Simon, via his own bloggige, bringing this article to attention, re '80s revivalisms as demo-trageting marketing trend. Which reminds me of why this is the one "decades blog" that I was always hard-pressed to ever contribute to.
According to the marketing logic cited in the NYer article, I should be winsomely nostalgic for the 1980s. It's the decade in which I went to high school, entered adulthood, finally got out of the shithole town I'd grown up in by eventually going off to college, & etc etc. Yet it's probably the one decade I feel the least the nostalgic about. Why? Because it was a totally shit decade. Because of the politics; because of the economics; because of all the shit music and shit fashion, all of which was inescapably hegemonic at the time due to the way media and culture worked in those days.
All of which is why, quite frankly, I'm quite fine with seeing the decade being associated -- by way of the cited marketing campaigns -- the last place that most people would ever go to shop for electronics, a lowest-tier fast food chain, and a video game that is unanimously considered the worst in history. Seems only fitting.
Chapter 14. The Thoughts of Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper the Sun, 1981-1994.
What Kelvin wanted “... He rushed off, leaving one of the newsdesk minions to explain the new rules of the game patiently to other startled hacks who were standing around. ‘When will you lot get it through your heads that Kelvin’s not interested in whether things are true or not,’ he told them. ‘What you’ve got to do is give him what he wants.’”
On his readers “... Mackenzie rapped out his picture of the Sun’s older reader. ‘He’s the bloke you see in the pub – a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and weirdoes and drug dealers..."
On violence "'I’ve got a story about someone who’s confessed to seventeen rapes,' MacKenzie had said on 13 June. ‘Is that a record? If it’s a record I want it on the front page.’ ... His management style was revealed in his offering a knife to an elderly worker on the art desk and advising him: ‘Do us all a favour, you useless c***- cut your throat.’"
On race "... ‘Well, Botha has said the days of white power are over in South Africa. What he doesn’t say is what’s going to happen when the darkies come down from the trees,’ was one of MacKenzie’s choice remarks. ‘No, I’m not having pictures of darkies on the front page,’ said deputy editor David Shapland ... the night an Asian man won Sun Bingo, ‘That’s the last things our readers want – pictures of blacks raking it in.’"
On AIDS and homosexuality "A report in the paper in February quoted an anonymous ‘psychologist’ at an AIDS conference in Washington DC as advocating mass killings of gays. ‘All homosexuals should be exterminated to stop the spread of AIDS. It’s time we stopped pussyfooting around,’ he supposedly said. MacKenzie responded to hacks expressing mild concern about the paper’s approach to the subjects with jeers like ‘Come out, have we eh? One of them, are we, eh?’ followed by a shout across the editorial floor: ‘Watch out, folks! There’s a botty burglar about!’"
All quotes from Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, Stick It Up Your Punter! The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper (Simon & Schuster, 1999. Revised edition.)
Come and See1 is about blood in the margins, it is about the filth and the great horrible real of unknowable matter in your boots, in your veins and beneath your eyelids so you see it when you sleep. Opening with children ignoring the warnings of elders not to dig the story pushes itself through the dry scrub and into the sand to find the armatures of war, a buried rifle. Sand is the safest kind of matter, dry and easy is trickles off the skin. For the tactile defensive, sand is the first hurdle, a uniform sensation gently clinging to the moisture of fingertips and gone with with the violent flap of anxious revulsion. Sand is safe because it is not even dead, it was never alive forever the silica other of rocks and architecture.
Once Florya has his rifle and bound with it his fate as a partisan, matter ceases to be so safe and will hold on around him as mud and muck and scum. This is the living dirt, the boundary zone of decomposition and enriched growth. Particles freefall in perpetual becoming, forming and loosing bonds, losing life and finding a role within another.
Come and See lives within this dirt, in a realism that unselfconsciously clings to hair or the corner of a mouth. Our characters find their own edges so shabbily defined as they merge with the landscape. Is this not the very mythos of the resistance? The hand of the land, the mob summoned up golem-like to throw its unprotected weight against the moral outrage of occupation.
