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2001: An '80s Odyssey |
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Can't we just 86 the
whole decade?
by Steffie Nelson
I am a child of the '80s. I graduated from high school in 1985 and measured my experience against John Hughes films and Valley Girl. I spent hours at a time watching MTV. I had an asymmetrical haircut and wore pointy boots and fingerless lace gloves. I had a T-shirt that said "Relax" - like the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song. I never figured out the Rubik's Cube. I read Bright Lights, Big City and the first issue of Spin magazine. I longed for a Porsche. I went to Xenon and Limelight and Area. I saw Sonic Youth for the first time. I was, as the post-punk band Killing Joke pointed out so astutely, "living in the '80s."
And when they were over I had already embraced the '90s, thrashing my grungey hair to the super fuzz big muff sounds that were the antithesis of the soulless pap that had come to symbolize the decade of greed. I may have been wearing a 1970s polyester shirt from the Salvation Army, but that was about a cheap style alternative, not a fixation on the past.
I will now astutely point out that it's 2001. You may be aware of this, but clearly some people are confused. Everywhere I turn it's "'80s mania," which could be shrugged off as yet another silly retro trend - were the trend not threatening to last as long as the actual decade. And it's not just a couple of slashed necklines or a mullet or two I'm speaking of, it's a full lifestyle package that seems to have, for many teens and 20-somethings, usurped the times in which they actually live. This ain't no retro, this ain't no fooling around, this is weird.
Perhaps these teeny-somethings think they are being tres postmodern, she-bopping to Cyndi Lauper in a sweatshirt minidress, but I fear the lessons of the comparatively political '90s are lost on them: Why emulate a hedonistic era of zero accountability rather than strive for a better future?
Paradoxically, the '80s witnessed a 1950s revival (Back to the Future, anyone?), whose main significance was the collision of quaint notions of tomorrowland with the birth of the digital age. Now we are experiencing - what? - a backpedaling toward the kinder, gentler Republican times before we were all wired and jaded and drowning in irony? A generalization perhaps, but that's the cornerstone of nostalgia, and that's what people are buying.
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