Songs of '83: "Let's Dance"

"Let's Dance," the lead single of David Bowie's album of the same title, entered the Billboard charts 40 years ago this week. I have a fondness for every old radio hit that I've included and will include on this list, but this single by Bowie was one of only a handful of songs I'm going to talk about this year that I would actually call important. 

Huey Lewis once commented that in 1980s, radio singles were the only thing that mattered. (Which is, perhaps perversely, one of the reasons Huey Lewis and the News aren't going to appear anywhere on this list; they were a great pop band, and Sports, a great album, was released in 1983, but none of the singles which really defined that album and subsequently shot that band into the pop stratosphere made it onto to American radio until 1984.) In general, I think he was correct. This was before the internet changed the music industry, and even the cable revolution, led by MTV and the music video format, was only with the very artists I'm focusing on in this list truly coming into dominance. So really, the goal for any ambitious band was to have radio-friendly hit singles, and a lot of them; the album as a whole was almost an afterthought. But nonetheless, there still were a couple of truly popular artists who, for various reasons and in the midst of all these changes in both musical style and musical production, released albums that included, besides radio hits, a whole musical statement, even if it was only noticeable in retrospect. I've already mentioned one: Michael Jackson's Thriller. Later this year there will be the Police's Synchronicity and Madonna's self-titled first album. But Bowie's Let's Dance is maybe the most important of them all.

Here, after all, was genuine 1970s rock 'n' roller, probably the single most important figure in the history of glam rock, and thus central to much of both what punk rock rebelled against and what disco, post-punk, and New Wave picked up and re-worked in the years which led up to 1983. And as I explained in my first entry, Bowie made the argument which crystallized the underlying reality of the Second British Invasion, however implicitly: that there is a racially, culturally, sexually diverse and fluid movement coming out of the clubs of London and the discos of New York, one that was using technology to transcend both old rock categories and punk's angry rejection of the same, in a collection of styles that I think can best be called, simply, "urban." That's what Let's Dance, and it's lead single, brought forward: Bowie had some vague, folky musical ideas and a few chords, Nile Rodgers of the great disco band Chic transformed them in the studio, Bowie roped in the then-mostly-unknown blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn to add some essential licks, and suddenly there is was--a grand invitation for the cities of the world to just dance.

Serious fans of Bowie--and even Bowie himself--have mixed feelings about the album, which was more successful than anything he'd ever done before or would ever do after, and thus cast a kind of shadow that ended up sending Bowie himself in some weirdly repetitive directions in the years that followed. But who can criticize the song itself? Listen to the full album cut--those horns, those drums, those synths, and that bass line! Or just enjoy the video, and ponder the whole pop masterpiece: combining dance beats and confusing but ominous political commentary, all under the moonlight (the serious moonlight).

Songs of '83: "Always Something There to Remind Me"

It wasn't until I grew older, and I came to really appreciate the complex beauty of Burt Bacharch's smooth orchestral pop sounds, that I realized what an audacious, and even vaguely unsettling, accomplishment Naked Eyes's "Always Something There to Remind Me"--their first single, which debuted on the Billboard charts 40 years ago this week--truly was. They took a shimmering, sad, yet hopeful song in the classic broken-hearted-girl mode (such as Dionne Warwick or Sandie Shaw performed it) and in their synth-laden hands it suddenly becomes a slick, dark, misogynistic number, alternating between bombastic bitterness over the girl who got away, and an almost sleazy, stalkerish undercurrent--the video practically identifies with the paparazzi culture of the era: how dare the girl escape my view, when I can't stop thinking about her! This take may not have been characteristic of the Second British Invasion overall, but it wasn't unique either (as we'll see when the Police arrive to take over nearly all of American pop radio later this year).

None of this is to run down the Naked Eyes guys. Pete Byrne and the late Rob Fisher were talented dudes at the University of Bath in the late 1970s who enjoyed the club sounds, played in a band with the musicians who later formed Tears for Fears (who first album was also released 40 years ago, but didn't get anything onto American pop radio for a couple more years), discovered the wonders of the Fairlight CMI, and cooked up some fine tunes, giving us suburban Americans another look at the mating rituals of these cosmopolitan Brits across the ocean. But hey, decades on, you got to call them as you hear them.

 

On Latimer, Localism, Liberalism, and Democracy

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Trevor Latimer’s Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism deeply engaged me, but not in a positive way, at least not initially. As one already inclined to respond defensively to his j’accuse against localism (one which he levels because, in his view, “localism can do and has done real harm to real people”—p. 15), I admit I found the book, despite its occasional strong arguments, too much like a meandering whine. Basically, it seemed as though that Latimer had decided—on the basis of a good deal of anecdotal observation but little systematic assessment—that American society is suffering from an “idolatry of localism” (p. 229), and was annoyed by it. His disparate responses to that supposed idolatry in turn annoyed me.

Fortunately, I then read Adam Smith’s much more complimentary take on Latimer’s work, and that gave me pause. Not because Smith's review of the book provided persuasive support for Latimer’s anti-localist assertions, but because Smith found in his arguments an occasion to rethink why he, or I, or anyone so inclined, might identify with localism in the first place. And such rethinking is always helpful, because localism is admittedly a strange beast—it can be understood (as Latimer observes—p. 25) as a theory, an idea, a doctrine, an ideology, a phenomenon, an activity, and/or a process, and hence requires much critical thought. And Smith’s particular rethinking is more clarifying about the project of localism than Latimer’s criticisms of it.

