‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’: the Idea of the 80s
In the perma-retro that constitutes contemporary life, the 80s is a montage from Wall Street, St. Elmo’s Fire, and Desperately Seeking Susan: a sequence of wet-gel, shoulder pads and designer suits, backed by bombastically upbeat music. Even 80s revisits like Wolf of Wall Street and Black Mirror’s San Junipero don’t go far from the format. We don’t often speak of right-wing utopianism – more of its “cold stream” realism – but the enduring fantasies of the 80s exemplified just that. For all both Wall Street and Wolf of Wall Street’s acknowledgement of 80s’ corruption, cruelty and volatility, it is the class-A rush of acquisition, consumption and social contract-busting that stays with the viewer. And the same is true of book and film of Bonfire of the Vanities and even American Psycho.
With California the alma mater of right-wing utopianism, via Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan in the 60s, California-set San Junipero’s choice of Belinda Carlisle’s 80s hit ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’ as its closing theme offers the perfect processed, high-gloss anthem for a marketplace utopia that is all style, cars, sex and sunshine. The episode demonstrates how the 80s consumed the previous ‘meaning’ of California as acme of the counterculture. In both song and drama’s curiously depopulated heaven, the social has been entirely voided (“nobody on the road, nobody on the beach”): the nightclubs are a spectacle of sociality – everyone is actually alone, (“dancing all by myself”). The counterculture – the essence of the collective; of the utopian – had never seemed so dowdy, so naive or just downright dead as it did in the 80s. Hippyphobia was a thing: style, materialism and individualism ruled: the counterculture had been countered.
Or had it? Because for leftists there was and is a different 80s, where a montage might run in grainy news-stock from the Patco strike to 81 to late 80s Act Up activism, from the UK’s ’81 countrywide riots to the miner’s strike of 84-5. This montage also has a soundtrack, most obviously in a more monochrome, stripped-down anti-80s aesthetic (see: Billy Bragg, The Smiths, REM’s Document, Springsteen’s Nebraska, John Mellencamp; Public Enemy). Such music confronts the 80s as dystopia. But less obvious – and the focus of this article – is music that countered the glossy 1980s where it lived and loved; music that inhabited its processed drums, synthesizer swashes and aspirational choruses. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1984 ‘Two Tribes’ (UK 1) is one example; 1982’s ‘Wham Rap’ (UK 8) another. But this article focuses on music that looked back – as against the 80s’ perennial ‘now’ (“Don’t look back, you can never look back”) – and looked back to the time within living memory when things were different: the 60s. A time when reality was different; when the imaginary was different: unbounded; affirmative; utopian. It would be easy for such music to be morbid, an instance of left melancholia. “A left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure” as Wendy Brown put it: “whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing” (1999: 26). But with Brown writing in neoliberal lockdown 1999, when large swathes of the left had settled for centrism, her conclusions – more postmodernism, less utopianism – are actually themselves a form of left melancholy: ‘realist’ and ultimately defeatist. By contrast, the mainstream 1980s music that this article analyses – now mostly regarded as ‘yacht rock’ – is utopian: heaven is a place on earth.
‘Two Tribes’: Neoliberalism and the Counterculture
While the right’s favoured hauntological era is the 1950s – see: Reagan’s 1984 campaign video – conservatives were actually haunted by the 60s: but in that less frequently utilized sense of ‘haunted’ as frightened. Margaret Thatcher blustered, “We are reaping what was sown in the sixties. The fashionable theories and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which the old virtues of discipline and self-restraint were denigrated” (Thatcher 1982). Thatcher, quite rightly, saw the union militancy of the 70s as a direct outgrowth of the 60s. Ronald Reagan’s genius was to link liberal economics to social conservatism, invoking the spectre of the 60s: “during the late sixties … the gurus of hedonism and permissiveness were given a respectable hearing” (in von Bothmer 2010: 38). Marcuse – the theorist most associated with the counterculture – tapped into both conservative fear and leftist longing when declaring that the counterculture invoked “the spectre of a world which could be free” (1956: 93). Crucially his language also invokes Marx’s “spectre of communism”. “Revolution Now” wasn’t just a slogan. The counterculture frightened the established order because massed collectives of young people physically rejected consensus authority: teachers, politicians, police, military, judiciary. The counterculture lived freedom; lived utopianism.
If the counterculture’s political gains were limited, its alliances with organised labour uneasy, that Democratic and Labour governments introduced civil rights laws, abortion rights and legalisation of homosexuality is attributable to countercultural pressure, with conservatives perennially trying to plug the dam. Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964-5, and as governor of California from 1967-75 repealed gun laws and sent in armed police to the 1969 People’s Park assembly at Berkeley, crushing left utopianism where it stood. Seeing the counterculture as the toxic waste from the post-war’s leftwards shift, neoliberals responded with their own utopian project of “the restoration of economic power to the upper class” (Harvey 2007: 26). By the 80s, and real legislative power, they could make this reality. But as Mark Fisher says in Acid Communism, “the rise of capitalist realism could not [have] happened without the narratives that reactionary forces told about [the 60s and 70s]” (2018: 757). 60s revolutionary dreams had to be un-imagined.