The defining scene of Come and See is not the famous barn burning carnival but the tripping rush of denial as Florya leads Glasha to where he insists his massacred family will be hiding.
The prelude to this hysteria is where the two children enter Florya’s family home which is a prelude to the horrific roar of matter. Flies buzz around the cabin while Florya retrieves the still warm soup from the oven, for a second or two it seems that reality might be held back by the cultural relief of the meal. Through the symbolic envelopment by the family, matter might still be tamed. Then Glasha vomits and the real comes crashing in like an umber flood tide, the childhood stability is now irreparably corrupt as boy and girl run away from this break, out into the swamp. This next moment is that which defines the film, the mirror of the earlier sand scene Florya followed by Glasha wade out into water covered in tendrilous algae and biofilm. The rifle is pushed out ahead of the boy and is enveloped just as he is, held close and safe in a parental shroud of living material, the gun rendered useless2, and safe as they now encounter a level of the militia even closer to the land, a group of peasants and sub-Lumpenproletariat for whom the abstraction of politics has been pulled down into the praxis of survival3.
In 1983 Alan Moore is taking over the writing of DC’s Swamp Thing. Originally Swamp Thing belongs to the genre of the mortal turned ubermensch, and their struggle to act responsibly while attempting to regain their own humanity. In the writing of Moore this is changed, Swamp Thing is organic matter which has assimilated the memories of the dead mortal, there is no self to return to. Swamp Thing is organic material made self conscious, Rhizomatic, it realises a fractal structure, all parts contained within all parts forever turning inward. Swamp Thing is the realist dirt of Come and See, the land as Actant. The Soviet film pushes an ideology which pushes one layer deeper than a National Socialist volk spirit. Rather than centralising land-culture it centralises land-matter4, bare foot in the earth forming effigies from clay and spittle and the Hydroxyapatite of a human skull. The dead mortal’s memories shape Swamp Thing, as much as the political agreement we called the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic shapes the landscape of this film. Ultimately, this shaping is just a vehicle for articulation and interpretation and somewhere within it is the pure and filthy real. Central to Swamp Thing is the concept that the protagonist is not a being itself but rather the agency of all plant-life. Once again the hand of the land.
“In my heart/ there’s a place called swamp-land/ nine parts water/ one part sand5”
The early 80s are the days of body horror, the pinnacle of animatronic hard-visual-effect-technology and the entering of HIV/AIDS into the collective Western Consciousness6.
There is an argument that all horror is to some extent fixated on the body and as such there is no such thing as a non-body horror. This would follow from the dual observations that our traditional lineage of horror narratives all feature a corruption of a body (whether ours, or the mirror of the Other) and that horror involves the threat or realisation of the transformation of a body through violence, moving from a familiar and operational thing, to something else all together.
However, this defining branch of popular cinema in the earlier years of the 80s is quite specific. John Carpenter moves from the recent supernatural revenge horror of Halloween and the Fog to the cellular eruption of The Thing. Similarly David Cronenberg shifts the role of the body to one of central reconfiguration and instability with Videodrome7. looking wider there is Re-Animator, The Howling, Wolfen, An American Werewolf in London and on and on. These are films which respond to a fear not of the Communist Other of without but the de-unification of the self (the self as a network which might be re-configured rather than a monad). However, what is also happening here is a change in society's view of the materiality of the body, as we obsess not simply on the threat of viral change, but on an increasingly drawn out look at the change itself. The camera lingers on the splatter of blood and the alteration of form (the monster change...) and this act becomes the distancing catharsis of self administered de-sensitization8.
