The 80’s. A momumental shit stain on the rear end of the 20th century. A skid-mark on the face of this beautiful world we live in. A coke fuelled, Reagonomic nightmare which most of us are happy to forget. Except for those too young to remember just how bloody awful it was the first time around. We have had to suffer something of a revival of the culture recently. Again, instigated by those too young to remember those bleak smoggy days rife with insider-trading and Maggie fucking Thatcher.
Most of the music, most of the fashion and most of the culture would be best forgotten, and perhaps not even just forgotten, but I would go so far as to say deliberately wiped from history. Like Bob Dylan’s Christian albums or East 17, there are some things which are best left to decay naturally until they are little more than a footnote in music magazines, there only to give a context to all the better things which have come since. It was a grim time where everybody wore eye-liner, shoulder pads and asymmetry ruled in fashion. Lest we forget, Calvin Harris documented the trials of the era in his track, “Acceptable in the 80’s.”
It has been claimed by Thatcher Bush, a DJ who spins only what he refers to as “crowd pleasers”, that if you play “Acceptable in the 80’s” backwards, a strange thing occurs. You can hear the ghost of John Lennon telling you to “Fuck off back to the shop to get a better record.” We interviewed Thatcher today in an attempt to discern the truth.
“I was alone in my basement apartment in East Barnstable, a borough of Liverpuddle,” he said. “I was planning a set for a 30th birthday party, gathering all the hits, you know the ones: Rock the Boat, Crocodile Rock, Rock Around the Clock. You know, stuff that rocks. I had had a request from the birthday girl for some modern classics too, so I was queueing up Calvin Harris’ ‘Acceptable in the 80’s’, on vinyl,” he said with a knowing look. A look that knew he couldn’t possibly be any cooler. Except, of course, that he could.
“I was spinning it back to cue it, when the most frightening thing happened..” It was at this point that Thatcher began to appear visibly shaken. “I heard… I heard John Lennon’s voice. It told me to go buy better records. It was definitely him. I would know. I used to be a Beatles fan before I got into good music, like Soft Cell and Depeche Mode.”
We asked him if he could show us, and sure enough, amidst the warped noise, there was John Winston Lennon himself decrying Calvin Harris.
In an effort to ascertain how this happened, we contacted Tipper Gore, the once long suffering wife of Al Gore. Tipper Gore was made famous by her involvement with the now infamous ‘Parent’s Music Resource Centre”, which fought against subliminal messages in music. She was made infamous by the fact that her name sounds like an instruction in a horror movie. (Tipper Gore? No thanks, I can do without tipping her gore, thanks.)
She was also the person responsible for the “Parental Advisory” stickers which are now commonplace, and are found on everything from Hiphop CDs to ‘The Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince’s’ face, being the explicit little purple sex-midget that he is.
We quizzed Tipper Gore on how she planned to proceed and she told us that she would make every effort to have the record banned, as she would with any record that contained subliminal messages. When asked why she took this crusade so seriously, she replied, “Have you heard my ex-husband speak?! He’d bore you to death in a matter of seconds. I took up this fight so as to not lapse into chronic boredom.” It was at this point that this reporter lapsed into said chronic boredom, due to the fact that it was Tipper Gore before us talking. And talking. And talking…
We contacted Calvin Harris soon after and asked him if the message had been deliberately placed in “Acceptable in the 80’s”. He claimed to have no prior knowledge of the existence of the message, and threatened to have David Guetta sue us, a threat which, of course, we did not take seriously in the least. Because David Guetta suffers with a debilitating Irony Deficiency. And that would hold up in any court.
So we headed back to the Wunderground bunker, which towers above Dublin City like a monument to sanity and reason in this odd and befuddled world, and got to thinking. It is no coincidence that both Bob Marley and John Lennon died at the beginning of the 80’s, our modern dark ages. All we can do is hope that the memory of the 1980’s evaporates into the air like the bad fart that it is, and does not linger. Except, perhaps, only the memory of how truly awful it was. Lest we forget..