Latimer’s criticisms are, I think, very much a product of his self-confessed pragmatic, and therefore unavoidably utilitarian, individualism. He insists that his explicitly “consequentialist and welfarist” perspective isn’t necessarily utilitarian, in the sense that he allows that the consequences of any particular policy or position should be judged on the basis of more than simple utility; when it comes to assessing the welfare of persons, “complex values count too.” But it’s not clear to me just what the “complexity” of those values might consist of, since the notion of assessing the consequences of any given policy or position on the basis of anything other than that welfare which can be materially observed or surveyed in the lives of specific individuals is simply irrelevant to his analysis. Quoting the philosopher T.M. Scanlon, he dismisses any reasons or values “that are not tied to the well-being, claims, or states of individuals in any particular position” (pp. 15-16). No res publica, no commonweal, no public interest for him (though he will make use of the latter term when it suits him, only without any kind of communitarian framework that might give it a moral or philosophical heft).

Consequently, the definition of localism that Latimer reiterates throughout the book—”prioritizing the local by making decisions, exercising authority, or implementing policy locally or more locally” (p. 27)—is always employed in terms of the practical benefits which it may or may not provide to particular individuals. This makes it impossible for Latimer to accurately assess, or even to really fully acknowledge, what seems to me a key component of localism, however construed: the philosophical anthropology that builds upon the kind of love which human beings routinely have, and in localist thinking normatively ought to be able to have, for those people and those natural and social forms and patterns and practices most immediate to their lives.

The love of, or the affection for, or the attachment to, the particular that I’m talking about is grounded in our existence as physically embodied creatures, whose awareness of and reflection upon the world can never be (at least until the transhumanist revolution, and maybe not even then) entirely separated from the tactile and the sensory and the circumscribed. Given this historical—even evolutionary—reality, developing an affection for one’s physical and social environs, for one’s place and one’s community, for a context that is both materially present and publicly knowable, has been recognized (and not just by convinced defenders of localist political arrangements) as constitutive of our persons and of our capacity to publicly act and reason and create and judge, in a way unlike any other pedagogical or experiential development.

This classically republican insight into the nature of human beings and human sociality is, admittedly, not always well articulated by those drawn to localism, perhaps in part because many localists grasp at it as a political foil for liberal modernity and not because of any deep civic commitment to local communities as a moral reference point. (This idea is well-addressed in Smith’s review.) Whatever the superficial motivation involved, however, this kind of thinking, with its emphasis upon the ties between local knowledge, local attachments, and human virtue that we can find in Aristotle and Wendell Berry and a thousand thinkers in between, is I suspect nearly always nonetheless assumed by all those—call them “conservatives,” whether left-leaning or otherwise—who recognize that a world circumscribed solely by rationally derived principles of the self or law or the market provides fewer and fewer spaces for such development. That Latimer does not engage with this thinking, preferring to stipulate a “normative individualism” instead, limits much of his philosophical and policy analysis (p. 109).

True, Latimer mentions both Aristotle and Berry (as well as many other localist and communitarian thinkers), but primarily only in two chapters of the book, those addressing arguments for localism (as he understands them, at least) from “belonging” and from “nature.” Some of those critiques are solid, directly posing challenges to the philosophical anthropology of localism, and thus should give localists pause. But many others go frustratingly awry. His attack on belonging boils down to an attack on the partiality which such attachments involve, while his attack on nature denies that there is any moral valence to natural sentiments anyway. In both cases, by working from within his welfarist and individualist frame, Latimer fails to fully grasp what it is localists are even talking about when they focus on the particular, and hence most of his arguments never fully connect.

Consider his attack upon the common localist concern with the size of those communities within which we live. He asserts that those who point out that large, complicated agglomerations of people are an unnatural site for the aforementioned development are confused: even if it is the case that certain elements of human nature are resistant to bigness, nonetheless “it is human nature to exceed itself” (p. 112). Leaving aside the potentially problematic implications of that assumption, it is striking that the size of a sphere of civic action and potential attachment is for Latimer relevant solely in terms of its level of welfare-provision. Berry’s articulation of affection as a virtue at least partly bound up with sticking to a definable place and a knowable people, or Aristotle’s insistence upon a definable polis or patria as crucial to the virtuous telos of the human being, make no appearance in Small Isn’t Beautiful, and that is no small oversight.

The idea of affectionate, tactile, even routine civic belonging, so crucial to the case that bounded communities and neighborhoods and other localities make for themselves, is cast by Latimer into a cost-benefit analysis as to whether one may justly “prioritize one’s own locale”—which, again, is for him wholly a matter of whether that prioritization will contribute to the material flourishing of disaggregated individuals. Since some localities enjoy resources and levels of social trust greater than others, justice might demand “that residents of flourishing communities disfavor their own communities and instead favor struggling locales” (p. 71). In support of this judgment, he asserts that being “agent neutral” is simply “a fundamental commitment of modernity,” which is an odd assertion, considering how elsewhere he dismisses “commonsense morality” as insufficient without supportive reasons to believe it (pp. 68-69).

