Listening to 1984: An Experiment in Time Travel - Part 2 of 12
As we continue our journey through 1984, we revel in the Sarajevo Winter Olympics and ponder the mysteries of "Footloose," "Blame it on Rio," and Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me."
The story so far: Sometime in 2019, I had a premonition that 2020 was going to suck. So— I decided to spend the year re-experiencing my favorite year from my childhood: 1984. By "re-experiencing" I mean listening to the music, watching the TV shows and movies, reading the news magazines and books, and listening to "American Top 40" and "Newsweek on Air" week-in, week-out, in chronological order. Weirdness ensued. I kept a journal.
(Note: If you just came onboard and are thoroughly confused, start with Part 1.)
February 3, 1984 / February 3, 2020
I have been revisiting Magnum P.I., one of my favorite shows from the 1980s. This program was a constant fixture on our living room TV. It is deeply imprinted: the guitar-driven theme song; the bright-red Ferrari; Tom Selleck’s iconic mustache, expressive eyebrows, and loud shirts. And Higgins. My memory is correct in the sense that these elements all made the show worthwhile, and Selleck’s everyman likability is difficult to overstate. But he can go dark when he needs to, and his ability to sell that darkness in the midst of such an absurd premise (Private eye of limited means is open-ended houseguest on lavish Hawaiian estate patrolled by overbearing British caretaker who seems to believe he is propping up the British Empire. Plus there’s a Ferrari.) is a testament to his greatness. Why he hasn’t gone on to a Tom Hanks-level movie career is beyond me. But maybe I am looking at it wrong; maybe Tom Selleck was born to dominate the small screen.
That being said, there is an uneasy balance between the over-the-top fantasy of each week’s plot and the more realistic nods to the trauma of Vietnam. (Magnum and his buddies TC and Rich are all veterans and served together). In a way, the show mirrors the spirit of the ‘80s—collectively we stage a bright, loud party with Vietnam, Watergate, and the late-‘70s malaise washing out in the recent tide, and nuclear and AIDS fears ever-present. Meanwhile, let’s have some helicopter chases!
This is all weirdly appealing. But so far, the writing is just not holding up. I can’t tell you too much about the plots—they seem to have been of a secondary concern to all involved. But I will keep watching for Selleck as Magnum and John Hillerman as Higgins. (I am startled to learn that Hillerman—who defined the manners and mores of the British aristocracy for a generation of American youth—was born, raised, and educated in Texas, and served in the Strategic Air Command. Who knew? Certainly not us ‘80s kids. Per Wikipedia:
He learned to speak in the character's educated middle/upper class English accent, known as Received Pronunciation or the King's/Queen's English, by listening to a recording of Laurence Olivier reciting Hamlet.
February 5, 1984 / February 5, 2020
Jonesing for some Pop Tarts, the original kind that you could make slits in across the top and drizzle butter in.
Also Fruit Rollups, Capri Sun, boxes and boxes of cereal, Doritos. (Okay, I’m not jonesing for the latter items, just remembering). These were my staple foods in the 1980s. How is it that I am still alive?
Dazzling, bright, loud decade. Boomboxes and Walkmans cranked. The soaring opening notes of Madonna’s “Holiday” blasting out of open car windows and across shopping mall soundsystems—those stringy keyboard sounds floating in the air followed by Fred Zarr’s fat Moog bass; brittle, percussive guitar; little synth squawks. How can you hear this and not grin from ear to ear? Shallow? Vapid? Soulless? This is my soul, my heart, my center.
I see the shadow side: the consumerism-on-overdrive after the relatively austere 1970s; the crushing weight of all the garbage spun off of our collective spending spree, with virtually no mechanisms in place for recycling; landfills swelling with discarded batteries and Styrofoam and television sets; all of it coming back down on us in an acid rain reflux. (Remember acid rain?) Oh giddy, heedless era. Give me more please!
At my Catholic elementary school in 1984 we have a weekly computer class. Boxy IBM personal computers, black screens, boxy type. Cursor pulsing at the end of a recently typed sentence. We receive instructions in a rudimentary programming language called, fittingly, BASIC. We execute rudimentary commands: calculations, formulas—”if x, then z.” What is the point, my nine-year-old self wonders? A calculator can perform the math more efficiently; my parents’ electric typewriter will give you sharper, more attractive text—and it has correction tape for fixing any mistakes! But we are told that BASIC is the way of the future, and we will need to learn it. Except that it isn’t, and we don’t. Within a few years, it will be largely forgotten, and those IBM monitors, I suspect, will be on their way to join the TVs and batteries in the landfills (with a possible intermediate residency in the school storage room alongside the film projector—which is still getting some play in ‘84, come to think of it.)
