There’s also any number of famous, beloved tracks from this era that are claustrophobic and avant-garde. Yes, there are any number of lush, yearning new wave songs, whether in the loose genre’s art-rock beginnings or its penetration into poppier forms. The context we so often forget to consider now seemed crucial, music that soundtracked one era of living on the edge of the world and could clarify a new one. Most of my favorite music comes from the ‘80s, but I heard it in a different light under Trump’s bungling reign. In the case of new wave particularly, there’s often this stereotype that it was a glossier and more romantic genre suitable for ‘80s excess, abandoning the politics of punk, despite the fact that many new wave bands wrote songs set against an end of the world that would’ve inevitably come at the hands of the USA or the USSR. Though the role of Cold War politics and nuclear anxiety is often obvious, or at least documented, when it comes to post-punk and new wave of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, it’s rarely a topic we focus on when we talk about ‘80s revivalism.
Occasionally, it could be comforting, a reminder that we’ve weathered crises before and we can do it again if we manage to not get incinerated.ĭuring it all, I made my way back through the music I grew up on, the music of the late Cold War. Sometimes, it primarily provokes that simmering anger, that aghast frustration that the people in charge seem to be so willfully oblivious to history. (In the wake of Hawaii, there were articles that drew parallels to similar events that proved to be close calls during the Cold War.) Mostly, these history lessons are defensive: Remember what’s happened before and stay vigilant. Though the moment we are living in comes across as fundamentally unique to 21st century America, there’s been no shortage of turning to history to clarify and survive it.
Earlier this month, for nearly 40 minutes, people in Hawaii thought they might die from an incoming ballistic missile. He has tweeted dick-measuring boasts about his nuclear button. He has called Kim Jong-Un “Rocket Man” during a speech at the UN. Already Trump has done unprecedented things like taunt and threaten an unstable foreign leader about nuclear war via Twitter. Somehow, we live in an era where there are people speculating about cabinet members having to tackle the President Of The United States - another Weird ’80s icon, Donald Trump - if he goes to fire the nukes. Now, it feels real again, the shorthand historical signifiers burned away for a new, visceral present. The stories of growing up during the Cold War, with perhaps subconscious but perpetual fear of nuclear attacks, once seemed part of history, something of our parents’ or grandparents’ generations. Then, with the fall of the USSR, we didn’t think about it as much.
But the last time a full nuclear war wholly captured the American consciousness as a real and central threat to the continued existence of the world was during the ‘80s, with the intensification of the Cold War during its final chapter.īack then, the prospect of the Americans and Russians bombing the shit out of each other made the possibility of not only nuclear war, but the very concept of nuclear energy, a mainstream concern. There are always concerns about certain countries reaching nuclear capability the topic is never too far from our headlines or our minds. For the first time in my life, we also live with some degree of actual fear that nuclear war could break out at any given moment. But that same pop music was also the soundtrack of a new era of nuclear anxiety.Īs of late, I’ve been hearing those classic ’80s songs differently. Sure, it is still tempting to look back on the ‘80s for more than those songs’ undying hooks, to look back and figure them as simpler times. Those are the years where pop music sounded like the future, but also preceded the real arrival of the future in the true mainstream introduction of the internet era in the ‘90s, a turning point with complete and still-evolving societal ramifications. Those are the years of proms in John Hughes films, and our own proms, and childhood, and all that shit. That was the decade they looked back on as their innocence, the same way we look back on the ‘80s as ours. It’s an interesting paradox: We often remember the decade and its pop music in fond, neon hues, the same decade that was shot through with apocalyptic darkness and in turn had a nostalgic bent towards the ‘50s. Nostalgia for that decade and its pop culture has both seemed to move in cycles and be ever-present for something like the last 15 years.