While solo artists were back on top in America, in England it was still the boy and girl bands, like it was in the nineties. As far as I'm concerned, not enough care was put into developing a distinct image and personality to the band members, so they stood no chance against the soloists. Still, these bands contributed to the decade, and took part in the transformations that happened in it.
And one of these transformations was the rise of the mashup as an art-form. The custom of mashing up two records was considered just a fun use of new technology, until Richard X mashed up Adina Howard's 'Freak Like Me' with Tubeway Army's 'Are Friends Electric?', two records that are very different in style but have the same chord sequence, and somehow mashed up perfectly. Suddenly, there was a mashup that sounded like a legitimate new record, so much so that the Sugababes, to my ears (and eyes) the best girl-band after the Spice Girls disbanded, decided to cover it, hiring Richard X to produce. 'Are Friends Electric?', coming out in 1979 in the midst of new wave and post-punk, used the electronic sound of the synthesizer to express loss of humanity, and the hero of the song feels such strangeness and alienation that he imagines everyone else is actually a robot. But in the years that passed, electronic sound became part of our humanity, and could be mashed with Adina Howard's kinky r'n'b record to express a different kind of strangeness, a strangeness that emerges from deviant sexuality. The record is also one of the first to sample eighties synthpop, and bring it back into the pop mix, a habit that would only increase throughout the decade and lay the ground for the rise of electro. Are we electric?
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