80s music

I used to think “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” was just the song that played while Judd Nelson raised his fist. A very 1985 sentence. Probably the sort of sentence that should come with a denim jacket.

But listen again. The song is doing something more interesting than decorating the final shot of The Breakfast Club. It is asking a group of people who have been reduced to labels to remember one another as whole human beings.

The song was written for the movie by producer Keith Forsey and guitarist Steve Schiff. Simple Minds initially declined to record it because the band wanted to make its own material. Then Forsey came to meet them, and the story took a turn familiar to anyone who has ever been persuaded by a conversation over a drink: the Scots went to the pub with him, liked him, and reconsidered. The Guardian’s account of how the song was made captures that lovely bit of creative resistance giving way to human connection.

The result became Simple Minds’ biggest North American hit, reaching No. 1 in the United States and Canada. In Britain, it reached No. 7, according to Official Charts. Numbers are useful here, not because a chart position tells us whether a song is good, but because it shows how widely this particular plea traveled.

And the plea matters because the film understood something about formation. The five students in detention are introduced as types: the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, and the criminal. Then the locked room gets uncomfortable. They confess things. They listen badly, then better. The categories do not vanish, exactly. They become too small.

That is why the Library of Congress added The Breakfast Club to the National Film Registry in 2016, naming it among films of cultural, historic, or aesthetic importance. The announcement called it a seminal coming-of-age drama. “Seminal” can sound like a museum label, but the point is simple: a movie about teenagers in a Saturday detention room kept giving later generations a vocabulary for feeling mis-seen.

Formation often begins when someone refuses the label that has been handed to him. Not with a grand reinvention. With the smaller courage of saying, “That is part of me, but it is not all of me.”

What happened? A film song became an anthem. What did it mean? A generation heard its private ache turned into a public chorus. What can I carry forward? When I am tempted to summarize someone quickly — difficult, lazy, successful, dramatic — I can leave room for the locked-room conversation I have not heard yet.

And maybe, before the day ends, I can ask one person a better question than “How’s it going?” Maybe: “What part of you have I forgotten to notice?”

I have a theory about 1980s one-hit wonders: they are where the decade’s hairspray occasionally lost an argument with the human heart.

You know the songs. The synth starts. The drum machine puts on its shoulder pads. Somebody in the room says, “Oh, I remember this,” and suddenly we are all back in a car we no longer own, wearing a jacket we should not have bought.

The joke is that these songs were disposable. One big single, then the cultural trapdoor. But listen again and a surprising amount of sincerity is still down there, humming beneath the gated reverb.

Take Nena’s “99 Luftballons.” It arrived as bright, bouncy new wave, the sort of tune that could make geopolitical dread sound almost danceable. Yet Deutsche Welle’s history of the song explains the grim little engine underneath: balloons appear on radar as possible enemy objects, both sides assume the worst, and fear escalates toward nuclear war. The song reached No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard chart. That is an astonishing amount of public attention for a warning about how quickly panic can dress itself up as patriotism.

Or “The Safety Dance,” which I once assumed was about safe sex, because the 1980s gave us many mysteries and very few instruction manuals. Ivan Doroschuk told Time Out that the song came from being kicked out of clubs for pogoing. The message was simpler and sweeter: you can dance if you want to. You do not have to borrow the crowd’s rhythm to prove you belong.

Then there is ’Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry,” a song that could have been reduced to a stylish new-wave chorus and an excellent haircut. Instead, it carried a painful story. Stereogum’s interview with Aimee Mann describes it as a harrowing account of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship. The song was a top-10 hit, but its real staying power comes from the way the polished surface lets a frightened voice remain audible.

Maybe that is the unexpected sincerity. These songs were not always “deep” in the way a professor with elbow patches means deep. They were simply specific. A balloon. A bouncer. A person being told to hush. Small details, carrying larger fears and hopes.

That is how formation often works, too. Not through a grand speech, but through repeated little signals: the song we keep playing, the boundary we finally name, the joke that stops being funny because we have started hearing the hurt inside it. Culture forms us by giving feelings a shape we can recognize.

What happened? A glossy decade made room for strange, earnest songs. What did it mean? Sincerity can hide inside bright packaging without becoming less sincere. What can I carry forward? Before dismissing the old song, the old story, or the old version of myself as cheesy, listen one more time. There may be a small human voice in there, still asking to be heard.

ravensquall

The Song That Asked a Generation Not to Disappear

The Tender Little Heart Inside a One-Hit Wonder