“Hung Up,” track one of Madonna's new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, knocks you over the head instantly. Her voice is that familiar mechanical cry, half-woman, half-machine, all sex. The beat is focused and forceful, the melody hooked on one slightly delayed chord change in the chorus -- a calculated swerve that gives the illusion of throwing off the rhythm before veering right back to lock it in, tighter than before. It's classic Madonna, an eccentric, propulsive, atmospheric dance epic up there with “Lucky Star,” "Into the Groove," and "Open Your Heart.”
Those were hits in the years 1983-86: a purposeful reference. Though Confessions evokes the ‘70s in its artwork, its glamorous post-disco groove is Spirit of ‘84, and this album, along with others lately issued, shows how the still-active veterans of that checkered decade are dealing with its legacy.
If you thought the '80s were over and tucked away, a decade-long bad memory, you were wrong. They've returned in the form of nostalgia fodder. In America it's natural -- probably even correct in some crooked way -- that history should pass through cliché several times before it reaches complexity. In the long term, history always subsumes culture: when history is written, 50 years or a century later, an era's cultural manifestations become a way of discerning that history, of painting the big picture. But short-term, the reverse is true. Recent history feeds pop culture, goes into the grinder as another ingredient of the moment, and emerges as history's cartoon double, nostalgia. History can look after itself. But that grinder needs feeding, and recently it's the '80s that have begun oozing out, all chewy and kitschy.
The '80s are a cliché, and the cliché is pretty much accurate. As a Mystery Science Theater 3000 song parody had it, “It's the Eighties / do a lot of coke and vote for Ronald Reagan . . . invest in arbitrage and read Jay McInerney!” Many of us who reached our teens as the decade began feel some bewilderment, alternating with active irritation, that such a thing as ‘80s nostalgia exists -- and not because, like the baby boomers, we hold our history in such exalted esteem. Much the opposite. There were great movies and deathless songs in that decade, heroic gestures and historic movements, but in terms of the national tendency it was a dumb and depressing time: American life as a bullet-headed sitcom, with everyone making room for Daddy Reagan.
Groggy and depleted from anger and change, mainstream America in the '80s grew a ravenous hunger for the obvious, even if that meant going slack in the brain. People were too tired, it seems, to embrace anything new, or desire anything too innovative. There were exceptions -- Roseanne, Annie Lennox, Chuck D, Boy George, other provocateurs in the arenas of race and sex -- but, again, in terms of tendencies, the soft option ruled: Michael Jackson over Prince, E.T. over Blade Runner, Walter Mondale over John Glenn. The 40th president -- true architect of the decade, with Jackson and Steven Spielberg as bricklayers -- remade democratic address as a Hollywood catchphrase, and the once-deadly sin of greed got the best PR in its history.
In the big picture, that was about five minutes ago. Yet here it is: ‘80s nostalgia. VH1's desperately cheesy, mendacious clip-a-thon “I Love the ‘80s” has had a three-season run. New York's top classic-rock station, WCBS, following a national trend, recently shifted to the “Jack” format -- a straight menu of ‘80s pop. Leg-warmers, skinny neckties, and shoved-up jacket sleeves are common in hipper high school lunchrooms. Nick at Nite's never-ending nostalgia rack is stocked with ‘80s comedies. Michael Mann is remaking Miami Vice as a movie.
And here, new product in hand, come three essential beneficiaries of the MTV ‘80s: pop tart emeritus Madonna, waifish warbler Cyndi Lauper, and dewy-eyed Swedish dream-boys a-ha. Though all are inextricably associated with the decade that brought them to prominence, it's to their credit that none is making a brazenly nostalgic move, though each harkens back in some way to the ‘80s work, and therefore begs the questions of how such short-term nostalgia is dealt with, faced up to, gotten around.
