It is blowing my mind how many teenagers these days appear to have an honest adoration for the music and pop culture of the '80s. I have never seen so many individuals between the ages of 13 and 19 claim to be fans of such artists as Depeche Mode or Duran Duran. It is hardly the kind of thing I could have predicted even approximately seven years ago, back when we ushered in the 21st Century. And while I couldn't be more delighted that my beloved '80s is getting some positive attention from a generation younger than my own, at the same time it feels disorientating, throwing me into a confused eddy of conflicting thoughts and emotions.
First off, why is this happening? I suppose part of it could be the influence of '80s pop music upon the present musical landscape. When such mainstream pop acts as Gwen Stefani and Justin Timberlake and credible indie acts such as The Killers and Franz Ferdinand can both proclaim heavy and devoted influence by some of the preeminent pop music artists of the '80s, I suppose that would turn the young people's attentions to that long-unexplored genre. I suppose I should also look at the increasing distance time-wise between the '80s and today. Much like how the youth of my generation embraced patently '70s artists such as Neil Young and christened them once more with the "cool" label, the time would be right at the present moment to openly and unreservedly embrace the artists who defined the '80s. Moreover, teenaged adolescence is supposed to be about being rebellious, and what could be more rebellious in the wake of the flannel-clad '90s than to bask in the warm glow of the '80s' fine tailoring?
So I suppose I can "get it" on a logical basis. Still, I can't help but think: Why now? Why are these young people being afforded the opportunity to be able to interact with like-minded individuals in their own age range when I was having incredible difficulties doing the same just ten years ago? I know, I know. This is the green-eyed monster in me talking. I should not let myself be caught up in jealousy but rather celebrate the fact that these younger people will be able and willing to carry the '80s-loving torch for the scattered few '80s adorers in my generation/age range. However, I would have loved for there to be more people my own age who loved this pop cultural decade/era in the same manner and under similar circumstances that I did.
Back when YouTube was still working (i.e. before Viacom became complete and utter assholes), I would gaze at the lengthy and impressive list of retro '80s music videos resident on the site and would be immediately awed. Here were the fabled videos I had only just heard about! I spent many a stolen moment running over to YouTube to view as many of those classic music videos as time would allow. But at the same time I would notice that a lot of the individuals commenting favorably about many of those videos were individuals who were in their teens, and that's when it dawned on me how much easier this new generation of '80s retro fans had it. They had YouTube at their disposal to view any/all '80s videos and commercials and other video tidbits. They could congregate together on groups on MySpace and Yahoo! and discuss the aspects of '80s fandom they particularly enjoyed. They could order up virutally any vinyl record, download virtually any mp3, listen to a rich and impressive mixture of '80s retro radio stations online, Google all manner of '80s pop culture accoutrements. For this new generation of '80s fetishists, the '80s is so much more available than it could have ever been for the average teenaged '80s fanatic in my age group.
However, I don't want to discourage that kind of '80s adoration from or by anyone. I don't want to devolve into wanting to foment any sort of intertribal conflict amongst the '80s favoring massive. Heaven knows the challenges we still have yet to face, particularly amongst the clueless and out-of-touch mainstream that still believes that that which is patently '80s are still ripe for ridicule. While fashion choices are appearing to be increasingly influenced by the prototypical fashions of the '80s, one would still be hard-pressed to find the fluffy-sweatered, frilly-bloused aspects of '80s fashions that it appears that real '80s teenaged girls donned. While '80s movies directed at teen audiences have always been readily available on DVD and at least one contemporary movie, Not Another Teenage Movie, paid earnest homage to that filmic genre, there is really nothing that compares to the experience of actually viewing a movie on the big screen. And Viacom's pig-headed actions both online and on the air provide evidence that The Corporation That The Eighties Built is still uncomfortable with actually acknowledging that history and giving others the opportunity to discover or remember it.
You know, I think my problem is that I feel like I'm stuck with Middle Child Syndrome here. Stuck in the middle between the generation that embraced the '80s as a contemporary part of their own teenaged adolesences and the generation that is embracing the '80s as a now-relevant, newly important reference point for contemporary pop culture, I differ from both in that I came into that adoration while said adoration was considered passe. Finding individuals in their mid - late 20s who could honestly tell you they favored the '80s above all other pop cultural decades will be a monumental task. Yet I logically realize that I am to be an exemplar figure for this new generation of '80s lovers, someone from whom inspiration, advice, and lessons only experience can give will be derived. Yet I am a part of the unwritten story that I alone can write, the unspoken history that I alone can tell, and because of that I suppose I should begin to really tell it, on an honest and noncontrived manner that will allow for that window to finally be opened. It is my full intent, now that I have the time to do so, to honor that promise.
