Want to Rule the World? Anniversary 1985
The best adaptation of 1984 actually came out in 1985, and it was called Brazil. That’s how things go—it takes a year or so to process prophecies. By stamping it 1984, Orwell all but assured the powers that be would only mobilize once the year was safely in the rearview. On 12/31/1984, there’d be no eyes on the erection of the panopticon, and the Washington Post could print “More Like Schm-Orwell.” Computer scientists would safely start turning human lives into ones and zeroes. Bootlicking and book burning would be primed to take the mainstream.
Nothing has been worse for Earth than the 1980s, and there was no worse year of those ten than 1985. I find the fifth of each decade to be the most abhorrent—not only is it when the culture stratifies into its worst extremes, but also, with my amateur synesthesia, the number “5” holds in itself a pallid yellow. It’s a gonzo and grotesque color, the thinnest sunlight of a smog-lit day. This is the color of the human soul—cowardly, sick; obsequious, cruel.
Musically, however, a silver lining: while the common myth suggests culture was bifurcated between defiant punk rockers (Big Black) and corporate stooges (Huey Lewis), a closer look yields a lot more popular discontent than you’d think from the Back to the Future year. After all, the outré likes of Rain Dogs and Hounds of Love were huge hits, and even the glossiest of studio albums were injected with gothic depth and compositional integrity (here’s to you, my beloved Tears for Fears). The Cure straddled pop, Whitney Houston debuted; Duran Duran did a Bond song, Elfman did Pee Wee. For all the social and political terror ’85 wrought, the tunes were immaculate. Scritti Politti even invented the 1975.
Sorry to be a downer, but prove me wrong: ’85 sowed the seeds of everything ailing society today, right down to the government obfuscating and suppressing public health to thin the undesired herds (the roots of MAHA is Reagan’s response to AIDS). What you won’t see in the wretched hagiography of Stranger Things is that living in the 1980s was little more than drab, boot-licking torture. If you weren’t there, don’t worry—there hasn’t been change in decades. They paved the road to nowhere; we’re on it to this day.
1975 has officially been sold as the year of the shark and the Saturday Night. These two things were the ones to last. As much as it might make you cringe to say, it’s undeniable: I’m a Brody sun, a Quint moon, a goddamn Hooper rising. A Gilda sun, a Conan moon, a Chevy… agh, you know what, fuck it.
The house where I grew up was two miles from Highway 61. That’s the historic blues highway that Bob Dylan referenced with Highway 61 Revisited, his 1965 album that, in turn, gave the film A Complete Unknown its name from a lyric in “Like a Rolling Stone.”
When I was 21, I worked at Forever 21. I was the sole stock worker on any given shift, and I ran that backroom like a movie set—there wasn’t a single maxi dress I couldn’t echolocate.
I remember—I remember the first song I listened to for weeks. It was in 2004. I had loved a tune before, sure—your Cher’s “Believe,” your Smash Mouth’s “All Star”—but had never experienced that blissful hunger for one. That came with “All These Things I’ve Done”…
Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. He killed himself—and he did kill himself. Crazy the acrobatics our minds will go through to rule out the reality of suicide. Impossible! That life could be too hard to live? We’re more likely to see misogynistic conspiracy lurk around every corner.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.
When I started gathering my research for this Annivyrsary back in January, one thing became clear—1974 was not a good year for music. This was very much a puberty period, an awkward personality vacuum that comes between shedding the old and fully realizing the new. This was to be my Waterloo.
Something preposterous happened in 1964: On the week of April 4, one artist had the top five songs on the Billboard Hot 100. It’d never happened before and it hasn’t been matched since. Mere weeks before, in the warming days of March, America found that no fewer than 60% of all records sold were songs by the Beatles.
Safe to say three of the most consequential albums of my life came out in 2013, and that list doesn’t even touch the dozen other nearly perfect albums from this year—Trouble Will Find Me, Modern Vampires of the City, Cupid Deluxe, Yeezus… 2013 changed music as we know it, and a lot of the biggest artists today cemented their status or debuted this year, from The 1975 to Beyoncé.
I do remember that this is the year I got a Nintendo Power subscription though. And I do remember one day, flipping through said Nintendo Power in the back seat of the family van, my parents slid a revolution into the CD player. That was the day I first heard Now!That’s What I Call Music! 14.
So for me, ‘93 was the first year of the 90s, and its evidence lies in several places: in the birth of the Riot Grrrl movement and third wave feminism with Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl”; in Nirvana’s dyspeptic final album before Cobain’s untimely death; and in Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the harbinger for the soon-to-be golden age of hip hop.