As recently as late 1983, these IBMs seemed futuristic. But that Mac on Paul D’Andrea’s desktop, with its whopping 128kB of RAM, has instantly made them look ridiculous. The future is upon us, one aspect of which is that everything will have a fleeting shelf life.
February 10, 1984 / February 10, 2020
The 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo began “last” week. I’m behind in my viewing so I don’t have much to say yet. Scott Hamilton’s prospects look good; a lot of people are talking about the luge this year; John Denver composed a theme song (“Country Roads” it ain’t); no one expects the “Miracle on Ice” from 1980 to be repeated, but maybe the men’s hockey team can nab a bronze. Just some scattered impressions from the lead-in footage. Sarajevo! Things are looking up for this once-embattled city. Right?
But here is where the memories become acute: the special Sports Illustrated double-issue with its photos of a winter paradise; the nightly viewings on ABC. For the Luries, there was heightened interest in these Olympics: These were the first Winter Games we viewed while living in a snowy locale. (We had lived in California four years earlier). Plus, my dad and I were enthusiastic skiers and I was finally at an age where I could appreciate what I was watching.
But the real magic unfolded off the screen. The back of our house opened to a two-tiered, downward slope. My siblings and I created a sled run and various other obstacle courses and, to increase the speed, slicked them down with water which quickly froze. Never mind that the hill terminated abruptly at the wall of the freestanding garage; if we couldn’t manage to brake, we would simply slam into the wall, sleds and all; hey, kids can handle it! (I can still feel that visceral THUD—a full-body absorption—as I hit that wall. Granted, the thickness of our winter clothing gave us the feeling of being encased in giant marshmallow suits).
One of our other favorite activities was to sail our sleds down a section of hill to the left of the garage, right off the edge of our backyard garden wall and into the alley behind it. Again, we emerged from these endeavors without a scratch. But our neighbor, Paul Jr, broke his collarbone while catching some air off of a homemade ski jump in his backyard. You can’t go for the Gold without risk.
Nostalgia’s frostbite, the sense memories flooding back: the sting of snowflakes landing on an exposed cheek; the happy effort of stuffing my legs into snowpants; the buoyant bounce of “moonboots”; the varied textures of snow, and the way my feet would sink into it after a fresh fall. If the snow had iced over sufficiently, I could sometimes walk across its brittle surface as if I were striding across the shell of a crème brûlée. But be careful! Put too much weight on either foot and you’re crunching through. Sometimes the snow underneath had retained its downy softness; other times it had melted away entirely, leaving a pocket of air, or even the bare, distressed grass itself, underneath.
I turn my memory viewer to the yard: its seeming vastness, its worlds inside of worlds. The concrete wells around the basement windows were great places to play with action figures, as were the hedges that separated our yard from the D’andreas’. And there on a plateau between the first and second slope stood a time-travel insertion from the Gatsby era: a stately, if somewhat rickety, gazebo. It seems to me that we ought to have used this building more in our play than we did. I don’t recall if it was unsafe or if we simply didn’t know what to do with it. The building came out of each successive winter a bit worser for wear and eventually my parents had it torn down. I would like to think it was more active in an earlier era: a nexus for 1920s garden parties, or simply a place for young newlyweds to sit and dream on a quiet spring evening, screened in from the insistent mosquitoes.
All of these memories—real and embroidered—I carry through my life like a happiness battery.
February 15, 1984 / February 15, 2020
Exhibit A for 1984 not being 2020: In a whirlwind ceremony on February 14, Elton John marries Renate Blauel in Australia.
Rod Stewart’s congratulatory note, quoted in Biography.com: “You may still be standing, but we’re all on the fucking floor.”
February 17, 1984 / February 17, 2020
Two strange movies make their debuts in 1984:
First, Footloose:
Okay, I know people love this movie. And I might too if I had seen it at age nine. But, somehow, this viewing in 2020 is my first time taking it in. On the plus side, Kevin Bacon is charming, exuberant, fully committed. His stardom in the wake of this movie is deserved. But my initial feeling is that the film itself must have been the product of a rather calculating boardroom meeting:
Let’s see…a dash of James Dean here, a dash of Grease. Let’s put up religion and small-town America as the punching bags. And the rebel is not making a stand for justice or an ideology or even drugs, booze, and debauchery, he’s holding the hill for…dancing. That’ll bring ‘em in without ruffling too many feathers! And let’s push the soundtrack hard in all markets while we’re at it.
