Thinking About Wendell Berry's Leftist Lament (and More)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Wendell Berry’s sprawling, uneven, brilliant, and sometimes frustrating The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice will likely not, I think, be widely remembered after he leaves us as his greatest, most important work. But it is undeniably his longest, and arguably his most ambitious as well. Very late to the party, I have finally read through his wrestling with the entangled ideas of racism, history, patriotism, religion, public discourse, agrarianism, and more, and I’m glad I did. It is a book crammed with insights, thoughts that Berry has, as he makes clear in the book’s introduction, considered and re-considered, written, scratched out, and re-written, over many years. “I am surprised, slowly of course, by the slowness of my mind” he writes as a kind of apologia (p. 5). However, I was surprised as well to have retroactively discovered, long after completing the book, a through-line to his argument, one that mostly ties together most of its nearly 500 pages, despite the many zig-zags and dead-end observations (a few of which probably could have been eliminated or perhaps deserved further integrative reflection of their own) along the way. And surprisingly (or perhaps not), it was a work of Marxist economic history that helped me see it.

In my observation, conservatives who celebrate Wendell Berry's ideas deal with the seemingly leftist elements of his thought—his condemnations of corporate power, finance capitalism, and libertarian individualism most obviously, but his highly selective and somewhat distanced engagement with the traditionalist pre-occupations that define so much of our never-ending culture war is perhaps even more important--in a variety of ways. Some downplay those elements, some appropriate them into a post-liberal framework, and some insist that the localist or distributist character of the agrarian beliefs which he holds aren’t in any substantive sense leftist at all, but rather are actually conservative, properly understood. All of these approaches have their value—though given that Berry never makes, in all this massive book exploring prejudices in America, an explicit Burkean defense of prejudice, I am doubtful how far any of them can go in their attempt to claim these ideas of Berry's as "conservative" in any formal sense. Rather, while The Need to Be Whole will probably never be much read or appreciated by contemporary (and overly statist) socialists, I think his overarching intentions are clearly most at home with anti-capitalist radicals of the left. It is they, after all, who have most consistently lamented the destruction of the commons, and lamented all the divisive consequences which have followed its ruination at the hands of an expansionist capitalism which has, tragically, characterized American history from its beginning; their complaint is Berry's as well.

The destructive horror of slavery and its still-abiding legacies are, to Berry, not best understood in explicitly racialist terms, though obviously the primary way those horrors and those legacies were and are elaborated is via racial categories. Still, the millions whose lives were destroyed by the Atlantic Slave Trade and slave economy of the American South is, to Berry, of a piece with the—primarily socio-economic, though often also literal as well--destruction of millions of farming lives and hundreds of farming communities (which provided settled environments of provision and membership to families both black and white) by industrial agriculture. This is not some Heideggerian sublimation of human suffering to the logics of technology; Berry is excruciatingly particular in the way he talks about the ways in which Southerners of all races dealt with the Civil War and its aftermath, with reverberations that affect our historical assumptions and linguistic pre-occupations to this very day. But nonetheless, if Berry's book is to be understood as providing an alternative to the history of racial exploitation told in the 1619 Project, it isn't anything similar to then-President Trump's celebratory 1776 Commission; rather, it's a long, sad tale that begins with 1225's Charter of the Forest, and all the ways in which the fundamentals of common provisioning, which the gift of land makes available to all those willing to work it, have been continually whittled away in the name of profit. 

Some might question giving Berry even this much credit when it comes to his dealings with race, pointing to the sympathy he expresses towards Robert E. Lee in the book, and his dislike of those who attribute some kind of genetic trauma to any depiction or memorialization of those Southerners who fought for an understandable yet still evil cause from 1861 to 1865. All this attracted a fair amount of criticism when the book came out in 2022, and I’m not entirely unsympathetic to it. But an understanding of how Berry grounds his overall argument in the requirements of membership and community-building work should enable open-minded readers, I think, to see that he’s not minimizing the horrors of slavery when he shows some contextual sympathy for those born into its web of enveloping prejudices. Rather, he's extending the tragedy of those horrors and the devastation they justified, situating all Americans in the same destructive shadow that slaves and their masters were implicated in alike. 

