I have to admit that I don't know firsthand what it was like over in the U.K. at the time -- how it was precisely that the 1980s got underway, if there was any sense of a decisive lurch in a certain direction being taken. Here in the U.S., the decade more or less started with a bang. A bang that was ironically accompanied by a whimper, a whimper (or maybe it was more like a groan) that some folks had labeled a "mandate"...
A fair amount of elementary arithmetic, there. Everything easily quantifiable. Throughout the prior decade, you could rely on Gil Scott-Heron to know the score; to call the action as he saw it, size it up for what it was. Wry knowing looks all around. "Back to a time when movies were in black and white, and so was everything else." Heads nod in agreement. "...And common sense is at an all-time low, with heavy trading." Indeed. Sometimes, before even the opening credits unfurl, you can sense that a movie's going to deeply and thoroughly suck.
By the time the decade had half run its course, many of those same black-and-white Hollywood films were being systematically "colorized" by Turner Broadcasting networks, Reagan had won a second term in office, and Gil Scott-Heron's recording career was on the wane. Scott-Heron would soon slip from the public eye for a long stretch; drifting off the grid somewhere in New York City, eventually (we would learn only years later) to be swallowed by the crack cocaine epidemic that was sweeping the country's inner cities.
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