Some further observations:
For a town where pop music has been banned, Sharia-law style, there is a hell of a lot of mid-‘80s ear candy bubbling in the background.
And—an asshole preacher is about the safest possible Hollywood villain next to a Nazi.
Footloose has been subsequently referred to as “the movie that defined a generation,” but this is not Easy Rider. It is pre-fab rebellion.
All that being said, I have to admit that the movie is endearing, and the soundtrack is great! And— Wikipedia informs me that the plot does, surprisingly, have some basis in real events:
The film Footloose was loosely based on events that took place in (Elmore City, Oklahoma). Elmore City had a ban, dating from before statehood, on public dancing within town limits. High school students during the 1979-1980 class year began lobbying for the right to hold a school prom with dancing. However, during the first town meeting on the issue, perhaps three-quarters of the crowd was against the idea, led by local church leaders. The controversy was picked up by local newspapers, went national, and ended up as a small item in a San Franciso paper. This was where songwriter/screenwriter Dean Pitchford, who was looking for a movie musical idea, ran across it. The eventual result was the 1984 movie. As to the prom, the town mayor sided with the kids, declaring that a high school function was not a “public” event. The school board then authorized the prom, which proceeded and received national coverage.
Footloose still feels contrived. But there is a real revolution (or Revolution?) on the horizon. Stay tuned.
Also debuting on this date in 1984: Blame it on Rio, a remake of the French film Un moment d'égarement (One Wild Moment).
Here’s the pitch: Middle-aged regular guy Matthew Hollis (Michael Caine) has an affair with his best friend’s emotionally unstable 17-year-old daughter during a vacation trip their two families take to Brazil. Hilarity ensues!
The film enjoys an impressively low 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (You have to work hard for that) and the consensus reads:
It isn't clear who is most culpable for this creepy comedy's sheer wrongness, but its smarmy laughs and uncomfortable romance will leave audiences feeling guilty long afterward.
It’s definitely uncomfortable. But I don’t think it’s quite that terrible. At the scene-by-scene level, the writing is good. And Michael Caine demonstrates yet again that he can handle the most thankless assignments with grace.
The problem isn’t so much the challenging subject matter as the flippant tone (“Hey, blame it on Rio!”) and Michelle Johnson’s shaky performance as the young love interest. Demi Moore is also in the film, playing Caine’s daughter, and the movie might have worked better if she and Johnson had swapped roles.
Beneath the farce, there are some compelling conflicts that are hinted at but not developed: How a person with highly principled views of fatherhood and marriage (Caine’s character) can become unmoored by a single moment of temptation (the “one wild moment” of the French film’s title), and how this fallible human being—as opposed to the comedy stock character the film at times tries to turn him into—might reckon with the ensuing moral quagmire. Then there is Jennifer, the young girl—whom the narrative portrays as not exactly innocent, though surely disadvantaged in the power-and-age dynamic. I have not seen the original French version, but what I’ve read indicates that it navigates these murky waters more successfully and still manages to mine some unlikely humor from the enterprise. Not a surprise; the Europeans generally have a better command of nuance than us yanks.
Needless to say, a movie like this could never get made in America in the 2020s, although the French made another pass at Un moment d'égarement in 2015 and even they blinked the second time around, bumping the love interest’s age to 18.
****
Blame it on Rio was not, thankfully, on my radar at age nine. And Footloose barely registered beyond the clips I saw on Entertainment Tonight. No, at this time I was nurturing a growing obsession with the British sci-fi series Doctor Who, which aired on our local PBS station on Friday nights. My parents enrolled me in various after-school sports programs: soccer, T-ball, even a summer golf camp. But I was the kid who wandered the fields and courses in a reverie, often losing track of my surroundings—dreaming of travels in time and space, no doubt. In the long run this dreaminess is as asset, a source of creative rocket fuel. But it can also give a melancholy tint to young life at times.
The desire to belong is strong, especially when the population of your immediate world is small and relatively homogeneous. The pain of failing to make connections can be acute. Thank God for books and art supplies and the understanding—via Doctor Who in my case—that there was another world beyond the finite boundaries of the one I found myself in.
Speaking of finite boundaries, it is dawning on me that the mid-1980s was the last period of an American monoculture. Everyone (or just about) knew what was in the top 40. Everyone watched the news on one of the three networks—or, if they really wanted to branch out, the MacNeil / Lehrer NewsHour on PBS. Everyone went to the movies. In ’84, things were just beginning to fragment with the growing popularity of cable, but as yet the center still held.