To actually spell out the problem here in his own language: it is, I believe, simply an anthropological reality of human sociality that the community-building “favors” which individuals provide to and receive from their localities—the taxes paid and the governmental services and programs received, obviously, but also the volunteering, the civic participation, the local commercial activity, the pride, the social interaction and involvement, and so much more—cannot be regarded as discreet bundles of individual acts. Rather, they are all tied up with an affective and collective character formation process. But this claim is illegible in Latimer’s analysis; for him affection, like any utility, must be fungible. If one prioritizes that set of relationships closest to where one lives, simply because they are the relationships one knows best, then you are acting in a “morally suspect” way: “we are not entitled to beggar thy neighbor” he insists, weirdly reading the feeling of local attachment as a zero-sum drain upon all inputs that human beings may make to one another (p 75). He quotes Adam Smith’s classic insistence upon the importance of sacrificing private interest for that of the public (though his presumption that “private” equals “local” and “public” equals “non-local” is neither explained nor defended), acknowledges that Smith also insisted that universal cares “can never be an excuse for neglecting the more humble department,” but then quickly insists that “the critic of localism hardly demands ‘neglect' [of the local]’’ (p. 77). Why the same can’t be said for advocates of localism who might well also care about various universals is not explained.

Latimer is not wrong in noting that, to the extent one can identify specific prioritizations which really are zero-sum—city and county governments taking tax dollars away from more general funds so as to lure corporations and employers away from other localities with tax incentives and write-offs, all in the name of local development, for example—the arguments for them are extremely poor. In these cases and others like it, Latimer’s attack on local attachments are on point: some localists do indeed present communities as “unstructured, undifferentiated blobs” (though far fewer in my experience than seems to be the case for him), and by so doing make principled arguments about the need for nested, federal arrangements more complicated than they need to be; similarly, his use of critical political geography against simplistic conceptions of subsidiarity should be taken to heart, allowing us to see that, in certain matters, a fetishization of spatiality in thinking about decision-making can only “confuse and distract” (pp. 94, 111). But it is frustrating that such legitimate, pointed criticisms are used to prop up a broad, often internally inconsistent attack on what is, fundamentally, a deep and complex aspect of human history and anthropology—one that, at different points in the text, Latimer seems willing to acknowledge the reality of anyway, which at the very least made me wonder just where his annoyance with localism truly rests.

Other chapters of the book, addressing arguments for localism dealing with “tyranny,” “knowledge,” and “efficiency,” generally do not go as deep into the philosophical forest, and thus end up missing fewer trees. As regards localism as a response to the threat of tyranny, Latimer helpfully distinguishes between the centralization and concentration of governing power and correctly points out that localism is “a response to centralization, a special kind of concentration of power, not concentration as such” (p. 63). His claim that localism and centralization are parallel vices is weak, though; stipulating that moving away from centralization and towards localism invites fragmentation and anarchy requires at least as much argument as he gives to the problem of concentration, and that he doesn’t provide.

As regards localism as a response to the problem of knowledge, he freely grants the insights of such thinkers as F.A. Hayek and James Scott and allows that local knowledge is often essential to effectively serving the welfare of individuals—as he puts it, “that local governments and local people have an indispensable role to play in policy development and implementation” (p. 161). But he also insists such an argument is obvious today, and that localists go too far in insisting that the remote collection of knowledge and perspectives by non-local agents and the centralized processing of such does not change it or compromise its integrity, which makes me curious to understand Latimer’s theories of bureaucracy or knowledge, or if he has any.

And as regards localism and the argument from efficiency, Latimer probably makes his strongest points against much localist rhetoric; too often localists assume administrative centralization (which would be the aforementioned processes of handling local knowledge) and governmental centralization (which would be the scaling up of fundamental political decision-making) are identical, but they are not. To use examples particular to the United States, the power to administratively experiment, which has historically been embraced by those who celebrate the power of states (such as under some readings of the 10^th Amendment), could be extended further to local counties and cities (such as under the principle of Home Rule and the Cooley Doctrine), without compromising the federal settlement under the Supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution. He notes that “policy experimentation requires [administrative] initiative but not [governmental] immunity” (p. 191), and he’s not wrong.   

That leaves Latimer’s chapter on localism and the argument for “democracy,” which I think is the densest and most frustrating of all of his engagements with his topic, and also the one which brings me back around to Smith’s perceptive comments on what Latimer’s attacks on localism reveal about the thinking of many localists themselves. The density and frustration comes from the way Latimer conflates a large variety of admittedly difficult arguments that have been made over the millennia about democratic rule, lining them up against localist conceptions of democracy in a somewhat arbitrary manner. The connection to Smith’s comments come from the way Latimer’s anti-localism—unavoidably, I think—makes use of common anti-democratic tropes about the presumed divisiveness and injustice of democratic participation. As Smith admirably confesses, perhaps certain localists are wrong in assuming that democratically empowering people within their spatial divisions will lead to preferred outcomes; as he put it,  perhaps some localists “smuggle our opinions about what should be decided into our statements about who should decide.”

To select a few of Latimer’s multiple overlapping arguments, he claims that, assuming one accepts the democratic legitimacy of electoral representation, questions of spatial proximity and size ignore “system effectiveness”—after all, while citizens “in large communities are less likely to influence decisions…those decisions are more consequential and more likely to be translated into outcomes” (p. 124). Hopefully, even those resistant to communitarian or republican ideas will recognize that making “consequentialness” solely a function of how many individuals are effected by a decision in total, ignoring entirely the affective dimension of that democratic empowerment which emerges when citizens are able to make decisions within their own communities, however humble or limited, is contestable at the very least.

