THE TRAGEDY OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC: This Atlantic review of “Future Sounds, a new book on the history of machine-made pop and classical songs, suggests that the radical power of the synthetic has largely been forgotten” — and eventually, the reader discovers that it’s all Reagan and Thatcher’s fault:

The book’s preface warps back to the sci-fi excitement of the year 1977, when Star Wars was playing in multiplexes and the Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer single “I Feel Love”—“pure, silver, shimmering, arcing, perfectly puttering hover-car brilliance,” Stubbs writes—was revolutionizing dance floors. Much as the Italian Futurists had agitated for a new canon in the early 20th century, and as the hippies’ rock and roll drowned out their parents’ sing-alongs, electronic music helped turn an entire culture toward wondering, What’s next? David Bowie, Kraftwerk, and others tried to answer the question with still-staggering inventiveness.

The tragedy, as Stubbs tells it, is that giddy anticipation of a paradigm shift ran up against the political regressions of the Reagan and Thatcher eras—and their accompanying oversaturated consumer culture. Even great breakthroughs got hijacked to dreary effect. “When the sampler became an affordable and ubiquitous piece of kit in the mid-1980s, it proved to be as enslaving as it was liberating,” he writes. “Rather than opening up multiple textural potentialities it degenerated into a box of tropes and tics and habits. The same stuttering effects, the same incredibly narrow pool of source material.”

Is there nothing that Reagan, Thatcher, and capitalism couldn’t do? How dare they cause the technological progress that saw the first modern music computers and samplers, such as the Fairlight, which sold for the staggering $40,000 price tag that Peter Gabriel paid in 1979 to the $8,000 E-Mu Emulator in 1982, to the infinitely more powerful DAWs that are now available for both PCs and Apple devices for free.