I found myself recently (in 2020) trying to explain the uniqueness of 1984 to a member of my extended family who is a decade younger than me. She has never identified points of her past with specific years. Indeed, she seems to feel no nostalgic impulses whatsoever. This may be the sign of an advanced maturity. But I suggest it also has to do with the fact that American culture had started to balkanize when my relative was growing up in the 1990s. Music listeners were more ensconced in their specific camps: grunge/“alternative”, R&B, country, hip-hop. (Of these, hip-hop boasted the most diverse audience.) The news-and-politics echo chamber was solidifying with the emergence of Rush Limbaugh. So I think there was less of a sense of “This is the world of 1994—the events, the songs, the people,” than there would have been in 1984. The monoculture was still there, and I can tick off the reference points: Bill Clinton, Kurt Cobain, Tupac, Seinfeld, but things were becoming more diffuse. The ascendance of the Internet and the ubiquity of cable meant that people were no longer locked into the culture that had been handed to them. You couldn’t count on the majority of people on the street to be conversant in the accepted reference points. And maybe that is how it should be. We ought to have the ability at any given moment to opt out of popular culture, especially if it takes a turn down Suck Street.
February 18, 1984 / February 18, 2020
Rolling Stone at the outset of 1984 is largely backward-looking, The January 19th issue features a cover story on the recent benefit concert for Ronnie Lane of Small Faces, who is fighting a losing battle with Multiple Sclerosis. The cover features a bleary-eyed assortment of the old guard: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Joe Cocker, Paul Rodgers, Kenny Jones (of Small Faces and the Who), all gathered protectively around Ronnie, who is obviously ill but beaming.
Two thoughts: 1) You won’t find a more complete collection of dinosaur remains in the Museum of Natural History. 2) The old fogies are, by and large, younger in this photo than I am now. Running the numbers provides an added shocker, especially in light of the February 16th issue commemorating 20 years since the Beatles arrived in America. The distance between February 1984 and the Beatles’ debut on Ed Sullivan is the same distance between now (2020) and winter 2000—a time when I was living in Savannah, Georgia and preparing to become a high school teacher. That doesn’t seem like a long time ago: the smothering humidity of south Georgia, the half-mile walk along the side of the highway to get to Armstrong Atlantic University, the lazy afternoons distracting myself in the college library, the long, beautiful drives across a winding highway elevated above the marsh—all of this feels like it happened within the last handful of years. But it was two decades ago. To many readers of Rolling Stone in 1984, the events of the 1960s—which seem to me a faroff speck in history; not quite the Civil War era, but exotically distant nonetheless—were part of living memory. Those events were closer to the magazine’s readers than 1984 is to us now.
Looked at another way: The distance between now and 1984 is the same as the distance between 1984 and 1948. Time bends, stretches, pauses. We make ourselves comfortable, thinking it’s not moving at all, until it snaps tight. The color fades from our hair, and the hair falls from our heads. And still the air feels the same on our skin. The young stay young. And in moments of absentmindedness, we forget that we are not young. Time is a long sheet of paper, which I can fold in the middle, mashing 1984 up against 2020, close enough that I can leap across. And I find, in the pages of the February 1984 Rolling Stone, readers bemoaning the state of music “today,” pining for the 1960s—that near-Paleolithic era, which was only yesterday. Meanwhile, 1984—lauded by Billboard in the 21st century as having been “Pop’s Greatest Year”—is dismissed out of hand by a not-insignificant number of music fans living in 1984. I suppose it will always be a challenge to know what’s in front of us, and I am aware of the opportunity cost of my own backward-looking excursion.
February 19, 1984 / February 19, 2020
Several readers of Rolling Stone in 1984 write in to decry the growing influence of MTV and the allegedly diminished caliber of the artists it is popularizing. The critique has some validity; as much as I love Madonna’s debut album, I can’t imagine it doing nearly as well in the pre-video era. But there is a reflexive conservatism to this write-off of everything new that is typical of generational culture clashes. Do the Baby Boomers, once the generation of “never trust anyone over thirty,” realize that they have become the enemy?
Some of this is inevitable and ought not to be resisted. Older people who try too hard to be hip do so at their own peril. But in my own case, as much as my heart remains in the era in which I was raised, I hope I never fall prey to “In my day”-style sweeping generalizations. Some things were better in the 1980s, and the music of the era—especially the music of 1984—will always occupy an outsized space in my creative and cultural consciousness. But there are great things happening in 2020, major innovations in all creative fields, and I wish to remain open to these developments. The music now is great, even if there are trends—such as the prevalence of autotune—that I wish would go away. What I mean to say is: the kids are all right. Gen Z, whatever we want to call them, they can annoy the crap out of me sometimes—it’s part of their job—but they’re all right.