Similarly contestable—and, in fairness, Latimer allows that his arguments regarding democratic participation are “less sure-footed” that his others (p. 127)—is the data he employs on the rates of local incumbent re-election, or on local media consumption, or on the social position of local activists, or on the convolutedness of local decision-making boards, all to suggest that arguments which tie localism and democracy together merely assume what they claim to support: the existence of a democratic local political culture. And it is exactly that kind of localist culture of politics—a culture which demands, in Latimer’s words, that governments be “more accountable to their [meaning, that localities’] citizens” (p. 147)—that Smith admits that, just maybe, many who call themselves localists don’t actually want. Why? I suspect primarily because prioritizing civic and democratic formation cannot be predictably tied to any particular policy outcome--especially not, as the localities in question often reflect progressive ideas characteristic of urban communities, illiberal ones.

People are urbanizing across the globe; changing technologies of commerce, information, finance, and communication have been making that inevitable for many decades. There are many reasons to think critically about the cultural and economic consequences of this characteristic of late modernity; as FPR readers in particular ought to be quick acknowledge, the agrarian critique should be made part of any localist (and therefore republican or communitarian—and I would say also socialist) one as well. But as Smith observes, for some localists the frustration is that local democracy in urban settings often contravenes the preferred outcomes of many of those who had embraced jurisdictional arguments for localism primarily because they'd assumed that their preferences would find greater support “in the country and the small towns” stereotypically association with localist politics. He thus asks: “to what extent are we localists, and to what extent are we postliberals, and to what extent are these positions compatible?” It’s a good question and---for left-leaning localist writers like myself, who have occasionally wondered why some longstanding advocates of localism seem uninterested in the classical republican literature when it comes to working out the implications of local democratic empowerment in our increasingly urbanized world---a revealing one.

Latimer has his vision: it is the maximization of measurable individual welfare. Localism is, for him, usually a false path towards achieving that. I think the case he makes has many flaws. But to the extent that his book helps some localist thinkers recognize that a defense of localism should rest not upon aggregate material results but rather upon a recognition of the moral and anthropological value of certain forms of civic engagement and democratic empowerment—and therefore not upon securing anti-urban political victories in various culture war issues—then it deserves praise. Latimer does end his book on a more positive note, hoping to provide “some lessons for localism from a skeptic” (p. 225). Maybe he actually succeeded at this: just in a far more conceptual way than he—or I, upon my first reading—thought.

Songs of '83: "Photograph"

Def Leppard was one of the major bands of the second wave of British heavy metal--meaning post-Led Zeppelin, post-Deep Purple, and post all the changes which punk and disco and club music had begun to bring into the cities of England. 40 years ago this week Def Leppard's "Photograph," their first release from their third album Pyromania, entered the Billboard charts. Pyromania was the first hard rock album I remember ever really seriously listening too; while my memories of radio-listening stretching all the way back to 1978 include plenty of loud, driving tunes--by Boston, The Rolling Stones, Van Halen, or The Who, for example--it was Def Leppard that truly introduced me to the concept, as Rob Reiner's Spinal Tap so effectively made manifest, of always making everything "one louder." Listening to this track, or "Foolin'" or, especially, "Rock of Ages," really kind of freaked me out--not in the nervous way that years earlier loud rock had made me slightly worried for my soul, but just because its intensity, its ferocity--and yes, its volume--got into me in a way I wasn't used to more blues-based rock 'n' roll doing. And like millions of others who crank "Photograph" up as far as the speakers allow today, that hook is plainly still in me too.

The so-called "new wave of British heavy metal" was much more simplistic, and arguably much more misogynistic, sophomoric, and plain old homosocial--just us guys banging our heads together here!-- than what had come before, though obviously exceptions were legion. Still overall, you probably can't imagine a band staking out a position more sociologically and culturally distinct from the clever, frothy, sexy, androgynous, synthesized sounds of British New Wave or American Black artists than a bunch of kids from Sheffield wailing on drums and guitars and singing about their lust for, and their killing, or possible being killed by, a sexy woman who may or may not be Jack the Ripper. Hey, it rocks.

 

Songs of '83: "Your Love is Driving Me Crazy"

 

The week after Prince's defining, outrageous, brilliantly sexualized combination of the classic car and classic one-night-stand song, "Little Red Corvette," broke into the Top 40 on the Billboard charts back in 1983, Sammy Hagar's "Your Love is Driving Me Crazy," his single biggest solo Billboard hit (yes, bigger than 1984's "I Can't Drive 55"), topped out at #13. Prince's song would have much greater success and a much longer life, and deservedly so--but let's take a moment to fit Mr. Hagar, "The Red Rocker," whose family background was shaped by the lettuce fields, steel mills, and brand new suburbs in Southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, into my overall thesis. Even more than Journey's (much better) "Separate Ways" from a couple of weeks ago, Hagar's 1983 hit spoke a musical language that had just about nothing cosmopolitan, nothing multi-racial, nothing New Wave about it. This was, like so much of Hagar's early hard rock, inspired by a desire to get away Fontana, California as soon as possible--which means its references are all within that particular prism. Does that make it a particularly White pop song, a head-banger that existed in contrast to an urbanizing, synthesizing, post-disco-diversity pop environment sweeping American radio otherwise? Check out his style, and decide for yourself.

