I thought about this
for a while -- about form and content, and how Freudian literary critique
identifies a need for artists to destroy their precursors and how
in so doing they just give their predecessors new life, and how the
naive are always insisting that their own naivete is a virtue -- and
then I threw Gold: the Best of Spandau Ballet into the changer.
For me, Spandau Ballet, and not Duran Duran, has always been the torch
that best illuminates the 80’s. Aurally as rich as a chocolate
cherry cheesecake, lyrically as comprehensible to the average speaker
of English as a radio news broadcast in Nahautl, they rule over the
decade like invisible kings. They are not the first people whose names
come to mind when you remember those years of excess and undoing;
they aren’t even the second or third. You think perhaps of Madonna,
or Reagan, or Margaret Thatcher, or Michael Jackson. Perhaps you think
of the faces that graced Andy Warhol’s Interview: Bianca Jagger
as her socialite status reached its zenith, or Keith Haring, or Boy
George. Or you think of the L.A. hair metal scene, or of the Replacements
and Husker Du and R.E.M. when they were young, long-haired Michael
Stipe in sunglasses hunched over his microphone like a self-exiled
poet emerging from a cave in the woods with a cryptic message for
a baffled world. Maybe you think of the cover of the first Smiths
album, whose image dates back to 1969. Maybe you think of the space
shuttle Challenger exploding terribly against a cloudless blue sky.
Maybe you think of Alf.
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