Back to the Future

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.

Cha-Cha-Cha

I suppose I should get round to a post about the Falklands War at some point - one of the strangest conflicts in history, and one which had nothing to do with Imperialism and everything to do with the curious metaphysics of national vitality (on both sides).

Anyway, here's The Fall's pro-War record, a satire on the kind of left-winger who sympathised with the Argentine Junta out of an anti-patriotic negative solidarity. Mark E. Smith would follow this act of political incorrectness by openly voting Conservative in the 1983 election, an act that has been mysteriously forgotten by all those snarky critics that like to hammer on at the alleged Tory sympathies of Paul Weller and Gary Numan.