Anthony DeCurtis

The Eighties

In November of 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as president of the United States. A little more than a month later, on 8 December, John Lennon was shot to death outside his apartment building in New York City. Each of those events had its own all-too-real causes and consequences. But each has also come to bear the weight of symbol; each is a lens through which the mood and the manners of the 1980s, the cultural climate of the decade that followed, may be read.

Some say the 1960s died at Altamont; others say the 1960s died at Kent State. But whatever vestige of 1960s-style visionary thinking and progressive politics managed to survive the 1970s—when, after all, the Watergate revelations and Nixon's resignation at least partly vindicated 1960s radicalism and inspired a brief resurgence of idealism among the young—who can deny that the election of Ronald Reagan proved to be the fatal blow to the 1960s dream? Even the liberal values of the Great Society, which were little more than an extension of the civilizing efforts of FDR's New Deal, were anathema to Reagan—let alone the wild utopian urges that were meant to transport us to the Gates of Eden, or the road of counterculture excess that would lead us to the Palace of Wisdom.

The generous collective impulses of the 1960s may ultimately have yielded to the Me Decade hedonism of the 1970s. But who knew that the next stop would be the pinched privatism, the smug selfishness, the glib pragmatism, the grim status consciousness, the greed masking as taste, the brutal superficiality of the 1980s? Who knew that the hung over sybarites of the Me Decade would transform, as if in the course of a nationwide Night of the Living Dead, into the desperately sober workaholics of the Gimme Decade?

Could there possibly have been a place for the likes of John Lennon in such a world? The point is not that Lennon was a saint, too good to live among the gleefully solvent sinners of the 1980s. It's just that he was too ungovernable, too unlikely to play by the rules, too interested in the margins to succumb to the savage mainstreaming of the last decade. The willful experimentalism, loopy romanticism, and smiling politics that Lennon represented—this was a man, you will recall, who believed that bed-ins and planting acorns could bring about world peace—are not virtues that would have carried much weight in an era during which greed was the ultimate good.

The characteristics that define the personality of Lennon's assassin, Mark David Chapman—an obsession with Lennon's media image to the point of obliterating the reality of Lennon the person, a worship of Lennon's power and celebrity so intense that it shaded into violence and hatred, a need to destroy the ideal he could not himself attain—are far more central to an understanding of the past decade.

Like the killings at Kent State, Lennon's death struck at the very souls of a generation and made idealism seem senseless, even dangerous. The vacuum left in those dead souls was filled in the 1970s with a craving for pleasure that could be kindled in a moment and extinguished just as quickly, pleasure not as a means of self-discovery—not even to be enjoyed for its own delicious sake—but as a distraction from numbness, a way to feel something, however briefly. Money and possessions—things that could be counted, measured, and used and that, for those reasons, provided the illusion of certainty—filled the vacuum in the 1980s. That so many of the people who wept and lit candles to mourn John Lennon's death eventually fell into step with the unforgiving individualism of the Age of Reagan is only one of the innumerable contradictions of the decade.

Musically, the 1980s got off to an unsteady start indeed. The punk explosion of the late 1970s had succeeded in stalling the alienating superstar juggernaut that had defined the earlier years of that decade, but punk itself became too self-infatuated and failed to gain much of a popular audience. Progressive artists like Talking Heads and Elvis Costello found a niche, but many of their contemporaries had either burned out or simply fallen by the wayside. In the early years of the decade, the economy was poor, video games—a technological harbinger of the very real war games to come—had seized the imagination of the young, and record sales were down significantly. It hardly seemed as if music mattered at all.

Then an event occurred that would energize the music scene once again and set in motion all the forces that would go on to shape the popular culture of the 1980s. On 16 May 1983, before a viewership of nearly fifty million people, Michael Jackson performed his Number 1 single "Billie Jean" on Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever, the television special that commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Motown Records. After that, for better or worse, nothing was the same.

To that point, Michael Jackson's Thriller, which had been released on 1 December 1982 and had hit Number 1 during Christmas week, seemed as if it were going to be a successful record in the manner of Off the Wall, Jackson's fine previous solo album, which was released in 1979 and had sold more than six million copies. But Jackson's electrifying performance of "Billie Jean" sent fans streaming into record stores, where they often purchased another album or two before leaving, giving the music business a much-needed economic shot in the arm. Thriller would go on to sell some forty million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling album in history, but its significance is far greater than even this astonishing number would indicate.

It must be remembered that Jackson's appearance on the Motown special was not exclusively, or even primarily, a musical performance. Jackson lip-synced to a recorded track—the better to execute his breathtaking dance steps, including the mind-boggling Moonwalk—and there were no musicians onstage even to create the illusion that a band was playing. For imagery, atmosphere, costuming, and choreography, Jackson drew on the video he had made for "Billie Jean"—a prescient strategy that would go on to become conventional wisdom for artists like Madonna, Paula Abdul, Jackson's sister Janet, and a host of other acts in the coming years. In a decade in which visuals meant as much as music, and live performance...