I Hate 1984

Has anyone else found this week's City Pages collection of vignettes, "I Hate 1984", a little regressive? In a series of brief essays, the usual suspects show us how cool they've realized they were back in 1984 by dint of their musical tastes.

From Peter Scholtes' "1984: An Introduction" to Brad Zellar's "The Minutemen: Double Nickels on the Dime" to Chris Strouth's "How Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel Almost Saved Me from Poseurdom", the recurrent joke seems to be, look at me, I was a total geek, a loser, lost...but because of my musical tastes, hindsight has vindicated me.

In these pieces, the narrator gradually vanishes (or fails to emerge at all), and instead the particular bands that they happened to find (or that happened to find them), and the styles of hair they haltingly adopted, take center stage. All we have as points of reference are embarrassing circa-1984 class pics which only underline the irony for us of how cool they've become. For example, in 1984 we learn that the fourteen year old Scholtes was a "punk rocker" who got shit about his hair on the playground. But his later success was prefigured--his record reviews were published in the high school newspaper by a woman who went on to be editor of The Progressive, natch. Zellar couldn't honestly tell you what the hell he was doing in 1984--"I surely had some sort of shit job"--but he could damn well tell you the best albums of that year. At the top of the list would be the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, which had some sort of profound effect on him. Vague on the details of the album's influence, all we know is that it still makes him profoundly happy. But what should help to give shape to an identity instead trumps that identity (or lack thereof). The Minutemen stood for something, but we don't know what. It helped make 1984 "a good year" for Zellar, but we don't know why. Perhaps he doesn't either. Something profound happened--the album is such an inextricable part of him that upon finding out he had forgotten the album on a road trip out west, Zellar detoured for a day in a frantic search of Rapid City's record stores for the album and, upon being thwarted there, had a friend overnight the album to his next stop in Montana. You rarely hear of such obsessive behavior outside of addiction counseling.

The album takes precedence in several of these essays, at the expense of making everything else appear vague. Perhaps that's the goal. What is a 'tribute piece' but an exercise in nostalgia that uncomplicates the past into a a series of smoothly saleable markers. They stand in for the past. And by dropping on to the page the Replacement's Let It Be, the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade, as well as ironic trimmings like Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, Chaka Khan, and Purple Rain, we're referred to these albums and their cultural connotations in place of anything authentic or specific about the narrator. We end up knowing nothing about him or why these albums meant so much to him in particular. All we come away with is proof that he was cool. Or rather, he was a nerd until history made him cool.

This is the leitmotif of a generation deeply anxious of their place in the world and uncertain of the future. Rather than confront these anxieties, they retreat into the immemorial realm of the album. Thus, Zellar can listen to Double Nickels over and over again and it sounds exactly the same. It brings back the exact same feelings and reminds him again and again "that nothing has been lost, that I'll always be in some essential way the same guy..." Whoever that is. It is this essential timlessness to an album (it will always sound the same, so long as you don't use the CD as a coaster, but even if you do you can always go out and buy another exactly like the first in every way) that makes it so attractive as a nostalgic device. Ironic then that Zellar should try to qualify his love for the album by asserting that there's "no ache of nostalgia" associated with it.

These are the narratives of wannabes and poseurs who, seemingly through the effortless pull of destiny, are saved by particular albums that, through a conflux of the universe, cross their paths at the perfect moment. We know that Foetus almost saved Chris Strouth from poseurdom, but what was he posing as? What was the alternative? What authenticity did the album impart on him? We'll never know--such answers are beyond our grasp. All we have access to are the reflections on the walls of the cave-- and very specific reflections at that.

These pieces do seem to be conscious of their own retrogressive politics. You can't tell the story of how The Replacements replaced your unrequited love for a girl without realizing the irony of your construction. By returning to an adolescence marked by growing pains, emerging sexuality, bad hair, alienation, and acne (at best!), and replacing all this with albums and bands that have since been validated by time, we can rewrite our own histories and erase all the baggage that we might still be carrying. Even in the loving way in which some contributor's express their hatred of 1984 betrays a kind of nostalgia that's always to be wallowed in. After all, these critics (as they would be pleased to have you call them) are setting forth their credentials. These are their resumes--by acknowledging their unself-consciously cool youth, they are imbuing themselves and their futures with authority. For a young unaware child to stumble across Let It Be as if it were destiny...you can't manufacture this kind of cred.

Only albums could figure in such an anti-intellectual pursuit. Books, which as entities enjoy with albums the same sort of permanence, somehow never stay the same. Books to these writers only start to make sense when they're adults, years after they first read them, or at worst remain just plain confusing and hard.

see also:
"I Hate 1984: The Box Set" via City Pages>.
"The Intellectual Situation" at n+1.

Posted by jason at August 2, 2024 11:22 PM