What has happened is an abuse of matter, an abuse of dirt. Through pushing depiction of the unstable borders of the self into a bloody hyper-real (and despite how the rubber looks to our now jaded eyes, hyper-real is just what The Thing was) representation, a connection with the real of muck was dulled significantly. This is what makes Come and See so shocking in 19849 (in the 70s it would have been fine, nature has mostly been left to it's own existence in this decade, whether by disinterest or respect10) it is true dirt, even-handed and real.
In 1983 Big Black released Bulldozer, Swans released Filth and right at the start of 1984 Einstürzende Neubauten take pneumatic drills to the floor of the ICA to get to the tunnels beneath11.
In 1984 Black Flag release the record My War which is itself a slither between two attitudes to matter and the physical. Side A is the dumb hand-me-down punk of America pushing 1977 London back through rock and roll, side B is something that slows down the moment into 3 6minute plus songs of the lingering touch of distortion. A perfect synthesis of early Sabbath and Funhouse the last half of My War revels in the moment by moment of sound in stark contrast to conservative structures of the tracks which precede it. The guitars have been atonal all along but with the first of the three tracks, Nothing Left Inside, Greg Ginn's playing is so loose as to be rootless, just a huge collapse spilling out over a spasmodic and exhausted12 ruin of the first 4 notes of Peter Gunn played for what feels like forever on three legs.
1984 also sees the airing of Threads on the BBC then in 1985 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is published.
Like a revisionist return-to-nature both Threads and Blood Meridian offer a doom triumph of matter over ideology. That messy algorithm of rot and growth, that fuzziness at the border of self might cease to just be something on the surface, might infect and get inside, and this is what it would like in that world a handful of years later, no common language and no absolutes at all. That's really the fear of the Easton-Ellis-Eighties, for all the language of utter self control, of dominance of everything through the left right of Will and Capital everyone knows that increasing the grip only provokes a rupture somewhere, something has got to burst out.
However, it that implies some sort of general self-awareness, 1984 is also the year Red Dawn came out. Happy Halloween.
1 I wrote this last month “I've had a sequential dream over the past week where I have been a reluctant member of a partisan militia traipsing through unlit farmland in the manner of the film Come and See, led by the tragically flawed and often depressed (at all times sitting in the pose depicted on the cover DMR's second album) Captain Kevin Rowland. I brought him round to my house at one point in an effort to cheer him up, possibly by cooking him dinner. I then realise to my horror that not only is my copy of Too-Rye-Ay visible but the record itself is on the turntable and something has initiated the automatic start. There is a click as the red light comes on, the arm lifts, swings out over the disk, I drop the piece of salami I'm holding, Kevin looks up just as the needle drops.... and then I wake up.”
2 A realisation of the hippie symbolism, a flower jammed down the barrel.
3 “Curiously, while Marx thought the final stage of history would amount to a sort of return to humanity's initial state ('primitive communism'), Marx and his successors never supposed that our own era's 'primitive communists' had any place in the transformations about to take place. You can't be an agent of history, the presumption went, if your form of life places you outside of history altogether.” J E H Smith
4 Matter is beyond corruption, it is impossible for a politic to insert itself between a subject and the pure experience of this terrible entity. “Base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations… For it is a question above all of not submitting oneself, and with oneself one’s reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that arms this being. This being and its reason can in fact only submit to what is lower, to what can never serve in any case to ape a given authority” Bataille, George Base Materialism and Gnosticism in George Bataille Visions of Excess Selected Writings 1927 - 1939 University of Minnesota: Minneapolis 1985.
5Swampland by The Scientists, released as a double A side by Au Go Go in 1982
6 The actual moment of AIDS entering general understanding is attributed to many events, but most relevant to our discussion here is the release of David Lynch’s Dune in 1984 with its disease ridden homosexual Sadean Baron Vladimir Harkonnen personifying the spectre of a collective terror and ignorance made flesh. It is also worth mentioning Dune's Soviet-Afghan War subtext and it's wicked case of TE Lawrence syndrome, which exoticises and objectifying the Other while living out its colonial fantasy of leadership.