He does this by way of an impressively wide rage of arguments, including a thoughtful consideration of the Sermon on the Mount, a critical reading a Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a reflection on the origin of Kentucky's state anthem, "My Own Kentucky Home," and much more. But the clearest elaboration of his entwining of moral, environmental, and socio-economic themes in his treatment of race in America comes through the lengthy consideration he gives to a conversation with the famed defender of both white supremacy and states’ rights, John C. Caulhoun, recorded in the dairy of John Quincy Adams in 1820—a conversation which Berry calls “essential to the sense of this book." He writes:

Calhoun’s significant distinction is between work that is not degrading, and therefore suitable for white people, and degrading work fit only for slaves. Adams defines the trouble exactly—“mistaking labor for slavery, and domination for Freedom”—and he clearly thought that the trouble affected both races….By assigning specifically to slaves the manual work considered degrading, the slave-owning aristocrats degraded that work for everybody, black or white, who did it. By degrading the work, they degraded the workers….It became possible for people who could not escape hard manual labor to despise themselves for doing it, and, from that, possible to despise the land that required it of them. Thus the set of values and attitudes by which the Old South aristocrats placed themselves above the fundamental work of the world in their time, values and attitudes meant to define the superiority of a class, instituted a (so far) illimitable cycle of degradations. It degraded the fundamental work itself, in both status and quality. It degraded everybody, black and white, who did that work. And inevitably—provided that the workers consented to the aristocratic values and attitudes—it degraded the land on which the work was done….

In his argument with Calhoun, Adams was speaking in affirmation of the value to the country and to democracy of “the plain freemen who labor for subsistence,” presumably on their own farms or in their own shops. Calhoun, speaking self-consciously as an aristocrat and in defense of his class and its values, divides human life and work into the permanent grades of higher and lower. (He clearly could have granted no standing to Jefferson’s “aristocracy of talent and virtue,” with which Adams might have concurred, though he did not like Jefferson.) Perhaps the greatest irony of our history so far is that in our public life we have favored and democratized Calhoun’s values and pointedly disfavored Adams’s….We all, black and white together, want to be John C. Calhoun….

The superiority of Calhoun’s social class rested upon Negro slavery—which, if we understand slavery as the lack or the want of freedom, was only one kind of slavery…Consumers of industrial products participate in the industrial economy virtually as captives, because of their total dependence on the products, and because of their lack of responsibility for the quality of what they buy. The condition of industrial consumers is of a piece with the condition of industrial workers, who are captives of the “labor market” and their need for jobs, and who have no responsibility for the kind and quality of their products….Slavery did not begin with the capture and sale of African black people, and it did not end with their legal emancipation (pp. 298-300, 301-302, 374).

In retrospect, much of Berry’s meandering book is revealed as an explicit exploration of the many and perverse ways the “democratization” of Calhoun’s aristocratic prejudices have deeply warped American social and economic life. In his view (and mine as well), without consistently prioritizing a participatory, democratic, egalitarian respect for work--including both those who do the work, and the land upon which they do it--one will be invariably left with a divisive competition to separate oneself from manual labor, and a greedy desire to impose on those you have separated yourself from to make sure they continue to do it for you. While there have occasionally been successful efforts to arrange and maintain the environments within with such work can flourish throughout American history, Berry mourns how rare they have been. Rather than the ideal of seeking common membership in a particular context of work—the “American Dream” of “economic democracy,” of “self-sufficiency based upon ownership of a family farm or ‘forty acres and a mule’ or a small store or a small shop” (p. 98)—we have a public realm that “is not, except in the most remote and theoretical sense, a membership…. It is nobody’s home … the realm of extremely powerful, wealthy, childish, and badly spoiled adult humans typified by Mr. Trump, his allies, and his rivals” (p. 136). Why this Calhounian triumph, in Berry’s view? Well, at one point he observes that human beings are “most at peace with one another when they are reasonably prosperous” (p. 87). That might seem a brief and materialist aside, but it is echoed in dozens of similar asides throughout the book, when he remarks on the fecundity of well-respected land, on how even oppressed populations (including the slaves of the American South) could find some degree of independence through the natural provisions that wise observers could obtain from said land, and so forth. When one reflects upon the common resources that lay at the heart of prosperity, and how capitalist expansion throughout history consistently begins with robbing the people of those common resources, economic explanations emerge as a framework for understanding how all the divisive and racist prejudices which Berry is exploring take root.

