The Automatik

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of music from the 80s and, as I am wont to do, reflecting upon my formative years in that decade. I’ve also been thinking about a current trend that has reached back in time to transform those years.

It’s about access to pop culture.

I frequently marvel at the ability that people have now for accessing pop culture in a way that I never did in the 80s and even the early 90s, before the complete takeover of Internet life.

There is a tremendous amount of information available for people to sift through. Here is a list of some of the things that people have access to now that didn’t exist when I was a teenager.

• All Music Guide.com
• Wikipedia
• Napster (and everything like Napster)
• MP3 and MP4 technology
• CDs and CD burners
• Amazon.com
• Email
• Instant messaging
• Cell phones
• Specials and clip shows like “I Love The 80s” on VH1
• You Tube and Quicktime
• Hot Topic

When I was in junior high and high school, here’s how things worked for me regarding bands that I liked.

I probably heard about them from either MTV or a “cool” older friend, someone that may have been friends with one of my friends’ older siblings. I would watch MTV constantly and was lucky enough at the age of 12 to have a TV in my room with cable after my mom gave me an old one, probably as a reward for an impressive report card and an attempt to soothe the shock of having my stepfather and both grandfathers die within one year of each other. Believe it or not, despite my mother’s protective behaviour with regards to not allowing me to watch shows like Soap and Three’s Company, I was actually trusted to not watch movies on HBO (the only channel that existed which played uncut movies) and I usually didn’t (except for Foxes with Jodie Foster).

So if the band had a song that wasn’t played on the radio, but had a video that was played on MTV or Friday Night Videos I would hold up my little Radio Shack tape recorder to the TV speakers and tape it. I actually had tapes of Adam and the Ants’ “Ant Rap” as well as Def Leppard’s “Photograph” that I listened to in this manner. These recordings were only possible if I happened to catch the videos when they were on and if I were lucky enough to see them from the beginning. For example, I would stay up late on weekends just hoping to catch Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer” video, but would only ever see “Rio.”

If I had a girlfriend who was lucky enough to own the band in question’s album, she would sometimes make me a tape on her parents’ stereo. If direct permission were not given to do this, my friend would have to do it surreptitiously. My mom had a stereo in the living room that was eventually given to me, but I had friends who were not allowed to play certain albums on their parents’ stereos or even watch MTV, so sneaking around to watch the video for say, The Stray Cats’ “Runaway Boys” (which made my friend’s mom “nervous”) was sometimes an issue.

Until I was 17 years old, I didn’t have a job, so the only allowance I received was from doing stuff like housework or helping my mom. From age 12 to 16, we lived with my Grandma Nutzie, who spoiled me and would not only sometimes give me the $8 it cost to buy albums (from her tip money or football pool winnings), she would sometimes take a taxi to the mall on her way to work and buy them for me. The hilarity that surely ensued when my silver-haired, polyester-clad grandma asked the surly, eyeliner-wearing sales clerk for a copy of Adam and the Ants’ Kings of the Wild Frontier is something which I wish I had documented on video.

Sometimes my friends would let me borrow their tapes of whatever album we were into at the time to play on my Walkman. I received a Walkman for my 11th birthday and the first tape I played on it was the Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage album. I was a huge fan of the song “Gypsy” as well as its accompanying video. At the time we didn’t have MTV yet, but my grandma did, so I can remember spending many weekends watching the channel at her house. This was how I found out about Split Enz, who was the first band I liked on my own, meaning without the influence of my parents, because even my mom liked Rick Springfield.

I don’t remember how I found out about Adam Ant, who took over the #1 spot not long afterwards. I do remember that my friend Michelle had tapes of Prince Charming and Kings of the Wild Frontier and she would let me borrow them sometimes on the weekends. I distinctly recall listening to both at the bowling alley where my grandma worked. I would go there on Friday nights to listen to my Walkman and play video games. This was the highlight of my life for at least a year.

Another highlight was going to the Mall. I would often go to Lakeside Mall on Saturdays and spend about six hours there, looking at records, clothes, and watching out for cute boys, especially if they looked like they might have been British or into Duran Duran. (There was another mall in the suburbs called Clearview, but it was lame and didn’t have any good clothing or record stores.) These mall trips would only take place if my mom would consent and if I went with a friend whose mom would also consent and if we could get a ride. So allowance money or money from Grandma Nutzie had to be saved up to buy albums and cool clothes from Stuart’s, Merry-Go-Round, or Express, the latter of which was the newest, hippest store in the suburbs.