7 Cronenberg obsessed on the fuzzy edges of the bodily self from the beginning, perhaps most notably with the vampire-vagina-armpit vehicle Rabid in 1977. However, as with Carpenter these earlier films followed the codes of the slasher genre, with its need for a monstrous antagonist to be escaped. Videodrome, and to a lesser extent The Thing (hamstrung slightly by the conformity of the 1950s source material) display a more Existential quality of examining the nature of the bodily self and the limits of it’s materiality against he limits of its conciousness.
8 Another branch of this enquiry should here look to the sister of the splatter film, the early 80s heavy metal album, specifically the rise of Grindcore and to a lesser extent Thrash and Death Metal. Again, a mass of cathartic abuse against matter by making all anxiety familiar and ineffectual. This will finally find language in Napalm Death's mantra from 1989 "You suffer, but why?"
9 Shocking in the West obviously. Another branch of enquiry would here look to the more pronounced respect of matter in post-war to pre-80s soviet cinema, compared to to the grittier end of 70s Hollywood and how this managed to survive much later into the decade.
10Hackman eats boiled eggs, DeNiro mashes bread into a bowl of milk and 70s Nicholson gesticulates with his mouth like he is forever talking around some dry rye toast. It was a decade which defined tough cinema by the way it played with its dinner.
11 Three bands that through abrasive sonic texture, volume and the physicality of the means of producing (even amplified) sound attempting to re-connect something lost in the performance that might only be done so through confrontation. Unfortunately the drama (frequently in the lyrics, always in the clothes) often pulled the whole thing back into spectacle time and time again. Incidentally, the most physically engaged records I can think of are probably Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow by Funkadelic and There's a Riot Goin' On by Sly & The Family Stone, where noise and sonic space just lie about like they own the place, both are covered in dirt without any hysteria at all. The mix alone on either record is enough cut all chance of the listeners return to decency and a life of wallowing in music, taking it for granted. Both records grate in their own way, grate against the possibility of a transparent listening experience, one sounds like you've woken up in a grave, the other in some Stan Brakhage Ajax-scarred zoetrope of the storm from Return to Oz and a motown Silver Apples. Also both appear at the dawn of the 70s, right in the spray of Altamont which was arguably a moment when corporeal grit proved it simply had the mass to destroy any ideology, or tea party, or sales pitch or whatever.
In close parallel to the 1978-83 post-punk renaissance (as documented in Simon'sRip It Up And Start Again), funk, disco and the poppier side of side of soul was also having a damn good run of it at the same time (covered in Peter Shapiro's equally excellent tome Turn That Beat Around). With a vicious backlash, and fatigue at the cultural hegemony of Saturday Night Fever, the dust of disco settled into all kinds of interesting shapes - from the first stirrings of hiphop to hi-concept New York punky funky disco eccentrics like James Chance, Arthur Russell, the Was Bros. and Kid Creole/August Darnell. Punk, Afrobeat, reggae, fusion, electropop and Latino music were cheerfully appropriated for dancefloor use. Add the ominous dynamics of Reagan's victory and the constituencies he came to destroy, it made for a heady, implicitly political brew. It was perhaps unsurprising that new wavers like Talking Heads and The Clash hitched along for the ride. It was also apt that Bowie would end his run of greatness with Nile Rogers instead of Brian Eno. The integration of the audience was frequently as seamless as its collage of musical styles. It wasn't so much mutant disco, as hybrid; lending it a frequently unpredictable pizazz.
