Planet 81 is the recording project of Phoenix, Arizona-based artist Justin Cohn.

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Around November 2021, I became obsessed with pop music from the year 1981. More specifically, I was drawn to a certain strand of rock that I heard in records like Phil Collins’ Face Value, Prince’s Controversy and Hall & Oates’ Private Eyes. Something about the direct quality of the music appealed to me. What I once wrote off as cheesy and dated now seemed sincere and timeless. I stopped listening to new releases and set to work immersing myself in music of that era, wading through a days-long playlist of notable ‘81 releases. Naturally, I wanted to know how records like these were made, so I could make one myself.

It was a time of technological adoption for many of these artists. New synthesizers and drum machines with sampling and programming capabilities laid the foundation. Digital reverbs and delays added strange new futuristic textures. Globalization awakened new, blended ideas of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Affordable multitrack recorders and smaller mixing consoles allowed for home recording. Even the future of the listening medium was up in the air.

But for all that was new and exciting technologically, the songs themselves weren't that far removed from late seventies pop rock. Now there were drum machines and big gated snares, crude synth sounds, and a rapidly increasing tonal brightness. But it was all tempered with the rock-solid foundation of the decade prior, which was itself responsible for turning pop music into an umbrella for an impossibly vast network of genres. 

“The decade is … an arbitrary schema itself,” Robert Christgau wrote in his guide to rock albums of the ‘70s, compiled and released in 1981. “Time doesn't just execute a neat turn toward the future every ten years. But like a lot of artificial concepts—money, say—the category does take on a reality of its own once people figure out how to put it to work.” The energy of this reality, the figuring-out of what the next decade should be, musically, seemed to give the early ‘80s pop landscape an especially charged air of purpose. All these artists, surging into the mainstream at an opportune moment, with the chance of becoming the defining voice of a new decade, made bold moves to position their ideas about where music should go next.

I imagined myself in the same position as these artists 40 years later. And it wasn’t just the weight of the oncoming decade. There was a sort of cycling loop effect that connected the 1980s with the 2020s that cut much deeper than music. Politically, economically, and socially, echoes were ringing out: reckless optimism in the face of never-before-seen volatility, heroic figures who harked back to an imagined lost past of prosperity, the evangelical triumph over science. 

There's a well-documented psychological phenomenon called the “reminiscence bump,” in which middle-aged people tend to overemphasize their adolescence in retelling the story of their lives. This bump is tied to music preferences, possibly because “adolescence may be a time during which individuals show a socially-boosted increase in the rewards of music listening.”

A less well-documented phenomenon, though not completely unexplored, is the inheritability of this reminiscence bump across generations. Is it possible that, approaching middle-age, living through a period of time that strongly echoed one where my parents were entering adulthood, I caught a sort of cosmic epigenetic empathy wave and beamed my music tastes forty years into the past?

I asked my mom and dad about what they were doing at the time, what their lives were like, where they lived, where they worked, how they socialized, what music they listened to, what they wanted. I compared notes with my own internet research. I sought out books, TV shows, films, art from the era. If I were to create music that was something more than pastiche or temporal appropriation, I would need to be immersed completely in a cultural landscape that wasn’t my own.

The songs that would eventually turn into my first record came together pretty quickly in tandem with this research. It helped to work within the loose framework of the “concept album." It just seemed fitting, both as a relic of the era, and as a way of telling a story that mirrored my own research journey into the past. A man, distraught by his own world and searching for "applause, honor, and fame," travels through spacetime to an another planet to live as a king. The only catch: his loyal subjects bear no resemblance to the people from his own world he wanted to preside over.

I imagined it would be like a sonic period piece—one of those fake "found" records. I studied period-accurate recording workflows, favored vintage gear that would have been available in 1981 (or used emulations of gear that was now too expensive to own myself), and tried generally to retread the same sonic territory as those records that initially drew me in to the era.

But reaction to the finished product was more interesting. Rather than hearing Hall & Oates or The Cars, listeners were actually catching on to the music I listened to in my adolescence in the mid-2000s: bands like Phoenix, The Strokes, and Weezer. My failure to accurately replicate the records I had been researching had accidentally uncovered my own foundational influences.

Maybe what caught me back in November 2021 wasn't a cosmic epigenetic empathy wave, but instead the first glimmer of my own reminiscence bump—shown to me in the way all the most important things in life had been shown, by mimicking the elders.

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