Songs of '83: "Little Red Corvette"

Forty years ago this week, Prince's "Little Red Corvette" (not his greatest song, nor my favorite, but quite arguably his single most iconic and best remembered pop number) entered Billboard's Top 40--and...just...wow. If a 14-year-old virgin Mormon who milked cows every morning and rode his bike to school could figure out immediately what this song was about, anybody could (and, I'm sure, did). I wonder if this was the very song that MTV's Mark Goodman was thinking of when he told David Bowie that the station had to be careful when it came to showing this kind of cosmopolitan, sexual stuff that viewers could handle in big cities but definitely not in the sticks. Honestly, it's not even the most explicit--or maybe, better, the most blatant--R&B-style song bout sexual intercourse that made it onto the playlists of the Top 40 radio stations I was listening to back then; Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" was released in October the previous year, but it was still near the top of the charts in February of 1983. Anyway, Prince was amazing--and when he died suddenly in 2016, this song was what people remembered:

Songs of '83: "She Blinded Me with Science"

Yet another one-hit wonder! (And still not the last.) Thomas Dolby recorded and released this song in the UK in 1982 (where it was a complete flop), after having conceived and story-boarded the whole video, and maybe even after having hired Magnus Pyke--a legit biochemist who had become, after decades of public service, a radio and television personality in England--to play the mad scientist for all I know. The song itself was practically an afterthought. Associating a multi-media composer and dabbler and entrepreneur like Dolby with long-suffering, hard-working bands like Dexys Midnight Runners, who similarly only had one shot at American pop radio, isn't really fair, but hey, that's the music business for you. Re-released in the United States as part of a whole EP, it entered the Billboard charts 40 years ago today, and the rest is history. (Or maybe "science.")

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back for Kansas Republicans

[This is a somewhat expanded version of an editorial which recently appeared in The Wichita Eagle and elsewhere.] 

Last weekend Mike Brown, a former Johnson County commissioner and a failed primary candidate for GOP Secretary of State Scott Schwab’s job, and someone who has expressed sympathy on multiple occasions for former President Trump’s lies regarding the 2020 election results, was chosen to be the new chairperson of the Kansas Republican party. This is a frustrating result for those local Republicans--and I know they're out there; I know several myself--who keep hoping to separate election conspiracies from their party’s substantive platform, an effort that, of late, one could argue that was, all things considered, going pretty well.

It's easy for the terminally online to forget, but it needs to be remembered that for a great many ordinary citizens, including a significant minority of Republicans, the claims of voter fraud and rigged elections promoted by Trump, culminating in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, had always made little sense, a feeling that has only grown more pronounced outside the hot-houses of conservative websites (and, unfortunately, Republican leadership caucuses, but even there many Republicans are silently trying to extricate themselves). This drift has become even more pronounced as time has gone by; recent polls show that election denialism declined by more than half between the elections of 2020 and 2022, and overall only a third of those not already caught up in conspiracy theorizing say they find such paranoia understandable. In short, continuing to obsess and nitpick over super-close elections has increasingly come to seem to most Americans as pointless, dangerous, and strange.

Kansas, however, has its own long and separate history with Republican electoral paranoia. Long before Trump started ranting about how he was robbed—and started harassing GOP officials and his own vice-president to get them to support his lost cause—we had Kris Kobach, who for years as Secretary of State made claims about illegal voting he was never able to prove, and demanded prosecutorial power to enforce voter restrictions which were thrown out as unconstitutional. Meaning that Kansas Republicans, including the ordinary rank-and-file ones, have long seen hysteria over election security overshadow their other priorities, which is why the failed (but still very close!) efforts to derail Kobach in his race for attorney general had significant Republican support.

Still, looking across the country, particularly at defeated, Trump-endorsed, non-existent voter-fraud-obsessed Republican candidates in Arizona and elsewhere, many Kansas Republicans probably had reason to feel hopeful for the direction of the state party. Despite the closeness of his loss to Governor Kelly, Derek Schmidt left the stage without recriminations (same thing for Kobach, who not only made no criticism of his squeaker of a win but also spoke only of his conservative agenda, and said nothing about contesting the governor's equally narrow win). Schwab won re-election handily in the midst of national under-performance by other local Republicans, all while insisting the Kansas elections were secure and reliable. Perhaps they were shaking off the preoccupations of their former national leader?

Many are, no doubt. Unfortunately, some Kansas Republicans are still obsessed with the idea that ballot drop-boxes or mail-in ballots allow nefarious actors to skew or falsify election results. And now, they have a state party chair on their side.

When running against Schwab in the Secretary of State GOP primary, Brown mocked his opponent for refusing to claim the same voter-hunting power Kobach had previously abused, insisted that all ballot drop-boxes should be banned, and implied that Schwab was at fault for not investigating outlandish, unsubstantiated claims about ballot-dumping and more. As party chair, he obviously won’t be involved in setting priorities for the Secretary of State, much less shaping legislation. Nonetheless, his narrow, 88-90 vote triumph among state party leaders—powered mostly by conservative Republicans in the 3rd District, frustrated by seeing their message increasingly rejected by moderates in the Kansas City area and the resulting “purple creep” that, among other things, kept Representative Sharice Davids in office, despite a Republican gerrymander explicitly designed to get rid of her in 2022—is surely frustrating to those Kansas Republicans who are hoping to move their party out of Trump’s shadow.