****
World events in February 1984: quagmires all over. El Salvador. Lebanon. Nicaragua. The federal budget. On-again, off-again US-Soviet relations. Some interesting parallels occurring in the two timelines: In addition to the familiar last names of the Syrian and Canadian heads of state, the UK in both timestreams is under long-term Tory leadership and, in the US, a fragmented and disarrayed Democratic party limps into an election year. How closely will these timelines continue to overlap? Will past performance be a predictor of future results?
(I noted in an earlier entry that the political factions have flipped in their attitudes toward Russia, with the Right increasingly warm toward our perennial adversary in the present day. Russia in both timestreams is totalitarian so it all seems arbitrary to me.)
The one aspect of 2020 that seems to be unique to its own timestream is the current US administration. But I won’t be so foolish as to try to unpack that just yet. Late in life, Richard Nixon opined that we can’t properly assess the events or leaders of an era until 50 years have passed. While part of that statement may have been self-serving—he may have been betting that achievements like signing the SALT I treaty, establishing the EPA, and resuming relations with China would, in time, overshadow Watergate and the messy denouement of Vietnam—it sounds sensible to me. But I’m going to buck his 50-year demarcation. I think we can do a reasonable job assessing the 1980s at a four-decades distance. I am as confused as anyone about the politics of the present, but there may be seeds of understanding in the past.
February 26, 1984 / February 26, 2020
The prevailing mood in America, coming out of the 1984 Olympics, is upbeat. The US performed well at the Games, finishing third in the medal rankings. (Though, it should be noted, East Germany and the Soviet Union performed better).
Even with the recent death of Andropov and all the accompanying uncertainty that brings, the record-breaking cold temperatures across the Midwest, and continuing confusion in Lebanon, El Salvador, and elsewhere, our collective spirit is buoyant. Reagan may have expressed it best at an inaugural lecture of Time’s speakers’ program at Eureka College (his alma mater) earlier in the month:
I hope that 50 years from now, should Time Magazine ask you for your reflections, you’ll be able to recall an era exciting beyond all of your dreams.
The only thing uncertain about that statement is whether Time Magazine will hang on until 2034. Otherwise, he is on the money. US astronauts are going on spacewalks, the Macintosh is taking off, and the economy continues to roar. Footloose is spreading its giddiness across the land. On the pop charts, a liberated Tina Turner returns after eleven years of obscurity with a forceful cover of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” Meanwhile, Van Halen’s “Jump” is everywhere. Exciting beyond our dreams, yes, and Reagan’s savvy reelection team is going to sell this back to us in a catchphrase: “It’s morning again in America.”
One interesting minor key: The appearance in the top 40 of a paranoid anthem that might have been beamed in from the surveillance-state future: “Somebody’s Watching Me” by Rockwell. And here, once again, the two timestreams fold into each other:
I always feel like somebody’s watching me
And I have no privacy
(Somewhere in 2020, without any trace of irony, a harried mother calls out, “Alexa, play ‘Somebody’s Watching Me,’” and an always-on, always listening AI device complies.)
I’m fairly certain that young Rockwell’s preternatural ability to tap into the 2020 zeitgeist 36 years in advance was accidental. In the few interviews on file, the hitherto unknown artist (quickly revealed to be Kennedy Willaim Gordy, Motown founder Berry Gordy’s son) attributes his inspiration not to concerns about Orwellian surveillance but to his enjoyment of creeping up on (and creeping out) his girlfriend while she showered. There is no doubt that Michael Jackson’s uncredited vocal assist on the chorus rocketed the song up the charts, but credit Rockwell’s goofy faux-British accent and his adept fusion of new wave and funk for giving this song legs. “Somebody’s Watching Me” is an accidental masterpiece, an anthem for the ages.
February Bonus:
Madonna shows up at William S. Burrough’s 70th birthday party at the Limelight in NYC, as captured in this uncredited photo. (Thank you, Dangerous Minds). But who is photobombing whom?
Sting and Andy Summers are also in attendance at this worlds-colliding event. Per Casey Rae’s William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘N’ Roll:
When Burroughs heard that “the police” were at the party, he became concerned, telling a friend, “I don’t know if you’re holding but someone told me those two guys over there are cops.”
Next up: Part 3