Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Eighty-six the '80s: Live in the now!

SCOTT DICKENSHEETS' column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4082.

UNLESS SOMETHING goes terribly right at the last minute, Mark and Mercedes of radio station KMXB 94.1-FM will successfully host a "Flashback to the '80s" party Saturday night. I've been feverishly chanting voodoo incantations over a Flock of Seagulls CD in hopes of jinxing the event, but I don't suppose I'm having much of an effect.

Color me anti-nostalgic, but I'd hate to see the ball get rolling on an '80s revival; let's finish getting over the '70s first. Exactly what about the '80s is worth flashing back to? It wasn't our finest cultural hour. The music? Cream filling between the hard slices of '70s punk and '90s grunge; two words should suffice: "Safety Dance." The movies? Bring me the head of John Hughes! The fashion? Two more words: parachute pants. We were Brat Pack Nation: Brat Pack movies, Brat Pack literature, big Brat Pack hair. We made culture heroes of corporate raiders and believed money could buy us love. For some reason, it's almost de rigueur to refer to the '80s as "go-go." Well, stop-stop.

Sure, the Mark and Mercedes gig is a hype event taking place before a concert by '80s fixtures the B-52s and the Pretenders; nothing to get too worked up about. Then again, why let '80s nostalgia get a toehold? You round up the mob and I'll pass out the torches -- let's end this thing here.

Despite its many mockable aspects, the stubborn cling of '70s retro at least hints at a decade with a core of substance, some signs of intelligent life beneath the bell bottoms and disco moves. Maybe it was the leftover fumes of the '60s, but '70s artists hadn't yet substituted market sense for ambition. Try to imagine a book like Thomas Pynchon's huge "Gravity's Rainbow" appearing in the cultural anemia of the '80s. The defining book of that decade? "Bright Lights, Big City." Wow. Everyone agrees that the '80s were a fallow time for visual arts, as well, trendiness replacing creativity. The only art form of any consequence in the '80s was the music video, tricked-up commercials for bands whose music was as interchangeable as their hair.

I tried to be evenhanded about this. Hoping to add a little ballast to this column, I queried a few friends about worthwhile artifacts of the '80s. This is the list I received: Traci Lords and the rise of college/indie rock.

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not exactly touting the superiority of the '90s. The previous decade had a few advantages over the current one; fewer actors had their own bands, for instance. And there were some nice touches back then; the Berlin Wall, the gathering anti-apartheid movement, the Rubik's Cube. And while the '80s gave rise to the Yuppie (bad), it in turn resulted in Yuppie-bashing (better than good!).

But the '90s do trump the '80s in one final, irrefutable way: it's the era we actually live in. Like I said, I'm an anti-nostalgist. I dislike looking back. I haven't attended my class reunions and don't intend to (nothing personal, Basic High class of '80). I've never wished I could do it all over again.

Nostalgia -- by which I mean a fondness for the idealized detritus of the good old daze -- seems pointless and silly. Time hasn't improved "Safety Dance"; camp it up all you want, the song still sucks. Sadly, I'm no doubt in the minority here; judging from KMXB's listener calls, plenty of people can't wait to squeeze into their parachute pants and tease their hair into piles for the "Flashback" party. Well, go ahead. You can dance if you want to, just leave this friend behind.

archive