Ian Angus’s The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism is a short and dense book, one which lays out in close detail both the centuries-old tradition of commons-based agriculture through most of human history (Angus’s research is explicitly focused on the development of expansionist capitalism in England, the United Kingdom, and its imperial territories, but it is clear that similar data patterns can be found around world), and the way that tradition came to an end. Many are at least vaguely familiar with the story of the “enclosure movement”—the repeated, and always expanding, efforts by aristocrats and early capitalists from the Middle Ages through the 18^th century to dispossess the peasants who farmed, hunted and gathered in, and provisioned their families and villages from the streams, forests, and fields that they may have had any nominal ownership of, but by centuries-old common law had access to. Leveling woods to establish fenced in sheep pastures, leveling homes to oblige those who lived there to hire themselves out as laborers in cities—the sociological and economic consequences of the history of enclosures have been debated (and, depressingly often, defended) for centuries, with Angus’s Marxist analysis being just the latest contribution of the argument (though an excellent one). I strongly doubt that Berry and Angus are at all aware of each others’ writings; yet, Angus’s argument about the centrality of dispossession to understanding the roots of imperialism and slavery enables me to see their work as complementing each other in a small but essential way.

In a way, it’s not a Marxist argument at all, but one that goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Second Discourse: all the pathologies of division and competition which plague humankind, according to him, begin with “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, said to himself, This is mine." But Rousseau’s philosophical jeremiad against economic inequality and private property is hardly a rigorous argument—and it certainly isn’t Berry’s, or Angus’s (or even, when you think about it, Marx’s either, as he was far more concerned with bringing to an end exploitation than he was with imposing any kind of propertyless economic sameness; he and Friedrich Engels explicitly stated in The Communist Manifesto that it was property employed in the process of bourgeois production, not personal property, which they were targeting). What Marx, and Angus’s use of Marx’s analytic framework, actually provides in this context is simply an understanding that dispossession—using competitive acquisition, whether legal or financial or military, to end the common access to landed resources which communities had for millennia learned (and sometimes, in some places, still do learn) to share and shepherd together—was and remains at the heart of creating the economic disruptions upon which plantation slavery in the American South, and so many other forms of economic imperialism today, were and are maintained. Angus’s quotes Marx, who in this light sounds downright Berryesque (though, unfortunately, not nearly as lyrical):

Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it…disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil….Capitalist production, therefore only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker (pp. 186-187).

Marx’s opinion about agriculture’s place in his vision of the historical inevitability of a workers' revolution is complicated. It is easy to assume that the above passage is merely descriptive of what he saw as an economically determined process, but there are also notes and letters from Marx (which Angus quotes at length) which reveal that Marx himself recognized the social power of the cooperative relations which existed among farmers and other small-holders, where the mutually sustaining and shared commons had not yet been absorbed in the name of elite profit. This, obviously, open up the possibility for a socialist conception of property and community that is leans in a more localist, republican, or anarchist direction, and decidedly away from the Marxist-Leninist assumption that overcoming capitalism can only be achieved through forcing workers--dictatorially, in necessary--down the path of industrial socialization.

But either way, seeing in Marx’s observations above a parallel to Berry’s concern about how economic competition introduces class distinctions, which in turn introduce a contempt for the economically poor or legally enslaved who are obliged to engage in manual labor on the land, and thus result in a degradation of all landed work as well as the land itself, isn’t difficult. Hence, my original description of The Need to Be Whole as a leftist lament. The kind of respectful and cooperative and forgiving communities of work and fair membership that Berry locates in the civil religion of America, as well as within the Christian vision, were (and still are being) undermined, with depressing rare exceptions, by the legacy of labor degradation and slavery, America’s original sin. That legacy was most prominently and destructively embodied in the chattel slavery of the American South, but it is tragically more accurately reflected in the acquisitive stifling—both at the beginning of the American experiment and today--of the “land need,” the “sensible need for independence” which common resources provide, a need expressed by “early settlers and freed slaves” alike, and which is felt today by anyone who wishes, as they search the want-ads and punch the clock, “not to be a starvling, a pauper, a scrounger, an underling, a peon, a slave” (p. 365). For us all to be economically free and respected by our fellow human beings, free of prejudices that stigmatize and separate us from one another and from the land and from the labor of our own hands, and for there thus to be no truly poor among us—what could be more leftist than that?

