Wading in the Velvet Sea

Either right before or right after this exchange was her typically frustrated, ‘How do you KNOW that?’ response to some random archaic pop nugget (‘Oooh, look, Was (Not Was) singing ‘Walk the Dinosaur?!’) I can’t explain why I know Rick Allen has one arm but I don’t know my mother’s exact birthdate; it’s just the way the cookies crumble. But it’s not easy having this much useless crap in my head yet date someone who has never seen ‘Top Gun’ or ‘The Goonies’.

Granted, she was hardly in a position to see them on the first go-round. The cultural gap between myself (age 27) and Jenny (age 21) is staggering. While I was listening to ‘One Night in Bangkok’ on the radio, Jenny was a frickin’ fetus. Sorta mind-blowing. When I was in college, 80’s dances were equal parts camp and nostalgia. Now, the dances are veritable Oldies Fests. Jenny looks George Michael in that ‘Choose Life!’ shirt the same way I look at video footage of the Beatles playing ‘Get Back’ on the roof of Apple Studios. I can watch all the ‘VH1 100 Most Shocking TV Moments that Involve Rock Stars Doing Rock Star Things Whether They Be Hcair Bands or Involving Dick Clark’s Hairpiece’ but I can never, ever know how cataclysmic the Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan was; I can never know what it was like to experience Elvis for the first time, or how earth-shattering ‘Psycho’ was. Conversely, that six year gap denies our currently newly-legal drinkers first hand-knowledge of the rise of MTV, the beauty of that chick from ‘Real Science’, and the Oingo Boingo incarnation of Danny Elfman. (It’s a dead man’s party/who could ask for more?)

The 80’s were arguably a crap-tastic decade in which to have one’s formative years. I mean, with the exception of 3 or 4 bands, the phrase ‘80’s music’ means ‘high hair, Casio keyboards, drum machines, and Samantha Frickin’ Fox with Full Force Five’. (I saw ‘I Wanna Have Some Fun’ on VH1 Classic and instantly regressed to every awkward middle-school dance. Ouch.) I am quick to clarify to anyone who’ll listen (which is about three people) the difference between ‘80’s Music’ and ‘Music Made in the 80’s’. Big difference. The latter category includes U2, The Police, and R.E.M. A lot of people would throw either The Smiths and/or The Cure in there, but they’ve never been my cup of sad bastard British tea. These bands made actual music that had the misfortune of recording during the 80’s. (Note: The rise of rap as a genre during the 80's is another topic for another time. Not trying to downplay it's significance, it's just too lareg a topic to fit in here.)

We’ve now got an entire generation or rising 20-something whose only exposure to the 80’s lies in about 50+ songs that get recycled on every single 80’s compilation out there. Why some songs survive to me is a mystery: no one really needs to have a copy of Glass Tiger’s ‘Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone’, yet loads of 19 year olds have a copy. These 50+ songs have been legitimized as ‘cool’ is a camp sense---no one thinks they are actually good songs, in the way no one stands in awe of the musical accomplishment of the Village People. But these ‘kids’ (put in quotes because I am under no delusion I myself am also a kid) never got to make this decision for themselves. A few record executives have convinced a new generation that ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’ is a ‘great 80’s song’. They are put in quotes to have a collective smugness in the listeners, letting them rise above the muck they are listening to, in a sense let the listener laugh at that which they are shaking their rich Caucasian asses off to arhythmically.

History turns a lot of pop culture into camp; it’s not like Buzz Bin clips form the early 90’s were that much better. (EMF, anyone? You’re unbelievable? WHOA!) But it’s interesting to watch the mini-80’s revival being force fed to a generation who has absolutely no idea of its roots. Is this how our parents felt when we reappropriated lava lamps? Must be. But the cycles of nostalgia are spinning inwards, the half-life growing increasingly shorter. Hell, we have radio stations featuring ‘The 90’s at 9’---we’re only 26 months removed from that decade!!! I may be outraged mostly because it means that Hootie and the Blowfish have found their way back onto my stereo, but I digress. At this rate, we’re gonna be nostalgic for Kelly Clarkson by the time the end of the new ‘American Idol’ rolls around.

History will someday show the links between the cultural divide of these 6 years. Hell, the emphasis on ‘music’ is as tepid now as then. In the 80’s, you didn’t need actual instruments; you needed a keyboard with 500 presets and some studio time. Today, the music takes a back seat often to the presentation. We’ve gone from Debbie Gibson’s denim jackets and synthesizers to Xtina’s assless chaps and, well, synthesizers, in a little more than a decade, but the spotlight away from the musical product remains the same. We’ve gone from ‘Miami Vice’ to ‘Real World: Miami’ without an ounce of artifice lost. It’s a treadmill, and worse, it’s a circular treadmill; the ‘advancement’ of pop culture is simply the changing vantage point around this treadmill. The elements are always ever there, it’s just want we choose to focus on at a particular moment that changes.