So there’s protest music built of defiance (think Ohio) and there’s protest music made of resignation.
A powerlessness that feels more like a slow motion lament that can’t help do much more than play in the perverse humor of the dire situation.
If you weren’t around in the early 1980s, it’s really hard to understand what happens when
Doom impends for so long that it transcends
Given and
Afterthought and becomes part of The Routine.
At the time, the Constant Saber Rattling and specter of Immediate Worldwide Nuclear Ruin became that kind of present that soaks itself into the atmosphere so that even things that aren’t about it have no choice but to be at least a little about it.
Living next to an Air Force base (literal ground zero) in Tornadoland meant you had no shortage of contrails and siren tests to test your nerve. Is that contrail arcing too much? It’s not the third Saturday is it? That siren could be curtains for all of us.
At times the anxiety would make you tense if a tv station took too long between commercials. You’d grab the remote and start channel flipping for either relief or confirmation.
The Nuclear End Of It All figured in all too frequent nightmares stoked on by apocalyptic flicks like The Day After (1983),
the BBC’s Threads (1984) (never ever ever watch Threads if you plan on sleeping again),
and it had no choice but to seep into the music as well.
99 Luftballons (1983) made it playful,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La4Dcd1aUcE
Two Tribes (1984) made it disco,
and Men At Work’s It’s A Mistake (1983) made it real on a level that stung deeper by being so personal to how we were all experiencing it: A languid shrug of gallows resignation. Our fate was predestined and well out of our hands and we can’t even really do much with it but shake our heads at the sad absurdity and just kind of drag on.
It’s a terrific song and probably one of their best, so none of that is a critique of the art itself.
In fact, it’s to its credit that this is not a Change the World song.
It lists along in the powerlessness of a horrific situation and through that captures a terribly specific flavor of hopelessness that I/we haven’t felt since 1983.
—jason malmberg
Flommist Jason Malmberg is a simple man who believes in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art sometimes. Copyright © 2018 Jason Malmberg.
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