Musical Decades: The Feel-Good 1980s
I was pushing my shopping cart through Safeway recently when the soft strains of Olivia Newton-John's voice came wafting down to my ears. "You have to believe we are magic," she was suggesting. "Nothin' can stand in our way."
As I snagged a tub of oatmeal and a can of coffee in the breakfast aisle, I found myself humming, then singing Newton-John's No. 1 hit from the Xanadu soundtrack. And, frankly, I didn't care who heard. Because for a moment, a grocery store's sound system had transported me back to the first summer of a decade that pretty much believed it was summer all the time—at least as far as music was concerned.
This is the third installment in Plugged In's year-long series devoted to six decades of music. Over the last few months, I've written "Musical Decades" articles about the 2000s and the 1990s. In the coming months I'll dig into the 1970s, '60s and '50s. But the tunes that sprang from each of those decades—even the ones I lived though—didn't really shape me.
The music of the 1980s did. And that makes this story … personal.
I was 9 when the '80s began and therefore 19 when the decade wrapped. Twenty years later, I can see more clearly how the music I loved played a significant role in forming my view of myself and of my world. And 20 minutes from now, when you're done reading, I hope you'll see things you didn't before, too. Because not only did I get the T-shirt—several, actually—I picked up a few thoughts about the importance of our musical choices.
Sweet, Sweet Saccharine
Forget about Vietnam, the oil embargo, the Iran hostage crisis, double-digit inflation … and disco. The musical '80s dawned with something approximating optimism. Or, at the very least, something intoxicating enough to make you ignore all the lousy news. The very first No. 1 single of the decade was Rupert Holmes' ode to a mixed drink, "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)." Newton-John's "Magic," which I nearly started singing for you a few paragraphs ago, would top the charts on Aug. 2 that same year.
Escape. Magic. If you look at many of the top songs from 1980, those two themes dominate. For every brooding hit like Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)," you can easily find 10 that proffer a sunnier outlook: Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," Kenny Rogers' "Lady," Irene Cara's "Fame," Billy Joel's "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me." The cynicism that would mark the '90s was hard to find in those early years of the '80s. As Katrina and the Waves smilingly sang, it was all about "walking on sunshine … and don't it feel good!"
I recall the summer songs of '80, '81, '82, '83 and '84 the best. That's because my best friend, Joe, and I practically lived at our small Iowa town's swimming pool from late May to late August. From the time the pool opened at 1 p.m. 'til we hauled our red-backed selves home on our bikes at 9, the radio blared.
And so I began to buy the songs that captured my imagination, at first as 45 rpm singles. It was an eclectic collection: Gary Newman's "Cars"; the one-hit wonder "Funkytown," by Lipps, Inc.; "I Love Rock-n-Roll" by Joan Jett & The Blackhearts. A few LPs—that's "long-playing" records, for all you youngsters—crept into the mix, too: Billy Joel's Glass Houses and that silly soundtrack to Xanadu among them.
Early on, then, I began to develop a relationship of sorts with music. And it didn't end with the swimming pool. When I went home, I retreated to my downstairs bedroom for hours of listening and singing. After school, I often ended up at my grandmother's house. Specifically, in her basement spinning more records and again singing my lungs out. (If only YouTube had been around then!)
Even from the time I was 10 or so, something in those '80s hits connected with my imagination, with my heart. And it wasn't just the sunny stuff, either. Take Rick Springfield's 1981 song "Jessie's Girl": When I fell "in love" with a girl named Lisa in the 6th grade, "Jessie's Girl" gave me an outlet for my longing and envy of her boyfriend ("Lately something's changed/It ain't hard to define/Jessie's got himself a girl/And I wanna make her mine"). I never did make her mine, I can tell you without regret now, but Springfield's song simultaneously encouraged me to ponder the possibility and provided ready-made musical sentiments for me to vocalize when it didn't happen.
As a preteen and then a teen, I don't know that I was particularly self-aware about the songs and musicians I connected with. All I knew was that I liked what I heard and that the music enabled me to verbalize what was happening inside me.
Play, Rewind, Repeat
The summer of '83 found a certain British band named after a hard-of-hearing feline making waves on this side of the pond—at my local swimming pool. "Unta gleeben glouten globen," said a smirking voice at the beginning of Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages." Cool is hardly a big enough superlative for the way that sounded to me. Thus, I was one of the 10 million or so Americans who immediately went out and purchased the album it came from, Pyromania. It was the very first album I purchased on cassette. And Def Leppard quickly became a "gateway drug" for me. On the heels—or paws, I should say—of the Leppard, pop metal became my musical staple: Van Halen, Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest and Bon Jovi all landed in my stereo in relatively quick succession.