Cyndi Lauper, with her thrift-store ensembles and novelty tunes, was pure ‘80s: a cuddly nonconformist whose hits included some of the decade's best and worst. Recently she's returned in maturer form, singing cabaret, and her new album, The Body Acoustic, is interesting for directly addressing an ‘80s past while attempting to grow it up. Lauper restyles her hits in rootsy settings, with neo-traditional arrangements and vocals thick with gravity, slow with serious intentions. Except for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” given a ska treatment and backup from Japanese duo Puffy Ami Yumi, The Body Acoustic emits the purposeful air of a prestige move, a clutch at class. But its rustic approach also has the nice effect of airing out some mildewed remnants (“All Through the Night,” “Time After Time”); and if the great masturbation metaphor “She Bop” doesn't quite work as bizarro folk, lesser-known songs like “Water's Edge” and “Above the Clouds” (with Jeff Beck on guitar) at least look good in designer denim.
Still, the suspicion lingers that all this songcraft and crystalline Americana would not be half so interesting if applied to songs none of us had heard before and couldn't compare to earlier, poppier versions. Lauper is not exactly exploiting ‘80s nostalgia, but neither is she transcending it. The Body Acoustic is touching and well-wrought, but without its ‘80s past to provide comparative flavor and imaginative counterpoint, it's merely a middle-aged reach for warmth and niceness, hearth and knitting -- decay disguised as domesticity. Its truth is in the Top 40; its falseness comes straight from the Sundance catalogue.
a-ha, meanwhile, evade a charge of nostalgia by simply ignoring the passage of time. Judging from their latest, Analogue, the Nordic trio have been cryogenically preserved since 1985 and their big hit, “Take on Me.” Their synth-based, string-dressed musical settings are fundamentally unchanged; their voices sound 10 minutes older. That's a relief, inasmuch as no one cares to see a-ha all serious and short-haired, like fellow ‘80s refugees Duran Duran or Bon Jovi. And musically, cold storage suits them. Their unique talent was for mounting a song, not wrenching it out; for performing emotions, not living them.
As their recent compilation The Singles 1984/2004 showed, that meant a-ha were capable of the kind of ditsy pop trifles that make you hate being alive, and that the ‘80s crawled with. But it also meant that when the performance came together and the elements clicked, a-ha could achieve real sweep, the sound of noble longing -- and the ‘80s were peculiarly rich, as well, with such triumphs of emotional bombast. Analogue has plenty of both, finally succeeding on grand plays like “The Fine Blue Line,” “Cosy Prisons,” and “Halfway through the Tour.” But good or bad, a-ha are oddly compelling to hear 20 years past their moment, because they still sound like the ‘80s are all around them. Whatever they are, they're not a nostalgia act: in their freeze-dried, zip-locked world, time stopped long ago.
And then there's Madonna. One thing Confessions on a Dance Floor throws into relief, whatever its unique virtues among her albums (good but not great, stellar but not standout), is the size of Madonna's achievement in staying so long at or near pop's center. She can musically and iconically exploit whatever nostalgia we're currently bingeing on while making music that, in both its inherent energy and its popular reception, always seems forward-moving and horizon-gazing. To those of us who grew up in the '80s, she's a link to that receding unit of time, a past that is presently undergoing its inevitable rebirth as kitsch and becoming fair play for the fancies and falsifications of a nostalgia-hungry media complex. But for those much younger, she's a key player on today's scene, if only by lineage -- virgin mother to Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Shakira, the Veronicas, and a dozen others, and therefore a definer of now-ness for millions of teenagers who might consider it a strike against Madonna if they thought too long about her having first risen from the prehistoric craters of the early '80s.
Madonna will always evoke that decade, because she'd never have succeeded as she did without MTV, Live Aid, and an atmosphere combining moral conservatism and Reagan materialism. But she has transcended her decade of origin as Lauper, a-ha, and most of the other ‘80s graduates have not. Fail though she may -- as movie star, children's-book author, sexualizer of world religions -- Madonna is peerless in her sustained ability to produce another rabbit, another hairstyle, another hit, and again make herself attractive to millions. That's quite different from making people care about her personally; but for someone entering her third decade as an icon, staying clear of the nostalgia grinder is all that need matter.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Harvard). His essay “Cruising a Road to Nowhere: Mechanics and Mysteries of the Pop Moment” is in the current issue of the journal Popular Music. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
