Analog by Night

I was trying to tell a friend of mine what book I’d like to read, and it turned into a rant. She got the first part of it, and here’s the rest of it:

See the kids these days have the 80′s all wrong. They seem to think it was just fun and neon recklessness. But they enjoy this recklessness from of a place of LOVE of life. Their’s is a hedonistic depravation that comes from being young and having too much life and energy you don’t know what to do with. That’s why it works so well with the other du-jour moda: neo-psychedalia. (You like the French and Italian mess I just made there?) Both of these little past-times are born out of the itchy weightlessness of an EXCESS of security, not fear. Not insecurity, but the 80′s were ALL about insecurity. And therefore the meaning of their neon is different.

The truth is the 80′s were one of the most desperate eras of the 20th century. The 70′s had just happened, and the 80′s were this kind of hangover/wake up because the excesses of the 70′s had really wrecked us. The 80s came out of a MAJOR recession. A stadium rock/drama/operatic bubble that burst.  When something as huge and dickly as the 70′s blows it’s collective nut all over your decade, you have to do something else. You can’t riff on that, you can’t do a 2.0. You have to stop doing the math and start inventing fucking algebra.

You’re left with new wave and punk as a way out of the giantness. Stripped down, bare, dirty poor, roots. What do we have to do now? Elect an actor as president?  What a perfect wait to set the stage for the most clownish, throw-your-hands up, and yell fuck it decade we’ve seen yet. You want malaise? YOu want ennui? You want numbness that would make Roger Waters cry out of sympathy?  Look at America between 1979 and 1991.

Did I mention the AIDS? The AIDS came and dominated most of the decade. I remember hearing commercials on the radio as a ten year old that made AIDS sound like a army of marching germs that were 60 miles outside of your home and killing everyone.  I remember it sounding something like this, “AIDS is a an epidemic disease for which there is no cure and a 100% fatality rate. If you get it, you die, and the numbers of people getting it are growing.”  I heard that for YEARS, not weeks like SARS, or Bird Flu, or Swine Flu. YEARS

Let’s take that fear and add sick, fucked up impossibly anal greed, horrible car design, awkward graspy fashion that was so space-age nobody could decide between puffed up shoulder pads, stiff collars and stillettos vs. the Bronxy acid-washed jeans and sweats (of every shape). Then let’s let Hall and Oates, Kenny Loggins, and some poorly saccharine bitter divorce pop dominate the airwaves.

The 80′s was nothing but people re-structuring. With no real ground to build on. which is why the 90′s came along and tore all the poorly, falsely, unredemptive fakery out again. And replaced with something infinitely worse. Intimate pseudo-sincerity.

Here’s what society HAD in the 80′s that it is definitely now missing: A real, palpable, scary-as-shit threat. Because of nuclear Russian, AIDS, crack cocaine, and the bursted bubble of the 60′s and 70′s that hadn’t redeemed them, people ran topspeed in two directions. 1. was a kind of super-selfishness that made the stiffness of the 50′s seem warm and yummy, and 2, complete abandonment of self.

Remember that the 80′s were nostalgic for the 50′s. There’s a lesson in that too. The teens living then were close enough to it to be curious about it, but too close to the 60′s and 70′s. That was the era for their parents and older siblings.  I think we are always a little in love with the decade 1-2 decades before we were born.

I believe that the youth of the 80′s were genuinely disaffected, genuinely so scared one minute and hopeless the next that they really DIDN’T give a single or double shit about anything, and were infinitely liberated by that. Naturally their hearts and minds went towards desperate escape with cheap pot left over and watered down from the 60′s, and even cheaper sex, and most interestingly a new born love affair with extreme acts of human depravity. Murder junkies.