Of course, Trump may well be back at the top of the national GOP ticket come 2024, so perhaps the state Republican is just getting ready to fall in line. But for those many Republicans who recognize—even if they keep their views quiet—how hopeless and dangerous adhering that line is, the Brown’s selection likely strikes them as an unfortunate stop backwards, while others try to push ahead.

Songs of '83: "Mr. Roboto"

Forty years ago this month, Styx--motivated partly by the enormous success of their previous two albums, partly by a desire to give the finger to conservative Christian activists who protested their concerts, and partly by the fact that the pop sound they'd only recently embraced seemed increasingly defined by computerized synth beats--released their most ambitious album ever: the rock-opera Kilroy Was Here. Nominally the story--complete with an accompanying film--of the "Majority for Musical Morality" outlawing rock 'n' roll music and using advanced, made-in-Japan robots to throw Styx's lead singer Dennis DeYoung in jail on false charges, who then breaks out and leads a rebellion, I suspect the only thing that most people remember from it is "Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto." Its Nipponophobic caricatures are best forgotten, and the whole production just has not aged well, despite the huge success of its lead single.

Listening to "Mr. Roboto" today, you can hear in it a weird--though still catchy--attempt to both embrace and push back against computerization ("The problem's plain to see / too much technology / Machines to save our lives / machines dehumanize"). Maybe Styx never stopped being prog-rockers at heart? The tensions the band felt over their new direction led them to break up pretty much immediately after this album, so perhaps jumping head-long into the new cosmopolitan, synthesized style wasn't a good idea. I can cut them some slack, though; it was 1983, the Time Magazine-endorsed Year of the Computer, so it's not like they were the only ones experiencing technological angst.

Songs of '83: "Separate Ways"

"Separate Ways" was the first single released off Journey's eighth studio album (and their last great rock album, I think most radio listeners would agree), Frontiers. By early February, 40 years ago, it was making its way up the Billboard charts, eventually cracking the Top Ten. While probably neither the most iconic nor most popular rock power-ballad which the band came up with, its R&B-plus-synths-plus-guitars-plus-Steve Perry's vocals sound is haunting, as the Stranger Things remix makes clear.

As I suggested in my original 1983 thesis, there's a dim sense in which one could argue that 1983 crystalized a transitional cultural moment, a moment when masses of, as I put it, "White, straight, suburban radio-listeners" like myself internalized, in however limited a way, a more urban, more gender-fluid, more multi-racial, more danceable and electronic and funky pop sound. Not that any of that stuff was entirely new, but as some point it became something of a norm, something that couldn't be contained and carved off, as disco at least initially was. Well, no crystalization exists without a counter-reaction. Am I suggesting that Journey, a San Francisco rock band, could be fairly appropriated as an unintentional avatar of the non-Second British Invasion, non-polyglot, White, straight, suburban radio sound of Reagan's America? The distant ancestor of the resentful, Angry White Male American rocker? Almost certainly not. But still, look at that video: they sure do look like a bunch of White dorks, don't they? I mean, that's the way I would play air guitar, if I had to. MTV wasn't their medium, but they had to pretend like it was anyway. 1983: a whole new world, baby.

Songs of '83: "Come On Eileen"

Shooting up the Billboard charts 40 years ago this week, right behind "Billie Jean" (and right ahead of Michael Jackson too; this song eventually landed for one week in the #1 slot in between "Billie Jean" and "Beat It," robbing the King of Pop of having two back-to-back number ones), was "Come On Eileen." I suspect I'm like a large majority of radio-listeners from back then who remember the song fondly, but mostly associate it with one-hit-wonderism and a Simpsons joke. But Dexys Midnight Runners--a hard-working bunch of Birmingham punks who took a soul turn, and named their group after dextroamphetamine, the drug that would keep them going through the midnight hours--had a long history in the UK, and a decent number of hits. With their fiddles and overalls, it might be easy to think they provide some sort of counter-point to my thesis last week the about multiracial, cosmopolitan, deeply urban roots and influences of New Wave on American radio, but no: Birmingham in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the same kind of polyglot, struggling industrial landscape you saw all across the United States, so when these folks turned to early R&B, blues, and rock 'n' roll (however technologically updated) for their music, they were merely pointing out to American audiences the same mix of influences that were already there and waiting. Enjoy!

Songs of '83: "Billie Jean" (Also: Michael Jackson, MTV, and the Year some Comparatively Cosmopolitan Brits Urbanized American Pop Radio)

Forty years ago yesterday, Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," the second single off his early-80s-defining album Thriller, entered the Billboard chart. By March it hit #1, and it stayed there for nearly two months. We all remember the song, and the video, and deservedly so; it was a game-changing song, at least insofar as mainstream American pop music consumption was concerned--and that consumption can tell us something important about 1983, I think. So listen and watch it again, but stick around afterwards for the commentary.

