands is the secret history of how New Wave music allowed men to queer their identities. How did A Flock of Seagulls and other New Wave bands “queer” themselves as straight performers? Could openly gay acts like Pete Shelley “queer” themselves beyond simply being out? In Tendencies, Eve Sedgwick clarifies that, “one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to [is]: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (7-8). A Flock of Seagulls’s fixation on aliens allowed them to escape the boundaries of heteronormativity; their synth-heavy music provided the gap through which an alternative definition of manhood – and what constitutes a fashionable hairstyle – could emerge. With each permutation in fashion, with every lyrical investigation of sex and love, with each new stance struck in the burgeoning field of music videos, New Wave men created an “open mesh of possibilities” surrounding masculine identity in the 1980s. From dandies like Spandau Ballet to avenging dorks like Elvis Costello to kimono-clad Boy George, this paper considers how and why New Wave music was the soundtrack to a new wave of masculinities.