Songs of '83 Special: "Puttin' on the Ritz"

Before I call this year to an end, just one more hit. My obvious and unstated foundation throughout this whole year is that I love the popular music of 1983. Maybe not as much as the swampy mix of hard rock and country and punk and more that to this day kick around in my memories of 1978...but still, the stuff that came over the airwaves the year I turned 15-years-old, the stuff which carried with it (as I only slowly learned later) the results of years of club experimentation and technological change and urban evolution? I think it was mostly brilliant, and I'm entirely happy to defend it all. Or, well, nearly all of it. Some of it wasn't that good. And some of it, though clever enough in its time, in retrospect is kind of creepy. And thus we come, on this last day of the year, to the long-promised, skipped-over, third German-language artist who hit it big on American radio in 1983: Taco, with his funky, synth-pop version of the Irving Berlin composition and the Fred Astaire classic, "Puttin' on the Ritz."

Why'd I skip over this song, which was cut in 1982 and become a one-hit wonder on American radio 40 years ago back in June? Because, as anyone who remembers knows, and as anyone who is patient enough to search through the internet can easily find out, the makers of the original video thought that a clever way to connect with a musical world that was, at the time, more than 50 years in the past (and today is nearly a century gone), was to feature tap dancers in blackface. It's not racist; it's ironic! It's a snappy, winking, faux-controversial homage! It's "European"! Yeah, no thanks. I suppose one could argue that, in his way, Taco's recording and video unintentionally serves as a synecdoche for the huge mess of multi-racial, gender-bending, cosmopolitan, and technological trends and controversies which 1983 pop radio encapsulated...but I'm not going to attempt that myself. Instead, I will sign off from this wonderful year-long exercise by thanking all 14 of you for following along, and share with you Taco performing his hit (appropriately lip-synched!) on a German New Year's Eve television special, 40 years ago tonight, complete with immensely bored showgirls. Enjoy everyone, and keep on listening!

Songs of '83: "Jingle Bell Rock"

Merry Christmas, everyone! Guess who released a special single for the Christmas season 40 years ago? Daryl Hall and John Oates! And guess what radio juggernaut, simply because they didn't quite fit into my narrative and didn't release an album in 1983 (though a couple of singles off 1982's H2O, their single biggest selling album of all time, were released during the year), have I not mentioned thus far in this year-long series? The same! So today, as a gift to you, I make up for that elision, twice over: enjoy the Daryl-on-vocals version of their cover of the Christmas classic, and the John-on-vocals version as well.

Songs of '83: "Joanna"

It would be a lie to claim that, as a White teen-age Mormon in Spokane, Washington in 1983, my ear glued to the radio, I was somehow also deeply familiar with R&B and soul. I wasn't. But American radio in 1983 wasn't yet quite as programmed and balkanized as it would later become; racial divides were many and, in retrospect, pretty obvious, but nonetheless, for every radio programmer concerned about how the Blackness of post-disco artists would play outside of the big cities, there was a Michael Jackson, a Prince, a Donna Summer, or a Lionel Richie to prove them wrong. So the fact is, I did know a little--enough to have insisted on monopolizing the television set for three hours one evening to watch the entirety of Motown Returns to the Apollo, among other things. One of those other things being Kool & the Gang, a great R&B group who were, by the early 1980s, coming to the end of the second wave of radio popularity in their, by then, 20-year-old history. "Joanna" wasn't their biggest hit ever--the ubiquitous "Celebration" holds that title--but it just might be their finest ballad, and I loved it.

Songs of '83: "99 Luftballons"

Of the three pop hits by German-language artists that American radio-listeners heard in 1983, Nena's "99 Luftballons" is, without doubt, the greatest, both in terms of chart success and overall musicality. Peter Schilling's "Major Tom" was clever and the source of a decent amount of nostalgia, and the one German-language hit yet to be revealed has its own--more controversial--nostalgic whimsy about it as well. But "99 Luftballons"? That's a solid (if synth-heavy) rock and roll tune, one of the essential tracks of Neue Deutsche Welle, the label created by Dutch and German music promoters in the late 1970s and early 1980s to talk about--well, pretty much what I've been talking about all year: namely, the post-punk and post-disco club sounds that knocked around Europe and slowly made their way on to pop radio, only in this case, the West German Cold War zeitgeist was pretty essential as well.

