RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,255
('all is quiet, on New Year's Day')
I awoke cold and quiet, on New
Year's morning, 1984. A lot had
changed for me. In the intervening
years I'd acquired a house (Metuchen,
NJ, 1979), a regular job, with hours
and salary and the rest, and, with
a 13 year old son, a full-blown
family setting. It hadn't taken but
a minute, it seemed, though in
actuality all that had spanned
the last bunch of years - tangled,
strange, and on the move. A music
group, U2, was all over the airwaves
that morning - New Year's Day.
They'd had a nearly perfect song
for the day, and now that it actually
was New Year's Day, the idiotic
rock-music stations played it to
death, in their commercial rituals
of selling equally idiotic kids the
products of America's rotten
commerce.
-
There was nothing special about
that, and it had always been so.
One of the thematic pushes of the
country had always been 'radio,'
when it was newfangled, and later
when it was old-hat. TV had long
ago supplanted any real usefulness
radio may once have had (all those
farmers and Depression families
huddled around their large wooden
console-box radios, listening to
FDR or Father Coughlin rants. That
vast old world had changed anew,
and the only thing that had kept
radio going was the automobile
which, by the 1950's, in so many
ways, had become rolling sex-palaces
for youth and their mobility-factor
radios. No one stayed home, and in
the foul streets they dance, while
from car windows their ersatz
musics blared. That world had all
changed too - now things had
'conscience' and 'relevance' and
without that they were deemed
nothing. My friend Frank had
first brought U2 to my attention.
I actually little cared, but he was
quite enthused by them, calling
me for a listen, saying they were
a good mix of The Who and
some other group I now forget.
With s dollop of Irish Christianity
thrown in - which confused me
because that was so very old-line
and archaic in and of itself. To
mix the two seemed like some sort
of historic betrayals, or at least
a new-world blunder; killing by
its terms Lindisfarne and Eire
too. But, to be expected, nothing
old had, any longer a relevance,
and certainly anything historic
and legendary did not.
-
The world, in all its changing
madness had actually just grown
static. Oddly enough, in BOTH
senses of the word. The noise of
radio-fuzz that is called 'static,'
and the idea of static and stasis,
as meaning fixed, unchanging,
having lost any dynamics. The
idea of driving around in a car
with cum-stained seats (that
only came later, after the old
vinyl-seat interiors had been
changed over to intense fabrics
and seat surfaces, which held
stains but became a boon for
the fabric-cleaner sprays and
applications) became that
version of that day's idea of
merit. Merit badges for the
'Explorer' crowd.
-
Anyway, on the crisp, cold
morning of Jan 1, 1984, yet
another transformation began.
Videos had become another
rash-craze, one to accompany
each song. 'Video killed the
radio star' was a phrase and a
song that had gotten much
currency, and was used as
the opener, the very first song
and video broadcast a few
years earlier by MTV, which
in its beginning years played
nothing but these 'music videos'
in a new form of tight rotation
that was immediately pleasurable
to everyone. And playful, and
ironic, and suggestive, and dour.
Each act worked out its own
persona. The New Year's U2
video that morning kept to its
forceful and determinedly 'dour'
persona quite well, except that,
in fact, with its mix of horses,
snow, longing, sternness, and
some strangely medieval quality
of 'strength' more feminine than
it was masculine, captured that
day, that morning, and that year.
We been to a friend's house for
a very-usual New Year's Eve.
Two small families, not anything
more. I can remember two things,
I think, or as I recall: Listening to
Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders,
singing, from a boombox, their
song 'Brass In Pocket,' or whatever
it was called, and a film we watched;
a movie called 'Freaks' - which was
actually that - life-adventures of
circus freaks, in movie-form, with
plot, climax, and many bizarre
creatures and individuals, almost
to the point of bizarre, other-worldly,
scariness.
-
Arriving home, the way-post-midnight
New Year's Day video welcoming,
for about a half-hour of repeated
play, was 'New Year's Day' ['All
is quiet, on New Year's Day...I want
to be with you, be with you, be with
you, night and day']. At the same
time, it now being 1984, they had
opened the day's playlist with some
post-midnight thing called 'Good
Morning, Mr. Orwell.' All through
my youth the approach of 1984
(Orwell's dystopian novel of the
then-future), was always looming
yet seemed always distant. Now
it was here. Any expectations of
strange things, state-controls and
authoritarianism and enforced
conformity and all the rest was
nowhere to be found, and all my
feared expectations from all those
years before had been unfounded.
Hmmm, had they?
-
And then, just that quick, it was
over, and in but a few years what
once had been a future-expectation
('1984') had come and gone, was
over and done, and was never
mentioned again, and that dread
and looming portentousness a
flop, and all the expectant air
of that old balloon, gone. The
world really was flat.