Thriller--and, most particularly, the enormous demand which "Billie Jean" generated--was a crucial player in MTV finally putting music by Black artists into regular rotation, which 18 months into its existence at the time still mostly conceived itself as serving a national FM-radio-style audience for White rock 'n' roll, pop, and heavy metal acts, and not much else. That story has been often told, but I want to look at another angle--one that was made explicit when (again, forty years ago this month), David Bowie, promoting his soon-to-be-released album Let's Dance, asked some pointed questions of the new network:

You can read a transcript of the key, concluding part of the interview here. Mark Goodman's flailing effort to make sense of his employer's decisions by way of regional distinctions ("we have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or [the] Midwest--pick some town in the Midwest--that would be scared to death by Prince") is easy to mock, given that Prince Rogers Nelson was himself a Midwesterner from Minneapolis, Minnesota. But it does make me wonder what more could be said about the nation-wide infatuation with Jackson's brilliant song and video, a song and video rooted a large variety of music and technological trends...but most of which, I think, really could be associated with cities (and urban activities and an urban imaginary tied to places ) like "New York" and "Los Angeles" in particular way. What was changing by 1983 was, among other things, perhaps that "London" needed to be added that list, and perhaps that helped to make the difference.

Ten years ago, I wrote a 4-part series on my memories of listening to pop radio as a young person and young adult, focusing on 1978, 1983, 1988, and 1993. And just about exactly five years ago, I kicked off a year-long series reminiscing about my favorite of those four years, musically speaking: 1978. My opinions haven't fundamentally changed; from an even greater distance today, I still think the swampy, often campy, often ridiculous mix of rock and country, blues and metal, folk and disco, which characterized that year made for some of the greatest popular music of my entire life. But as the 40th anniversary of 1983 arrives, some different ideas dominate my thinking, and I feel like I'm seeing something cosmopolitan, something comparatively multicultural and, lacking any better word, something genuinely (if however vaguely) "urban" as the best descriptor of how musical sensibilities, significantly due to MTV (even against some of its own founders' wishes), were changed that year.

1983 is usually seen--thanks to mainstream coverage it received--as the high-watermark of the Second British Invasion, of what was called, in the sort of limited pop-music conversations I was able to access as a 14-year-old, "synth-pop" or just "New Wave." Any attempt to confine a multifaceted musical movement(s) to a single calendar period is ridiculous, of course, but still, it's not wrong to see 1983 as a culmination of sorts. If punk music meant anything, it meant that rejecting a rock 'n' roll style which had become ponderous and loud and Americanized in a particular post-WWII way (as the English guitarist Martin Simpson put it in the liner notes to his blues album, Smoke and Mirrors, growing up in England in the 1950s and 1960s essentially meant living on a giant U.S. aircraft carrier), and which had been embraced by thousands of English, Scottish, and Irish English-speaking musicians in the 1970s. (This was true, by the way, even if the ideological content implicitly conveyed by that style was harshly attacked; think of the righteous anger at, yet also the total dependency upon invoking, various America-shaped economic, sexual, racial, and historical memories and norms in Pink Floyd's The Wall.) By 1983, as punk had given way, as the racial diversity of the cities of the United Kingdom brought reggae and glam and dance music into post-punk acts, and as these musicians began to do more with the drum machines and synthesizers that had begun to appear throughout Western Europe in the late 1970s, they had done it; they'd conquered American radio (throughout the year, there were regularly more British acts on any given week's Billboard top ten than American). The music of these artists was often technologically unique, and their sexual and aesthetic style--magnified by the visual element to making pop music which was by then well-established in Britain but still new to the U.S.--left the (White) pop music bad boys of the previous two decades far behind. I'm not sure how you can see all this and not see an urban, multicultural, polyglot, sexually experimental perspective at work.

Maybe it didn't have to happen in the UK; there was still the racially charged craziness of New York City and Los Angeles which MTV programmers were worried about, after all. But think about that, and about the way the larger pop radio establishment in America initially resisted it--the anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ, anti-urban undercurrents of Disco Demolition Night were real, after all. Something David Byrne wrote about those mid-to-late 1970s days in the liner notes to the first disc in the 1992 Talking Heads collection Popular Favorites, 1976-1992: Sand in the Vaseline might provide some perspective here:

I wanted my guitar to sound thin, clean and clanky. Not chunky, distorted and macho, like a lot of what was around. My philosophy at the time being that this puny sound was in the true nature of this instrument....the first truly modern instrument. The first scientific industrial instrument...clean, metallic, precise, yet funky and African...the first instrument to embody our young culture...."American" cool-African-futuristic-trash-aesthetic....[T]he beauty of this "American" aesthetic is that it belongs to anyone who claims it...who grooves on it...who sees the deep zen poetry in James Brown's lyrics, in a juke box, a suburban split-level, a wild hairdo, who sees the hope for the future implicit in the shape of an electric guitar (a hope that was becoming a nostalgic joke). So here it was, waiting...do it yourself art/poetry/sex/life/bullshit that anyone could make possibly reach a sizeable audience without compromise. God, everything we were hearing on the radio was either nostalgic or mired in compromise...at least on "Rock" radio. Disco culture was a radical alternative, as much a cool hip subculture with integrity as the little alternative (punk) rock world we inhabited. We liked it...The Jackson Five Get it Together L.P. rates with Sgt. Pepper in my mind.