"99 Luftballons" is unusual for a European song picked up by American markets, in that it by-passed the UK entirely; Nena--which is the stage name of their lead singer as well as the name of the band--didn't release the song there until 1984, after it had gotten huge airplay across Europe and Japan. American and English promoters wanted an English version of the song, and that was released as part of whole album built around the hit song, but different band members (including Nena herself) never liked the not-especially-clever translation which they sang. Far better was the original German version from March 1983, which by December had been grabbed and played by enough big-city radio stations across the USA that Epic picked it up and officially released it stateside, 40 years ago this week. It shot up the charts, eventually reading #2 on the Billboard charts by early 1984--around the time British radio listeners heard the English-language version for the first time. A strange journey for a savagely bitter--but also weirdly romantic--song about American military generals accidentally destroying the world in a nuclear war after being freaked out by some balloons floating over the Berlin Wall (the line "Hielten sich für Captain Kirk"--"They all thought they were Captain Kirk" is, of course, the best bit of the whole song). But regardless: it rocks.

 And thirty-five years on, at least, back in 2018, it still did:

Songs of '83: "Karma Chameleon"

Culture Club, with their lead singer Boy George, were already a thoroughly familiar presence on American radio by this point of 1983. Their debut album, 1982's Kissing to Be Clever, managed to land four Top Ten hit on the Billboard charts during 1983 ("Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," "Time," "I'll Tumble 4 Ya," and "Church of the Poison Mind"). Boy George's ostentatious--and for the time, comparatively outrageous--androgyny made Culture Club the poster children, and a target, for every parent and pundit who insisted upon Making Their Views Known about this dangerous "new wave" of music escaping the clubs and poisoning American middle and high schools everywhere. (Years later, in his book The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom negatively compared George's androgynous impact on popular culture to Mick Jagger's, suggesting that the former wouldn't last; given that the down-to-three-permanent-members Rolling Stones just released a new album, I suppose you could argue he was right?) 

One of the weird things about all this, in retrospect, is that Culture Club were a pretty conventional pop band, all things considered. Their reliance upon synths and other technological club beats was fairly minimal, and while they soaked up the New Romantic and post-glam rock vibe of acts like late 1970s David Bowie, they also loved American R&B and country music--they even had guitars, for heaven's sake (take that, Human League)! "Karma Chameleon," the lead single of their second album, Colour by Numbers, a goofy little tune about--appropriately enough--changeableness and adaptation, ended up being their single biggest hit in both the UK and America. 40 years ago today, it premiered on the Billboard charts--and this time, there was no Michael Jackson or The Police standing in its way, preventing from going all the way to Number One.

Songs of '83: "The Politics of Dancing"

I'm so happy this song made my list; it's one my favorite, perhaps my very favorite, ridiculous and awesome New Wave tune. The London band Re-Flex didn't have a very long life; they had some intriguing interactions early on with Thomas Dolby, Level 42, and other artists and bands that navigated the new world of 1980s pop better than they did, but hey, not every musical outfit is destined for greatness. One-hit-wonderness, though, which they achieved with this single that entered the Billboard charts 40 years ago today and went on to be a Top Twenty hit? And, of course, had a wonderful video that mixes roller-skating with a Cold War spy thriller? That's not a bad fate at all, says I.

Songs of '83 Special: "Sunday Bloody Sunday"

Forget Michael Jackson, forget Prince, forget David Bowie, forget Duran Duran, forget The Eurythmics, forget The Police--for many, many, many of my Gen X peers, there is only song of 1983--and only one performance of that song--that can really tell the pop music story of that year. That's this one, right here. It's not part of my memories of that year though, except perhaps retroactively. So, like with Modern English's "I Melt With You," a little off-Billboard charts explanation is necessary.

I grew up in Spokane, Washington--though future NCAA powerhouse Gonzaga University is located there, it's not a college town, and the radio that I listened to growing up was mainstream pop and rock. By 1983, for all the reasons I've laid out in previous posts, the cosmopolitan and technological and stylistic post-punk and post-disco and multi-racial changes that had been building for years in the clubs of UK and in a few select big cities in North America were finally overwhelming institutional resistance (such as on MTV) and getting onto Top 40 American radio--but that still left a huge artistic ferment that wasn't being heard or seen by your average teen-age radio-listener across America. 1983 also was the year that "underground" or "alternative" or "college" radio really began to be a major profit-making market in the U.S., with R.E.M. and Violent Femmes and more all releasing their first albums that year. And then there was U2's breakthrough album War. Their classic song, "Sunday Bloody Sunday," was released in the UK and elsewhere earlier during that same year, but all that was unknown to me.

