The ‘80s that never were
There seems to be a decade, a vast, spacious one, encompassing seemingly more than just mere ten years of human time. A decade that mostly never existed, yet we all seem to long for it, remember it fondly and feel nostalgic about it. The vaporwave decade of the ’80s that never was.
We all know this feeling. You just kick back, relax, watch a tv series. There’s the “He-man and the Masters of the Universe” blaring on an old TV screen in the room of the teenage protagonist. Even the good girl has some Nintendo poster up on her wall. All the kids ride their bikes at dusk for the whole summer that seems to last for like six months straight on end. The sun sets over the distant mountain summits and occasional rain is always like a tropical torrent.
We were there, we lived this life. We rode at the back of the bus late in the evening, played football on the dirt road only illuminated with a single lamppost casting an eerie sodium yellow light. We watched “Miami Vice”, loved Jennifer Connely, and listened to a mixture of Queen, Tracy Chapman, and Cindi Lauper.
The days were long and hot, sweaty in the inner city and downtown all the same. The vending machines would satisfy our thirst with a loud thud of soda cans falling from 1.5 meters. We’d ride the subway train without end, disappearing from the tissue of the city to pop up someplace else, hunching a worn-out copy of a Batman monthly or an oversized X-Men special.
We’d steal smiles and those ridiculous first pecks on the cheek by a bonfire lit on the edge of a swampy forest or on an empty plot in the middle of a suburban settlement, while a tape player would blare the latest Sinead O’Connor hit single alternating it with Yuriy Shatunov. And the next day we’d chase each other across the local supermarket, climb the steam pipeline, and swing on a rope pilfered from an abandoned workshop and fastened across the railway bridge.
Oh, like hell, we were there and we did all those magnificent, magenta-tinted things, boys and girls of the eighties, the last wave of the GenX, still kids enough to despise the idea we might someday be treacherously turned into suited up yuppies on scooters. We rode those bikes, watched all the goddamned shows, we should never forget the taste of cola on a hot afternoon and the smell of tar on the main street of the god-forsaken small town we grew up in.
Except all this is just a teal and purple story we tell ourselves in our minds, our movies, our books, comics, and in our online podcast shows. Those of us who grew up in the US or maybe Western Germany or in the UK may have more of that included in our childhood and teenage years. Those who grew in the East Bloc like me, well, we did have the He-man cartoon, and we did have Coca-Cola (even though orangade was far more widespread and approved by the state, unlike the other beverage ridiculed in poetry and tv). There were little Nintendo in our lives, but we did have the Pegasus system with bootleg cartridges and we did have the soviet copies of Game & Watch handhelds. Not really big arcades in shopping malls, but we did have roadshow funfairs that did have Donkey Kong machines.
What we did was surely riding our bikes till our asses and feet were sore. This was a question of not dying of boredom. Starting a game on an 8-bit Atari took something like 20–25 minutes and there were two TV channels that aired maybe up to one hour of children show total a day on average (with most of it on weekends anyway). We wandered the forests, plundered abandoned houses and swam in the river that was not believed to be clean already back then.
We did listen to tapes, most of those copies of copies, because good music was not that easily accessible. The largest music shop in Warsaw at the beginning of the ’90s changed that drastically, offering “official” tapes for the full price and the ability to buy a clean tape and copy it for half price.
We did all sorts of things. We had posters on our wall, transistor radios and movie crushes. It is yet still largely a time so colourful because it is so long gone.
“I envy you” — declares my younger, a boy of 11. Tender age and heavily influenced by his geek dad. He’s not exactly sure if he likes “Akira” better or maybe “Last action hero” but also cherishes Arnold’s performances from “Commando” and “Terminator” greatly. He has a gaming pc, but also a Switch and Nintendo DS (bought the latter two with his own money, saving for like literally a few years). He’s got posters, action figures, 3D printed figures, runs his own twitch and Instagram and he’s longing.
“Boy” — say I — “You got yourselves much better eighties here and now than I ever had! I would not even dare to dream things you have now are possible to exist!”
“Dam right you didn't. Hence you never missed them” — that’s one slightly bitter and slightly ironic young chap. He’s right in most respects. We didn’t have all that. We didn’t really have the ’80s we now like to tell ourselves we remember. It is like the joke about PC Master Race being superior.
“A PC is far superior to a console.”
“Is your PC superior?”
What we did have and what made the ’80s of our childhood so great were us, ourselves. We were self-sustained little universes struggling to have as much fun in those totally fucked times the decade before the fall of the East Bloc was in Poland we just didn’t really care.
We may not have had all the stuff we grin to while watching “Stranger Things” or even “E.T.” for that matter, but we had ourselves. We didn’t have the internet to play Minecraft together over a headset so we had to meet in person.
The little disenchanted chap is not amused.
“So, you talked to your friends about the movie we saw last night?”
“Dad, George is the only one in the whole class to even know who Schwarzenegger is. There’s no point in even trying.”
Let us have the vaporware eighties for now. Let us make movies and TV series and write books and stories and articles and let us ride our “second” cars with broken AC and windshields all the way down and INXS blaring loud and remember the time we used to fall asleep on the back seat of a wheezing Fiat 125p.
Still a better love story than the 21st century. At least for us, the middle-aged guys who are in desperate need of a time machine. The young, disenchanted, prematurely sardonic folks are having their own, much better eighties right now — the crazy twenties. Let them know — sometimes — we envy them some. It will make them much good.
