The Eighties Never Dies

Don't ask me about contemporary music. I simply have no clue. You can pretty much say that as far as musical taste goes, mine never went further than 2003. I'm all for 90's music--Brit pop, lousy boybands, alternative rock, that sort of thing. I have zero interest in the R n' B scene that has dominated the music industry for these past five years or so.

While we're talking about music, nowadays I often find myself drift back to the 80's period. New age stuff. Synthesizer and the likes. Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, New Order. You get the idea. As for Duran Duran, I'll have to pass (that's my brother's domain, he's been a big fan of eighties music for a while; he's three years younger than me, by the way). I like The Police, too, but they're an anomaly. Their white reggae isn't really a representative of the era.

Well, I'm not in a band or something. Otherwise, I would've recycled the old thing--the eighties style--and make a new music that I can claim my own. Some Indonesian bands do it, you know. I wonder if their fans--especially the kiddies who were born in the 90's--realize that. The point is, this newfound interest in the eighties isn't mine alone. At least I don't make a fool of myself and take it one step further by putting on blue mascara or perming my hair.

It's not just music, though. The movies get into me, too. I've watched quite a lot of eighties movies on TV. Too bad I watched them when I was too young to understand them thoroughly. The most vivid memory is about being impressed by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom so much that I wanted to become an archeologist afterwards. I'm lucky for having the chance to watch the whole Indiana Jones trilogy recently (prior to the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). As for the more iconic eighties movies like The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo's Fire, and Pretty in Pink, I'm not too lucky. I'd watched them, but they're all just a bunch of blur in my head. Obtaining those movies here in Indonesia is virtually impossible.

One thing that makes me so enthralled by the eighties is this warm and fuzzy feeling that I get upon listening to or reading about or seeing something eighty-ish. Maybe it's because deep down they remind me of the carefree days of my youth, a time when I had nothing to worry about. No need to delve too much into it, though. For the time being, I'm just going to have a taste of the eighties once more.