Showing posts with label pop culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pop culture. Show all posts
Monday, May 21, 2007
Sunday, May 20, 2007
The Civil War Inside My Head: '80s vs. '90s
I wonder how long ago my last blog entry herein was. It feels an age ago, though I'm sure it was at most a week. Apologies. I will make up for it.
So I've been doing a lot of confused running around in terms of the pop culture that I'm exposing myself to. I recently purchased a secondhand item that reminded me poignantly of the '90s adolescence I was exposed to and have noticed little elements of this '90s frame of reference popping up here and there ever since. Whether it be a '90s song snuck into a block of purportedly '80s R&B songs or a once-faded memory of a '90s experience I actually enjoyed, it appears as though the '90s are calling me back, haunting me to this very day.
I don't know if I should be mentioning this in an '80s-centered blog, especially since I have stated very clearly that I found the reality I faced in a '90s existence miserable comparative to the fantasies I had worked up of The Eighties. But it is, unfortunately, true. I have been unwittingly shaped and defined by my '90s "childhood" (insofar as those trite '80s nostalgia lists have been about the "childhood" such lists claim) as much as, if not more than, the '80s pop culture I chose to wrap myself around. I cannot help but look at something such as gangsta rap and remember that I Was There in a much younger guise when it emerged into the general American mainstream consciousness. 15 years later and I can instantly recall the "I didn't even have to use my AK/Today, it was a good day" line, even though I was at the same time cultivating an adoration of Talk Talk's The Party's Over and had crushes on Tony Hadley and Bryan Ferry bubbling underneath. Still, gangsta rap, grunge, sample-driven Eurodance, and R&B were a part of my everyday landscape, and they are a part of who I am, like it or not.
It's funny, you know. The '90s were the era that was forced onto me. I think I've stated here before how I cried myself nearly to sleep every night because I did not want to be a part of the '90s. The '80s appeared from the glimmery, distanced vantage point I had to be by far the better decade. I would stare at my oversized black t-shirt and baggy jeans and daydream about wearing an outfit that a Molly Ringwald character in a John Hughes movie would wear, or an oufit that the title character in Valley Girl would approve of. I dreamt vivid fantasies of walking down the corridors of a suburban Chicago high school, wearing frills and fluff, carrying my textbooks and gabbing along with several of my closest friends about John Taylor or the latest Billy Idol album. Then we would all hang out after school at each other's houses, styling each other's hair and snacking on pizza rolls and TaB while watching music videos on MTV and turning the volume up when Howard Jones's "New Song" or "Doctor! Doctor!" by the Thompson Twins came on. Then my alarm clock would wake me up and I would awaken to the reality of life in an inner city Catholic high school, having to rely on shitty VH1 retro '80s programs for my music video fix, and the fact that (a.) I was thousands of miles and over ten years away from that fantastical suburban Chicago dream world and (b.) the MTV idols of the era were more likely to be Dan Cortese or one of Boyz II Men.
Yet the '90s affected me. Had it not been for the distancing effect of the '90s, I might have just as easily discounted the '80s. The reality is that the '80s wasn't all just about delightfully poppy New Wave synth music. The '80s also encompassed John Cougar Mellencamp, David Lee Roth, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and other crimes against music. And I wasn't too young to be aware of the '80s from ca. 1983 onward. From my recollections of those years, I remember the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over everyone, and the Soviet Union still looming large in the landscape as a threatening figure. Also, there were new bogeymen just peeking from over the horizon as global terrorism began to hit home. Who can but forget the horrific events of Pan Am Flight 103, exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland by the Libyan terrorists who hijacked the plane and used it for their own nefarious purposes over a decade and a half after the unforgettable events of September 11th? To those of us who were barely young enough to be conscious/cognizant of world or national events, the '80s were a time of constant revolutions, fighting, and bloodshed. How much richer, then, must the pop culture have been in order for the teenagers of that era to go on living life as carefree as previous generations of teenagers had! It is because the '90s were comparatively stable and peaceful that we as a society ended up with anemic and unfulfilling pop culture during that time period. Because circumstances did not demand for particularly entertaining entertainment, the '90s became the perfect incubator for "Friends", the Counting Crows, and a culture where sipping coffee in a coffee house, wearing slovenly attire and listening intently to sober-minded "political" poetry was considered the "in" thing to do.