On very rare occasions, I was granted the opportunity to go to the French Quarter and look at the indie/import record stores there or peruse band t-shirts at Bongo. These were always way out of my price range. The only other way to get shirts was in the classifieds in the back of magazines, but these were usually from the U.K. or L.A. and getting a money order was not feasible when I was in junior high or high school. And then there were the band pins.

Some of the record shops at the mall (Smith’s and Sound Shop) had band pins, but they didn’t have the greatest selection. If you wanted a better calibre of pins, you’d have to find a way to Warehouse Records and Tapes on Veterans Boulevard, which carried super-forbidden stuff like patches of marijuana leaves and such (not that I totally understood what that was in junior high).

Another way of getting music to listen to was the radio. This was fine when I was into more mainstream stuff like Madonna, but Japan was not played on B-97 FM. (Although when the mainstream radio stations got wise to the burgeoning popularity of “progressive music,” they would play it for a couple of hours on Sunday evenings around 6 p.m.). When I discovered college radio, via Tulane University’s WTUL, in the summer of 1984, it was like the Second Coming of Christ.

These were bands that I had only read about or heard older kids discussing. Hardcore music was big at that time, so I went through a phase of being into Black Flag and other such bands. There was a WTUL show called Techno 2000 that played synth-pop New Wave on Tuesday nights – this was how I got into Gary Numan. And then there were the regular DJs (who would play Foetus, Tones on Tail, and the Cocteau Twins) and the “New Music Show” on Tuesday afternoons. I basically organized my homework time and weekend chores around these radio shows.

This was the process: I would listen to each song and if it seemed cool, I would start recording. Then, I would write down some key lyric about it so I could remember the order when the DJ listed all the songs he or she played at the end of a set. If I didn’t like the song, I would either not record it or stop recording it and carefully rewind to the end of the previous song so as not to cut off any of it. Then I’d have to wait for the DJ to come on and try to extrapolate which songs I had actually taped from the list.

Many of these DJs were dingbats or stoned, so they frequently would play about 15 songs in a row and then forget one when they read through the list of what they played or worse, mispronounce the band’s name or list the wrong song name. And there was no way to find out what the real name was! There are songs I have on old tapes for which I still do not know the band or the song title. The elaborate procedure for this taping system was not immune from my own mistakes, either. Once I had spent an hour taping stuff off the radio only to find out I’d accidentally taped over some Japan song. I was crushed.

Another drawback to taping music from the radio was getting my mom to give me allowance money to buy blank tapes. I still have tapes of WTUL music that I taped over store-bought cassettes that I was sick of hearing (like some Rod Stewart tape I got for my 12th birthday and Barry Manilow Live!). There was nothing worse in my little teenaged world than hearing some amazing DJ set on WTUL and not having an available tape.

Around this time I also discovered magazines like Star Hits. I had already been reading Creem and Circus for a year or two. Star Hits had a section for Pen Pals, so around age 15, I became pen pals with a few people around the country. At the time, there were these little friendship books that people made and mailed to their pen pals. You’d put your name and address on the cover – of course, your real name was not interesting enough, so you’d have to adopt a pseudonym. Mine was “Charlotte Sometimes” because I was into The Cure at this point. Then you’d list all your favourite bands or whatever stuff you were into, but you had to do it artistically. I was fond of drawing paisley patterns and Ankh symbols. Then you’d mail it to your pen pal and they would mail it to their pen pal and so on and so on, until all the pages were filled up and then it would get returned to you.

I remember one of my pen pals lived in Arizona and was named “Debbie Death.” She was super nice and sent me tons of tapes of albums by The Cure and Cocteau Twins. Another girl, whose name I can’t recall, lived in Eugene, OR. Then there was Paula (I can’t remember where she lived) who was a huge fan of The Church.

Since I wasn’t old enough to drive and my friends from school didn’t live that close, talking on the phone was a major concern for me. I would happily spend four hours at a time on the phone with either one of my two friends. My mother had other ideas about this hobby on school nights because of that pesky thing known as homework and the fact that we didn’t have Call Waiting at the time. Friday and Saturday nights were usually spent in front of MTV and on the phone, if my mom or my friends’ parents weren’t open to a sleepover. If I got into trouble and phone privileges were withheld, it meant that I had to wait until the next day, possibly even during recess, to share my latest squeeing about Adam Ant or John Taylor with my friends.

