“A left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure” as Wendy Brown put it: “whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing” (1999: 26). It would be easy for such music to be morbid, an instance of left melancholia. A time when reality was different when the imaginary was different: unbounded affirmative utopian. But this article focuses on music that looked back – as against the 80s’ perennial ‘now’ (“Don’t look back, you can never look back”) – and looked back to the time within living memory when things were different: the 60s. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1984 ‘Two Tribes’ (UK 1) is one example 1982’s ‘Wham Rap’ (UK 8) another. But less obvious – and the focus of this article – is music that countered the glossy 1980s where it lived and loved music that inhabited its processed drums, synthesizer swashes and aspirational choruses. Such music confronts the 80s as dystopia. This montage also has a soundtrack, most obviously in a more monochrome, stripped-down anti-80s aesthetic (see: Billy Bragg, The Smiths, REM’s Document, Springsteen’s Nebraska, John Mellencamp Public Enemy). Or had it? Because for leftists there was and is a different 80s, where a montage might run in grainy news-stock from the Patco strike to 81 to late 80s Act Up activism, from the UK’s ’81 countrywide riots to the miner’s strike of 84-5. Hippyphobia was a thing: style, materialism and individualism ruled: the counterculture had been countered. The counterculture – the essence of the collective of the utopian – had never seemed so dowdy, so naive or just downright dead as it did in the 80s. In both song and drama’s curiously depopulated heaven, the social has been entirely voided (“nobody on the road, nobody on the beach”): the nightclubs are a spectacle of sociality – everyone is actually alone, (“dancing all by myself”).
The episode demonstrates how the 80s consumed the previous ‘meaning’ of California as acme of the counterculture.
With California the alma mater of right-wing utopianism, via Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan in the 60s, California-set San Junipero’s choice of Belinda Carlisle’s 80s hit ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’ as its closing theme offers the perfect processed, high-gloss anthem for a marketplace utopia that is all style, cars, sex and sunshine. And the same is true of book and film of Bonfire of the Vanities and even American Psycho. For all both Wall Street and Wolf of Wall Street’s acknowledgement of 80s’ corruption, cruelty and volatility, it is the class-A rush of acquisition, consumption and social contract-busting that stays with the viewer. We don’t often speak of right-wing utopianism – more of its “cold stream” realism – but the enduring fantasies of the 80s exemplified just that.
Even 80s revisits like Wolf of Wall Street and Black Mirror’s San Junipero don’t go far from the format. Elmo’s Fire, and Desperately Seeking Susan: a sequence of wet-gel, shoulder pads and designer suits, backed by bombastically upbeat music. In the perma-retro that constitutes contemporary life, the 80s is a montage from Wall Street, St. ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’: the Idea of the 80s