I switched from moving the needle on my records to playing and rewinding those cassettes—over and over and over again. I don't know how many times I listened to Pyromania, but I eventually wore the tape out. How do you know when a Def Leppard cassette is worn out? Well, when every song sounds as incoherent as "Unta gleeben glouten globen," that's how! All in all, I'm hard put to estimate how many times I might have listened to that album. Hundreds? Definitely. Thousands? Maybe.
Which brings me to this: Not only does music offer a powerful emotional connecting point—more so, I feel, than other forms of media and entertainment—it does so in a way that we can access repeatedly almost to the point of infinity.
Compared to movies, music's influence via these repeated listenings is simply staggering. For example, Star Wars was one of my favorite films, and I've seen it maybe 100 times. Is that a lot? Sure. But compared to the number of times I listened to Pyromania or Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet? Well, 100 times is just peanuts.
And what happens in the process? The words—and the feelings—get burned in. And I think something vaguely Pavlovian begins to happen.
After I got my driver's license at 16, I exchanged time singing in the bedroom for time singing in my (mom's) car, driving up and down the mile and a quarter "strip" in my hometown. Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," especially, used to make me feel alive in some mysterious way that I still can't quite articulate. And it made me want to drive fast. I can still feel the hot, heavy wind on my face and see the bugs smacking into the windshield. To this day, when "Livin' on a Prayer" comes on, it quickens something deep inside me.
And that's just one song from the '80s that instantly transports me to a concrete memory and a powerful emotional reaction. Looking through Billboard's catalog of weekly charts while researching this article, I had those kinds of flashbacks with hundreds of songs.
The Heart of the Matter
In his 1989 song "The Heart of the Matter," Eagles member Don Henley sang, "These times are so uncertain/There's a yearning undefined." In many ways, the power of music gives voice to those undefined yearnings in our hearts. That can be a powerful thing, and the feelings engendered by the songs of our youth (it's rarely the songs of our 40s!) can tempt us not to think too critically about them. After all, why would I want to be critical of something that I've come to identify with so deeply?
But we need to think critically—even if it's 20 years after the fact. Because the messages we internalized then (and continue to internalize now) may cloak untruths and half truths about ourselves that feel right but aren't right. I can think of plenty of songs from the feel-good '80s with not-so-feel-good messages I didn't critically assess at the time.
Take Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again," for instance. In my case, I felt very alone throughout much of my adolescence. I was "going down the only road I've ever known." I knew that, "like a drifter I was born to walk alone." David Coverdale was singing about me. It was my song. In 1987 I connected with those lyrics. And, amazingly, to this day I still connect with them. Because I sometimes still feel like an outsider.
I can't say for sure, but I wonder if I hadn't fixated on and connected with songs like that quite the way I did as a teen, might that deep, dark feeling that still haunts me not be quite so strong? It seems silly to blame it on the laughable likes of David Coverdale, but …
Music truly does have the power to shape our sense of self. And it can mold us profoundly when we're young, because, well, we're kind of a blank slate when we're 17 and 15 and 12. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if someone had actively helped me think a bit more critically about the ways I engaged with music. No one told me that I had made music my friend, and that my friend wasn't always the best sort of influence.
I'm acutely aware, this far into an article about 1980s music, that I haven't so much as mentioned Madonna, U2, Bruce Springsteen or Michael Jackson. In fact, I've barely grazed the surface of how remarkably diverse this time period was in terms of its genres and musical movements—from thrash to punk, new wave to alternative. It was a decade that gave us everything from A Flock of Seagulls to Slayer, The Cure to George Michael, Bobby McFerrin to .38 Special.
But the style of music isn't really the point, I've found. (Nor are sales figures, tour information and other such trivia—interesting as they may be.) Our musical choices and preferences are not incidental to our lives. It's the way we think about music that matters—no matter what decade it is.
Musical Decades: The Techie 2000s
Musical Decades: The Nerve-Racking 1990s
Musical Decades: The Feel-Good 1980s
Musical Decades: The Swinging 1970s
Musical Decades: The Revolutionary 1960s
Musical Decades: The Rockin' and Rollin' 1950s