I have friends from Spokane around my age who insisted they knew about and were serious fans of U2 and this album, at the same time I was still listening to Thriller and Synchronicity. I grant that they must be telling the truth, but it's hard for me to know exactly how, since there's no way "Sunday Bloody Sunday" was getting much airplay in Spokane in 1983, given that it initially wasn't even released as a single in the U.S. (and War's lead single, "New Years Day," released in the UK and elsewhere in Europe earlier in the year, never even broken the top 50 on the American Billboard charts). But somehow or another, the power of this song--and specifically, the performance of the song which U2 gave at the Red Rocks Ampitheatre near Denver, Colorado on June 5, 1983--could not be contained. That absolutely electric performance--which reflected as well as any other recorded performance of theirs the crazy mix of messy messianic intensity and brilliantly clean sounds which characterized the first stage of U2's fame--was filmed and edited and released to the world, officially, on the concert film U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky in 1984. Unofficially though, on November 21, 1983, 40 years ago today, the band released an 8-track live recording of their 1983 tour, using the same title. And to promote that album, the video from Red Rocks of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" was made available (even though the audio of the song synced to that video was actually one recorded in Germany in August of that year). And that video just blew up. I remember seeing it on Friday Night Videos, perhaps sometime late in 1983, but more likely early 1984. Anyway, I had no idea who U2 were, though I think I may have identified them with a band named on some pins that a friend of my older sister (a high school junior at the time--practically a real grown-up!) wore. But that may be just a reconstruction; in all likelihood, I probably just thought I was watching some crazy experimental live recording from some cool but totally marginal indie band. And I guess, in a sense, I was right. It was years before I put it all together with my other pop memories, and realized what I'd missed (or rather, misunderstood).

Oh well. As for the song itself, I don't know when "Sunday Bloody Sunday" finally got airplay on Top 40 radio stations. Maybe it never did! Maybe, instead, it went straight from being a college radio favorite to a classic rock station standard. A strange journey one of U2's most famous songs. But regardless, even though it really doesn't fit into what I remember coming out of my radio during 1983, I had to put it somewhere. So here it is everyone. Enjoy your Thanksgiving, and your own U2 memories; mine are, however retroactive, very good indeed.

Song's of '83: "That's All"

Early 1980s Phil Collins and Genesis receive far more critical crap than they deserve, at least if one takes into consideration what they were going through at the time. They were a fine--maybe not Yes-level, but still, a major--progressive rock bank all through the 1970s, never having much impact on the American radio market but selling tons of records and tickets all across the UK and parts of Europe. Then came the departure of lead vocalist and resident weirdo-genius Peter Gabriel, followed by the departure of lead guitarist Steve Hackett. And then Phil Collins, emerging as lead vocalist while continuing on as drummer for the remaining threesome, discovers both drum machines and his own immense--if very pop-oriented--melodic sensibility, and over a period of a few years becomes both a massive radio sensation (thanks to his first solo album, Face Value) and nearly omnipresent as a studio musician in both the UK and America (he played the drums on last week's "In the Mood"). My favorite Genesis work is what they produced when they were right in the midst of working through all those transformations: And Then There Were Three is wonderful, for example, and looms large in my reconstructed memories of rock radio from 1978. But after five more years of adjustments passed, Genesis had become a straightforward, and efficient, pop machine, for better or worse. Collins was determined to kick off their 1983 album, titled simply Genesis, with a Beatlesesque pop song, complete with him purposefully imitating Ringo Starr's fills on the album's lead single, "That's All." Premiering on American radio 40 years ago this week, this song became their first Top Ten hit in America, to be followed by many, many more. The fact that, as far as pop songs go, it's nice but pretty much entirely disposable is, perhaps, sadly, part of the point.