I can still find glimmers of hope, though, even in the '90s. I can see why I gravitated toward Nirvana, even without the "Kurt Cobain as teen idol" factor; their music, as heavy and loud as it was, brings to mind the band's overt and much-stated power pop influences. There are some Nirvana songs that sound eerily like Cheap Trick outtakes. The popular dance song "Something Good" by Utah Saints introduced many in my generation, including myself, to the luminous vocals of the '80s alternapop queen Kate Bush, who was to the underground college radio scene what Madonna was to the mainstream. Listening to late '80s college radio fodder, one can instantly find cues that such "Alternative Nation" darlings as the Catherine Wheel picked up. And, of course, while rap was invented in the '70s, it was the '80s that took it out of the streets and put it on the airwaves.
However, I cannot stop sensing that I just did not belong in the '90s. Take, for example, "The Real World". Granted, I was addicted to the first four seasons of this show, and I once had thought about what I'd do should I end up being on that program. But the people showcased on that program were by and large people of the era. Even though the first two seasons were populated by the same former '80s teens I envied/wanted to emulate, by the time they were at the stage in their lives that they were in during their participation in "The Real World", they were also fully of the present era. Even the older participants in the first season, Norm and Kevin, belonged more to the '90s than I felt/feel I ever could or would. And in a sense I envied that, too, because I did not want to be an Other. As with every other adolescent out there, I did not want to have any aspect of myself be "different", so the fact that those and the rest of the roommates I observed during that time period were able to blend in and be of the decade I at once both hated and desperately wanted to be a part of was -- well, it was disorientating, to say the least. Yet I continued to watch, only giving up the ghost when the London season ended and I began my gradual disattachment from MTV.
Even still, I am aware that perhaps I am blessed to have discovered the '80s in the manner that I did. Maybe I would have been just as disillusioned about that decade as I was/am about the '90s. Perhaps the '80s would have left me just as much in a sea of confusion and disappointment had I experienced it as it happened, at the age I've felt for a long time I should have been. Though I still can't help wishing and hoping and praying for the opportunity to experience it firsthand, to at least get a taste of that which I have pined for, for so long.
So I've been doing a lot of confused running around in terms of the pop culture that I'm exposing myself to. I recently purchased a secondhand item that reminded me poignantly of the '90s adolescence I was exposed to and have noticed little elements of this '90s frame of reference popping up here and there ever since. Whether it be a '90s song snuck into a block of purportedly '80s R&B songs or a once-faded memory of a '90s experience I actually enjoyed, it appears as though the '90s are calling me back, haunting me to this very day.
I don't know if I should be mentioning this in an '80s-centered blog, especially since I have stated very clearly that I found the reality I faced in a '90s existence miserable comparative to the fantasies I had worked up of The Eighties. But it is, unfortunately, true. I have been unwittingly shaped and defined by my '90s "childhood" (insofar as those trite '80s nostalgia lists have been about the "childhood" such lists claim) as much as, if not more than, the '80s pop culture I chose to wrap myself around. I cannot help but look at something such as gangsta rap and remember that I Was There in a much younger guise when it emerged into the general American mainstream consciousness. 15 years later and I can instantly recall the "I didn't even have to use my AK/Today, it was a good day" line, even though I was at the same time cultivating an adoration of Talk Talk's The Party's Over and had crushes on Tony Hadley and Bryan Ferry bubbling underneath. Still, gangsta rap, grunge, sample-driven Eurodance, and R&B were a part of my everyday landscape, and they are a part of who I am, like it or not.