Of course, the arrival of Thriller, its almost totalitarian commercial impact, and the (arguable) backlash it provoked in the form of hiphop, swept this mini-utopia away; leaving dancefloors between a desexualised, deracialised, deradicalised Disneyland and the harsh admonition to 'keep it real' (until rave, itself a different kind of Disneyland, albeit existing largely in the head). Funk was eventually pushed to the margins, but for a while there the influence of George Clinton could be heard all over the place (yaoww!), and not just among his own P-Funk collective. This was before the horrors of AIDS and conservatism, when sexuality was openly celebrated; unlike the paranoid disgust of Jacko and his many imitators, or Material Girls insisting the only thing going on was the rent. Disco was assimilated into the default pop mainstream by the likes of Stock, Aitken and Waterman and Hi-NRG-lite like New Order and the Pet Shop Boys (their one true classic 'West End Girls' - the source of this blog's title - emerged from the New York scene mentioned above, but itself riddled with noirish sexual dread). The only Utopia Madonna pledged allegiance to was her own neoliberal success story. Jellybean Benitez served his instrumental purpose many movers and shakers ago. Despite her (increasingly desperate) bumping and grinding, the actual tracks sounded as sterile as any other by the late 80s. Disco vets like Prince stood out for the idiosyncratic niche he carved, but he was a rarity; reliant on MTV and Hollywood to make his mark. There were still somewhat anomalous exceptions, like Sly and Robbie's awesome 'Boops (Here To Go)'; but rather than prove influential, they ultimately suggested lost possibilities.
Anyway, all the above is just an excuse to post some great tracks from the period. Ironically, the songs below are now most likely to be heard (if at all) in the twattier kind of hipster venue. Places that are far from sexy, integrated, adventurous, politicised or remotely Utopian. Where "fuck you" is the soulful refrain replacing "let's do it!" At least musically, things were a little more open then. Michael Henderson was an in-demand session player with fusion superstars, proving he could funk with the best of them, coiling his mighty bass around a filthy double entendre. Arthur Russell's deeply personal, spacious, spiritual style now has its due recognition. Rick James' Street Songs is the rare album that's excellent from beginning to end, and in a more just world, would have outsold Thriller to much healthier social and commercial effect. The production credits of Sly and Robbie speak for themselves, being in demand as producers with good reason. They eventually settled into the increasingly conservative and enclosed world of Jamaican pop. Frankie Beverly's Maze were relatively 'trad', reflecting the short-lived optimism of an emergent black middle-class; but never quite entered the mainstream with their lack of video glitz and high reputation as a live act. The last track (one of the greatest dance tunes ever, IMHO) is a lovely example of August Darnell's pop genius, and could be a manifesto for the whole milieu I'm lazily attempting to describe. Of course, with the exceptions of mighty Rick and Grace (for obvious reasons - look at 'em), none of these tracks had the pop videos that would be de rigeur by mid-decade. History was indeed made at night, but the Spectacle was closed to its potential; as pop (and nightlife) carried out its slowly gentrified, neutered facelift and eventual irrelevance. But whenever I hear this stuff, it can't help but evoke thoughts of a warmer world.
Sexuality as the mediated, oppressive, conscious contagion attacking personal agency, biology and ontology. Subject to deception, technology, ideology and social stratification (The Law being as un/dead as Bela Lugosi). Subcultural neuroses that would eventually become common parlance, and then repackaged accordingly. AIDS was beginning to be diagnosed around the same time, but wasn't a mainstream panic until the middle of the decade. If sci-fi/horror's nightmares don't exist at its time of writing, it may be necessary to invent them shortly after.
All the above are cult classics, highly influential in their respective (sub)genres. 'Sleeper' hits that took years to grow an audience (or canonization for Blade Runner), their motifs moving across fashion, adverts, pop videos, and product design, ie. everywhere. A virus of the pleasure principle. Away from the peer pressures of cinema viewing, the lonely - guilty? - space of home video gave these films room to gestate. The lifestyles, behaviour and economic conditions of their characters now appear far less alien than they did in 1982/83. We may be more alienated than these doom-mongers could forecast. Consider the shape Cafe Videodrome has taken since, and your statistical likelihood of surveying either (a) a corporate-led social network, or (b) pornography shortly after looking at this blog. All those immaterial encounters... like tears in the rain...