Songs of '83: "In the Mood"

Far more than last week's fun rock tune from Yes, and far more than next week's entry from yet another 70s outfit that went pop in the 1980s, this week's song--the, in my opinion, endlessly captivating pop-funk-via-hard-rock-via-synth-and-drum-machine song "In the Mood," by Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant--is one that truly stands the test of time. It wasn't the first cut off his second solo album, nor his biggest solo hit ("Big Log" takes the title for both of those, a song that I've always found somewhat pretentious and only middling at best), but I say it's his best solo work--and this is my list of my memories, so what I say goes. The strange fantasia video for the song, mixing pastoral images with hammy 1983 beat-boxing, just captures how inventive, how creative, Plant could be as an artist, sometimes. (The fact that a country version of song subsequently became a stable of his late career concerts provides even more evidence, as if any were necessary.) Anyway, enjoy.

Songs of '83: "Owner of a Lonely Heart"

This week, and for the next two weeks to come, the songs which cracked into the American radio mainstream 40 years ago represented something that has only appeared a few times so far on this list: majors bands and performers that had achieved commercial success by producing the sort of songs which got airplay under the pop rules which obtained in the 1960s and the 1970s, now playing by a newly evolving set of expectations, ones much more technology-dependent and much more cosmopolitan in outlook. Journey and The Kinks nonetheless pushed ahead into the 1980s by doing what had always worked for them before; Styx, by contrast, attempted a synth-pop rock opera; David Bowie kind of crystalized all the transformations of 1983 even while perhaps not fully embracing them. 

And Yes, the first of our three 1970s dinosaurs, and arguably the most influential progressive rock band of them all? They came back together, after having disbanded in 1981 (having decided, reasonably enough, that their artistic moment had passed), and brought with them into the studio the two Trevors: Trevor Rabin, a rock guitarist whose musical sensibilities fit in well with the way post-disco develops were encouraging rock music to change, and Trevor Horn, a singer-turned-producer who had worked briefly with Yes before, while at the same time making the new electronic sound essential to British popular music, through such bands as The Buggles, ABC, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and later the Art of Noise. The re-integration of the significantly changed band--though at the last minute, Jon Anderson, Yes's founder and former lead vocalist was convinced to come back on board--was hardly without tension, but it produced a sleek, sharp, utterly of-the-moment Cold War rock album, whose lead single, "Owner of a Lonely Heart" entered the American Billboard charts this week in 1983, and by January of the following year was a #1 hit. Was it the Kafkaesque video that did it? Perhaps. In Reagan's America, in a year of nuclear false alarms and talk of lasers in space, the visual expression of Yes's pop-rock alchemy was on the nose.

Songs of '83: "Holiday"

I was never a huge Madonna fan, especially not at first. That was almost certainly at least partly due to my teenage Mormon suspicion of her: that she was one of those "bad girls" that are to be avoided. Madonna herself surely would have entirely endorsed my response, circa late 1983, when she finally--after years of studying dance and networking at clubs and pitching herself (with more and more success as the 1970s turned to the 1980s) as a backup singer all around New York City--made it on to mainstream American pop radio. Whether it was her own Catholic background or the socially conservative religious or cultural hang-ups of literally anyone else, she delightedly (and, of course, strategically; she's always been a savvy self-marketer) figured how to flaunt her disregard for us squares, stylistically, sexually, or otherwise. In that sense, "Holiday," the first cut from her debut album to make it onto the Billboard pop charts (debuting 40 years ago this week), was entirely appropriate: her whole oeuvre has always been about selling an image of getting away and taking a break, "just one day out of life."

"Holiday" is a pretty lame song, all things considered, just as the original video shot for it was (really it was more a dance audition than a video). Later cuts from her first album were better ("Borderline," for example, is simply a terrific pop song), and I enjoyed Madonna' stuff on the radio well enough. But it probably wasn't until I watched the tremendous documentary Paris is Burning, focused on "voguing" and the underground LGBTQ ballroom scene in New York City in general, that I started to view Madonna's choreographic skill, her cosmopolitan vision, and dedication to what came to be called "dance-pop" with some respect. Yes, she's an operator, no doubt about that. But in her own way, she's an artist too, one who was for years was determined to master, to lift up--or to rip off--whatever added to the liberatory power and delirious fun of cutting loose on the dance floor and in front of the mic. In that spirit, here's Madonna at the height of her powers, during the (regularly protested and condemned as "satanic" by Pope John Paul II!) Blonde Ambition tour. Put your troubles down, everyone; it's time to celebrate.