Some stories of note in 1983: the invention of Detroit techno, as embodied by the single “Clear” by Cybotron; the birth of English indie rock as we know it with The Smiths debut and follow up singles (“Hand in Glove” and “This Charming Man,” respectively); and the birth of American indie rock as we know it with R.E.M.’s Murmur.
If you want a little taste of what 1973 was like, go watch Licorice Pizza, the title of which refers to the old LP, a.k.a. the vinyl record—and boy, was this year firmly the middle of the Album Empire.
It’s time for the first of our Annivyrsaries, my favorite history class, and we’re starting with the sounds of 1963. So naturally, I want to focus on something that hasn’t been touched as much by scholars—the rise of the Surf Song.
It was the year the world was supposed to end. For music, in a own way, it did. As the 2009 class of indie darlings delivered underwhelming follow ups (Shields, Centipede Hz, Swing Lo Magellan—many now, in ten years time, seen as unsung greats), critics were reckoning with the rise of poptimism.
In 2002, I was listening to All That You Can’t Leave Behind from the backseat of a minivan while I flipped through the pictures in Nintendo Power. I thought all songs debuted through Now That’s What I Call Music! I was Coldplay’s perfect mark—I had no idea what a cliché even was.
I must’ve gotten my hands on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004, when I was 10 or 11 years old. Grand Theft Auto maintains a dual reputation as one of the greatest video games of all time as well as one of those Matrix-level Y2K-era youth corruptors.
The first time I went crowd-surfing was in a stranger’s dark living room to “Come On Eileen.” I remember being lifted on shaky hands and the warm breeze borne from the drunken crowd. It was during that thumping chant of the bridge, every foot moving to the brow-beating stomp. My nose scraped the ceiling as I sang along.
At the height of his fame, David Bowie forged Ziggy Stardust to help him withstand the heat of the limelight. He quickly came to resent it. He was starting to think that he was Ziggy. He even went as far as trying to kill Stardust off one summer in London. “That fucker would not leave me alone for years,” he once said.
Pretend it’s 1962. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring hits The New Yorker in June. In a month, heavy smog descends upon London; the first Walmart rears its head in Arkansas. Another month, and Marilyn Monroe is dead. The world could collapse any day now.
Summer morning doesn’t strike the Midwest sky so much as it subdues it. The sun will lay the night down gently—first with the grip of firm, pink fingers, then a whispered command in daffodil light.
It's 2001: CDs are excessive. Packing 1.4 million bits into a single second of stereo? In reality, we need only 128,000—a mere twelfth the size of what we were sold.
In 1991, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine spent three years making their second record, held up by perfectionism and his visionary sound—thousands of pedals to make the guitars shimmer, a mirage of pitch-bent tremolo effects.
She and I stood face-to-face—cheeks rolling as we chewed in calculated fury—in a bathroom flooded so many times you could see from peeling paint the location of each waterline. Moments ago, we’d scoured the concrete for bright strips of green between the rippling sheet of the Mississippi River and the faded auditorium where we now conspired.
At 11:59 p.m. on the first day of 1971, families watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson witnessed the last ad for cigarettes ever broadcast on television. 60 seconds dedicated to Virginia Slims. Those who preferred CBS’s Merv Griffin saw the same but for a different pack—Marlboros. Dick Cavett fans got Benson & Hedges.
1961 was what MAD Magazine called an Upside-Up year. It’s strobogrammatic, rotationally symmetric—flip it upside-down while no one’s looking and the number appears to have remained the same. If 1969 is the year that changed everything, we ought to christen 1961 as the year the world flipped upside-down, unnoticed; no one seemed to be paying any attention.
The real reason I had no time to write was I got so sucked in to making the damn playlist. It had to be longer this time, both because I had so much material (it was the year of my musical awakening) and because we could all use a longer escape.
This Valentine's Day, Hulu released a new TV version of High Fidelity. I told myself I wouldn't watch it. Its existence felt like a trick, its timing too convenient. It only took me two nights to cave. I set down the movie to watch the whole thing twice; some will disagree, but I think it's fantastic.
1990 was the year that the Pale Blue Dot photo was beamed back to Earth by Voyager 1—as it left the Solar System, Carl Sagan told NASA to have the craft turn its camera around and take one last photo of the Earth against the black canvas of space. In the shot, our planet is barely bigger than a pixel.
The best adaptation of 1984 actually came out in 1985, and it was called Brazil. That’s how things go—it takes a year or so to process prophecies. By stamping it 1984, Orwell all but assured the powers that be would only mobilize once the year was safely in the rearview.