The pictures on these pages are taken from my high school yearbook -- one of those idiotic-looking kids is even me, in my senior picture. And we did look idiotic. That's one thing you can count on, probably until we stop having high schools with yearbooks, is that everybody looks idiotic in them twenty years later. And popular kids look just as idiotic as the unpopular kids. In fact, sometimes the nerds and misfits look less idiotic -- because they were out of step with popular fashion of the time. In my yearbook it's 1983-84, and the popular kids had mullets, giant curly hair, "feathered" hair helmets, Dynasty hair, and other bizarre hair choices. In fact, when it comes to hair, the 1980s was one of the most ridiculous decades in all of human history.
The words are intended to be a kind of 1983 pop culture explosion -- short references to commercials, news events, television, and popular music of 1983.
Not movies, for some reason. That just occurred to me now. Maybe it's because, as a high school senior in 1983, I didn't see a lot of movies. The whole home video thing was starting to seriously take off in 1983, but I don't know if my family had a VCR yet. (Although I think we did have an Atari Computer.)
I don't think we had cable TV yet, because when I watched music videos, it was Friday Night Videos. And I did watch it, because, hey, it's not like I had anything else to do on a Friday night.
Ironically, FNV debuted as NBC's answer to MTV, retooled as more of a variety show in 1994 when cable became ubiquitous, and then failed to revive itself in 2001 by eliminating videos entirely. I say "ironically" because I think if, in 2001, they had instead decided to retool as an all-video program they might have been able to once again compete with MTV, which by that point was nothing but The Real World.
Of course, as mentioned in a recent AV Club article, "It's a cliché to complain about MTV not playing music videos anymore. (It's such a cliché that pointing out that it's a cliché is itself a cliché.)"
When MTV debuted, there was all sorts of hand-wringing about how music videos were ruining music, emphasizing image over substance. MTV ensured that stars were flashy video artists like Boy George, Madonna, and Michael Jackson, instead of the quieter, more substantive artists of the 70s. You know, people like David Bowie, who just couldn't compete in the video era.
Still, even when it was starting to be a joke to explain what the "M" in "MTV" even stood for, people continued to make music videos. For the longest time I wondered why. Who would ever see them? What were they for? But now the Internet (which is, incidentally, ruining music) has a thing called YouTube.
So, out of nostalgia for my wasted youth, please watch this delightful Video of The New Orleans BINGO! Show/Preservation Hall Jazz Band covering The Kinks' "Complicated Life", filmed just a few weeks before Katrina.
Oh, and, if you go to the MTV web site, guess what they have there? Music videos.