Songs of '83: "In a Big Country"

Big Country's "In a Big Country" debuted on the Billboard charts and American pop radio 40 years ago this week. The story of Big Country's origin was, like so many other post-punk UK outfits which emerged far from London's clubs, one of desperate experimentation--in this case, Stuart Adamson playing around on an effects pedal and an electronic bow and discovering a way to make guitars sound like bagpipes. Leaving behind the punk scene entirely, and connecting with a couple of studio musicians skilled in creating a 1970s classic rock sound (Big Country's drummer and bassist had both played with the Who's Pete Townshend on his terrific solo album Empty Glass), Adamson brought Big County together in 1981. Their first album got some decent airplay around the UK--but it was this goofy, utterly delightful video, featuring Adamson and his bandmates treasure hunting (and being hunted in turn) across Scotland, that gave the band their one hit in the U.S. The subsequent story of Big Country is not an entirely pleasant one--but for American radio-listeneres like me, they made 1983 a lot more fun.

Songs of '83: "Rockit"

I'm pretty certain I never heard Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" on the radio in 1983. Its presence in my memory, and its presence on this list (it was actually a released single, but it never even made it to the Top Fifty, cresting at #71 on the Billboard chart this week in October, 40 years ago), is entirely a result of Friday Night Videos, which played it constantly. I can only presume that in the months following Michael Jackson and other Black artists breaking MTV's informal racial line, the push was strong for other platforms to make up for lost time--and this crazy, artsy, funky video certainly qualifies. I have no idea how Hancock himself regards this recording today, but for a White kid starting high school far away from any college scenes or jazz clubs, it got stuck in my mind as a bit of a revelation.

Songs of '83: "Heart and Soul"

There are multiple major radio stars from 1983 that, for a variety of reasons, I haven't highlighted, and won't highlight, on this list. Toto's biggest selling and most famous single, "Africa," hit #1 on the Billboard charts in February, and was unavoidable for much of the year--but it had been released months earlier, and I count it as a 1982 song. Billy Joel's An Innocent Man was released in August of 1983, and had four Top Twenty hits--but ultimately, the vibe of the Piano Man just doesn't fit with what I think 1983 really meant in terms of pop music trends. And so forth: Elton John, The Fixx, Bryan Adams, Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band: all very much in the radio mix during this year, but they're not making my personal cut. But how could I, how could anyone, ignore the biggest, slickest, hardest-working White guy pop bar band of the era? No one could, and I'm sure not.

"Heart and Soul," the first single from Sports, hit the Top 40 four decades ago this week, and with it Huey Lewis and The News began a streak that lasted for nearly five years; with only one exception (1984's "Walking on a Thin Line"), every single they released until late 1988 became a Top Ten Billboard hit. Looking back over the decades, Huey Lewis has commented that the band, by the time they came to the end of their run, had become better musicians than they'd been back in their heyday, when the goal--their only goal, really--was to orchestrate in the studio whatever radio-friendly hooks their blusey-but-not-really mix of guitars and keyboards and drums and harmonica allowed. I never saw them live (one of my major musical regrets, to be honest), but I've heard from multiple friends who did that their shows were loose and loud and awesome--and also perhaps never quite as kick-butt as their recordings. It's interesting that once they hit their peak and the years passed, they started playing around more, releasing albums of doo-wop and soul music--but never letting their formula go entirely. It worked for them for years, and it was certainly working for them here.

Songs of '83: "Major Tom (Coming Home)"

There were three German-speaking pop artists who had major hits on American radio in 1983. The 40th anniversary for one of them has already past; I'm going to come back to it later this year, for reasons that I'll explain at the time. Another, the biggest splash by a German-language pop song on the Billboard chart all year, won't have its turn in the spotlight for a couple more months. So this week we have the third entry: a witty bit of synthpop from Peter Schilling, a musician whose love of electronica always shaded into science-fiction--and in David Bowie's 1969 "Space Oddity," with its story of the eponymous astronaut stranded alone in his tin can far above the world, Schilling found his muse. He recorded the song in German--"Major Tom (völlig losgelöst)," meaning "completely detached"--and released it in January of 1983; it became a huge club hit throughout Western Europe, and the pressure was on to record and release and English-language version. When he finally finished and released the English translation, it climbed to the Top Twenty in the U.S. (and Number 1 in Canada), guaranteeing his place as one of the great one-hit wonders of the era. (Major Tom himself, of course, kept coming back again and again.)