It's all there: a discontent with an American rock 'n' roll style seen as nostalgic and utterly unwilling to embrace the irreducible plurality and wildness of the musical/technological/urban frontier, which is "American" only in the sense that it is revolutionary and weird, not in the sense of that it carries the presumptions of a superpower. (I love his description of the guitar as simultaneously "metallic" and "African.") What Black and LGBTQ and other populations were bringing into the discos of New York (and London, and Paris, and Berlin, etc.) is part of what I see the whole Second British Invasion as bringing to American radio, building upon and making nationally dominant what earlier post-punk bands and emerging house and dance beats in Black and multi-racial communities had done in dense urban corners of America. Michael Jackson probably didn't need an invasion to get MTV to change its mind, but it certainly didn't hurt that videos from various racially and sexually mixed musicians and bands from the UK and Western Europe had been piling up on their desks for a year and a half before Thriller hit.

The subsequent popularity of many of these dance-music-inspired artists in thoroughly White college campus cultures--the "college radio" of the 1980s--has given some New Wave music a bad reputation, I think; musicians more proximate to the post-punk moment of the mid- to late-1970s--the Talking Heads or Blondie in the United States, the Police, the Pretenders, Joe Jackson, or Elvis Costello and the Attractions in the UK--are more likely to be respected today than the supposedly frivolous and superficial New Wave acts from England that came later. But I don't think that's fair. I would argue that the racially mixed make-up of many of these bands, and the way Black (including Afro-Caribbean), disco-oriented and other international musical styles were electronically interpreted by many of them, speaks against their subsequent, mostly undeserved, American reputation. And frankly, the fact that these artists brought into the mainstream of American pop music consumption--brought into my radio as a teen-age listener in Spokane, WA--the sort of sexual, racial, and material associations which disco had always flirted with arguably helps put the weirdness of much of American popular culture in the 1970s into perspective. Maybe that weirdness (Cher with Greg Allman! Cillia Black with Marc Bolan!) was partly a side-effect of the American media establishment trying to make sense of--and thus contain--all the urban unpredictability which Byrne made mention of above. And maybe, just maybe, in some very indirect, deeply structural way, the manner which the White rock 'n' roll and metal acts which had been MTV's bread and butter responded to the rise of Michael Jackson and the New Wave can be put into the same story as well.

Years ago, the critic Stephen Metcalf, while writing about Morrissey and the Smiths (a band that might best be described as a 1960s-style rock 'n' roll band that skipped punk, went post-punk, and never evolved further), wrote something that has stayed with me ever since:

1983, the year of “This Charming Man,” is the year the ‘80s became the ‘80s. Up until that point, Thatcherism in England and Reaganism in the United States had been little more than hollow promises. Then interest rates fell, the two economies thawed, and spandex was everywhere. It was the year of Flashdance at the box office, of “Every Breath You Take” and Thriller on the Billboard 100; the year of Risky Business and The Big Chill. If this list doesn’t make you want to crawl into your bolt hole--well, you are probably not a Smiths fan. I think the word that best captures the times is heartless, as evident in the stupid rictus of Sting’s face, circa 1983, as it was in Margaret Thatcher’s budget cuts. No wonder Morrissey’s voice sounded so fresh, so slyly subversive. As much as he publicly avowed a hatred of Thatcher, culminating in “Margaret at the Guillotine,” it was Thatcherism that made Morrissey. The Iron Lady represented a hardness of purpose, a pitilessness that would allow England once again to produce winners. But also, inevitably, losers.

I think about this passage today, in light of a deeper awareness of the racial history of the Western world than I had even as recently as five years ago, when I wrote my tribute to the songs of 1978, and I wonder if one might not also see 1983 as being a year when a certain kind of determined backlash to the multi-racial and androgynous dance mixes and synthesized beats that had spread so deeply in Western cities (though possibly not, at least according to MTV, to Poughkeepsie) took root. Can you imagine someone turning on Friday Night Videos (which premiered in 1983 and was my gateway drug, by the way; we didn't have cable) or just the radio, listening to or watching Culture Club or Lionel Richie and realizing "Good grief, we didn't stop disco: it's everywhere!"? I don't know what kind of "response" such a hypothetical realization could have given rise to; it's not like you can separate musical trends from those of other media, to say nothing of the politics of Reagan's America and the final decade of the Cold War in general. All this stuff comes together, after all, with cross-influences going every which way. But still--the fact that 1983 was the year KISS took off their make-up, the year that Metallica and Mötley Crüe released their first albums, the year Def Leppard went head-to-head with with Black and New Wave and similarly influenced pop artists for Billboard dominance...well, it makes me wonder. Not that you can code New Wave and dance music as liberal and heavy metal and hard rock as conservative (if anything, I'd have to think about what was happening to country music in the 1980s to make any of this actually plausible). Still, to see 1983 as a watershed year, with the divides over winners and losers becoming more culturally explicit, such that the majority of White, straight, suburban radio-listeners like myself became aware of them for the first time? There may be some sense to that, I think.

This year, I'm going to do a "Songs of '83" series, like I did five years ago. None of them will be as long as this one, I think. But I see something in the history of pop music that perhaps I didn't before, and as the Billboard chart of 1983 brings songs to my attention, maybe I'll point them out, for whomever is interested. I kind of am, if no one else. For now, though, thanks Mr. Jackson; thanks for making MTV cave into the popularity of an urban-centric, technologically changing, post-American Century musical reality which they'd been surrounded by since they'd begun (MTV's very first video was the New Wave band the Buggles with "Video Killed the Radio Star," after all), but hadn't accepted the racial consequences of yet, perhaps. My youthful radio-listening and tv-watching habits are in your debt.