It's funny, you know. The '90s were the era that was forced onto me. I think I've stated here before how I cried myself nearly to sleep every night because I did not want to be a part of the '90s. The '80s appeared from the glimmery, distanced vantage point I had to be by far the better decade. I would stare at my oversized black t-shirt and baggy jeans and daydream about wearing an outfit that a Molly Ringwald character in a John Hughes movie would wear, or an oufit that the title character in Valley Girl would approve of. I dreamt vivid fantasies of walking down the corridors of a suburban Chicago high school, wearing frills and fluff, carrying my textbooks and gabbing along with several of my closest friends about John Taylor or the latest Billy Idol album. Then we would all hang out after school at each other's houses, styling each other's hair and snacking on pizza rolls and TaB while watching music videos on MTV and turning the volume up when Howard Jones's "New Song" or "Doctor! Doctor!" by the Thompson Twins came on. Then my alarm clock would wake me up and I would awaken to the reality of life in an inner city Catholic high school, having to rely on shitty VH1 retro '80s programs for my music video fix, and the fact that (a.) I was thousands of miles and over ten years away from that fantastical suburban Chicago dream world and (b.) the MTV idols of the era were more likely to be Dan Cortese or one of Boyz II Men.
Yet the '90s affected me. Had it not been for the distancing effect of the '90s, I might have just as easily discounted the '80s. The reality is that the '80s wasn't all just about delightfully poppy New Wave synth music. The '80s also encompassed John Cougar Mellencamp, David Lee Roth, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and other crimes against music. And I wasn't too young to be aware of the '80s from ca. 1983 onward. From my recollections of those years, I remember the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over everyone, and the Soviet Union still looming large in the landscape as a threatening figure. Also, there were new bogeymen just peeking from over the horizon as global terrorism began to hit home. Who can but forget the horrific events of Pan Am Flight 103, exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland by the Libyan terrorists who hijacked the plane and used it for their own nefarious purposes over a decade and a half after the unforgettable events of September 11th? To those of us who were barely young enough to be conscious/cognizant of world or national events, the '80s were a time of constant revolutions, fighting, and bloodshed. How much richer, then, must the pop culture have been in order for the teenagers of that era to go on living life as carefree as previous generations of teenagers had! It is because the '90s were comparatively stable and peaceful that we as a society ended up with anemic and unfulfilling pop culture during that time period. Because circumstances did not demand for particularly entertaining entertainment, the '90s became the perfect incubator for "Friends", the Counting Crows, and a culture where sipping coffee in a coffee house, wearing slovenly attire and listening intently to sober-minded "political" poetry was considered the "in" thing to do.
I can still find glimmers of hope, though, even in the '90s. I can see why I gravitated toward Nirvana, even without the "Kurt Cobain as teen idol" factor; their music, as heavy and loud as it was, brings to mind the band's overt and much-stated power pop influences. There are some Nirvana songs that sound eerily like Cheap Trick outtakes. The popular dance song "Something Good" by Utah Saints introduced many in my generation, including myself, to the luminous vocals of the '80s alternapop queen Kate Bush, who was to the underground college radio scene what Madonna was to the mainstream. Listening to late '80s college radio fodder, one can instantly find cues that such "Alternative Nation" darlings as the Catherine Wheel picked up. And, of course, while rap was invented in the '70s, it was the '80s that took it out of the streets and put it on the airwaves.
However, I cannot stop sensing that I just did not belong in the '90s. Take, for example, "The Real World". Granted, I was addicted to the first four seasons of this show, and I once had thought about what I'd do should I end up being on that program. But the people showcased on that program were by and large people of the era. Even though the first two seasons were populated by the same former '80s teens I envied/wanted to emulate, by the time they were at the stage in their lives that they were in during their participation in "The Real World", they were also fully of the present era. Even the older participants in the first season, Norm and Kevin, belonged more to the '90s than I felt/feel I ever could or would. And in a sense I envied that, too, because I did not want to be an Other. As with every other adolescent out there, I did not want to have any aspect of myself be "different", so the fact that those and the rest of the roommates I observed during that time period were able to blend in and be of the decade I at once both hated and desperately wanted to be a part of was -- well, it was disorientating, to say the least. Yet I continued to watch, only giving up the ghost when the London season ended and I began my gradual disattachment from MTV.
Even still, I am aware that perhaps I am blessed to have discovered the '80s in the manner that I did. Maybe I would have been just as disillusioned about that decade as I was/am about the '90s. Perhaps the '80s would have left me just as much in a sea of confusion and disappointment had I experienced it as it happened, at the age I've felt for a long time I should have been. Though I still can't help wishing and hoping and praying for the opportunity to experience it firsthand, to at least get a taste of that which I have pined for, for so long.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