The importance of friends at this time in my life cannot be overstated. I had few and was never able to master the strategies of making more. I was not popular in grade school (or junior high), although I was an excellent student. I was too bourgeois, goofy, geeky, or weird to be friendly with the rich girls at my private school who were spoiled, privileged, and cruel to me. Since team sports were a huge deal and I was not good at them that became yet another black mark against me. Although I’d been in dance classes since age three, I didn’t learn how to ride a bike or swim until I was nearly ten years old so you can imagine the disdain I was subjected to from all of my peers and classmates.

Music was my thing. It belonged to me and no one else could claim it. The music I listened to seemed like the answer to all the times I questioned why I didn’t fit in or why I had few friends. It was the solution to all the lonely days spent making up plays with my dolls as the actors, all the ersatz radio shows I’d created adopting fake British accents. These bands were obviously misfits who didn’t fit in, either; why else would these boys wear make-up and strange clothing? If being weird was going to be something I was stuck with, then I was going to make damn sure I milked it for all it was worth. If the popular kids listened to music on the radio, then I was going to listen to music I saw on MTV.

Another thing that became vital to the development of my individuality was fashion. Although I actually received a subscription to Vogue for my birthday from my great-aunt, I was also into the whole post-Punk/New Wave/Early Goth look of the time: lots of black, berets, brooches, thrift store clothes, etc. I started drawing my own fashion ideas into a big spiral sketchbook and was convinced I would grow up to be a designer. I still have these sketches and if I ever get access to a scanner, I’ll post some images of the more ludicrous designs I created.

So what’s the point of all this nostalgic navel-gazing? I suppose it is the fact that it truly blows my mind that people under the ages of 25 or 30 did not have the experiences I did with regards to access to pop culture, specifically as it relates to music. The rapid development of shared information and media technology in the last twenty years, or even the last decade, is well on its way to erasing the need for any of the methods I used to gain access to music. If you factor in the co-opting of “alternative” music and fashion by the mainstream media factories, then the process of nullification is complete.

At present, teens and twenty-somethings can log on to the Internet to find out about a band, listen to them online, download their song, and then play it on their MP3 players or cell phones. Furthermore, they can order the CDs from Amazon and have them delivered to their homes. If they are not yet 18 or their parents won’t order stuff for them, they can just borrow their friends’ CDs and burn them on their computers (or trade MP3s via email). Videos can be watched and downloaded from websites. One can purchase band pins and t-shirts at stores in the mall or just order them from almost anywhere online (including Ebay) using Pay Pal. And of course, high schoolers without driver’s licenses can talk to their friends on their cell phones or via Instant Messaging (though I am aware that parents restrict these activities for the same reason my mom didn’t let me talk on the phone for four hours at a time).

There is an ad campaign currently running on television regarding some cosmetic cream. The ad is predicated on the belief that one will not be able to guess the age of the woman in the commercial because the product makes her look so young. “Did I wear bellbottoms in high school,” she queries, “Or penny loafers?” Although the ad is presumably trying to play up the difference between the 70s and 80s, such fashion questions are irrelevant.

Postmodernism has such a stranglehold on pop culture that these timelines have been rendered obsolete. Bellbottoms made a comeback in the 90s and could easily have been worn by kids who graduated from high school before this current millennium. The influx of commercial jingles utilizing or amending songs from the 80s (The Cure, The Pixies, The The, Madness, just to name a few) and the ubiquity of clip shows on VH1 has removed the signifiers from songs that were once a badge of honour for outcasts like me. When I see some young guy wearing a Duran Duran t-shirt he got from Ebay or Hot Topic because the 80s are hip now, I feel like I’ve been robbed.

It’s not just that I don’t like being a demographic; it’s that almost everything that shaped me as a person has been commodified. Nearly everything that essentially saved me from feeling like I was the loser the popular kids disliked has been destroyed. The bands I still listen to and care about, nearly twenty years later, are not mine anymore. I know that postmodernism, and its spawn, pastiche, are here to stay, but I never said I liked them.

I want my nostalgia back.