So in neoliberal ideology, “May 68 became a purely cultural change, a kind of carnival in which, playing a revolutionary game, the youth pushed the society […] to modern forms of liberalism and individualism” (Traverso 2016: 13). By the 90s, following the collapse of Soviet Communism, it was safe to rehabilitate the 60s as stylistic simulacra, stripped of utopianism; of revolutionary impulses. As such, Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head (1994) is the Blairite guide to The Beatles: while he acknowledges the “obscure sense of loss” the 60s left behind (1995: 2), MacDonald sees its main legacy as “the revolutionary present: the NOW” (1995: 18). But “we want the world and we want it now” is not the same as “we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time”, the kind of 60s trope favoured by the 90s (see: Primal Scream’s acid house Screamadelica, 1991). In blaming the 60s for the 80s’ “complete materialistic individualisation […] of society” (1995: 30), MacDonald misses how the 80s took the counterculture’s demands for instant fulfillment, its ideal of ‘freedom’, its optimism but denuded them of their collectivity; of their utopianism. These contested concepts become what Alan Sinfield calls ‘faultlines’ – revealing their ideological project while creating space where dissident meanings can appear. Equally, what we are describing here is better known nowadays as ‘hauntology’.
‘Ghostbusters’: ‘Hauntology’ 2.0
It’s essential when discussing hauntology to confront the concept’s relationship to ‘left melancholy’ – a term originating with Walter Benjamin. Indeed, writing now, after the 2019 UK election, when political comparisons to the 1980s are rife – a defeated left; an electorally turbocharged neoliberalism; a resurgent nationalism – a left melancholic immersion in “I ❤the 80s” escapism could be all too enticing. But there is little about the 80s about which we should feel nostalgic. Enzo Traverso in Left-Wing Melancholia makes the crucial distinction between ‘the victim’ and ‘the vanquished’: “The memory of the Gulag erased that of revolution, the memory of the Holocaust replaced that of antifascism and the memory of slavery eclipsed that of anticolonialism” (2016: 10). ‘Victims’ are passive, tragic, evanescent; the ‘vanquished’ are active in struggle, utopian even in defeat: material. As such looking back can be an energising rather than an enervating process; can be galvanising rather than galling.
As such, this article engages with hauntology to consider the role of retrospect in culture from a left perspective. Jacques Derrida’s coinage, in Specters of Marx (1994: 10, 63, 202) ‘hauntology’ is a play on ‘ontology’ – ‘being’ – and describes that which – metaphorically – occupies a liminal space between the living and the dead; “that which acts without physically existing”, as Mark Fisher glosses it (2014: 19). As a concept, hauntology is hugely useful – particularly once you delete Derrida’s quibbling playfulness from the equation – and this article builds on Fisher’s use of the concept to try and render it both more widely applicable and more material. Firstly, then, ‘hauntology’ should be opened up from its usual application to post-90s music. Not to lapse into the common misuse as the critical banality, ‘haunting’. The mining of the past in music that is not consciously retro or performatively postmodern is actually more haunting by its very insinuating subtlety, denying the immediate ‘hit’ of subjective nostalgia. As for the counterculture as this article’s focus of hauntology, Jeremy Gilbert testifies to Fisher’s own punk-derived “hippyphobia” (Gilbert 2017: 24), but late in his life, Fisher was working on ‘Acid Communism’ (2019: 753-70), and applying hauntological language to the counterculture’s persistence in cultural memory": “haunts’ (2019: 755), “dreamings” (756), “exorcism” (757), “spectre” (757).
Secondly – and relatedly – there is within hauntology a potential for a kind of morbid serenity – Brown’s left melancholy immersing both object and subject. This likely has its origins in the gothic revival – that most hauntological of genres – and Heathcliff’s invitation to Cathy in Wuthering Heights, “Haunt me then”. Comforting as this form of left melancholy can be, it is enervating, as attested by Fredric Jameson: “To remember the dead is neurotic and obsessive and merely feeds a sterile repetition” (2009: 144). This article aims to show how it is possible to look back into the past and find not just capitulation and despair but defiance and hope. This is why I’m uneasy with Fisher’s emphasis on “the failure of the future” (2012: 16): it can seem like giving up on the utopian; something the left can never afford to do. In his most extended piece on the subject, however, the introduction to Ghosts of My Life, Fisher does formulate a more energised hauntology, which “constitutes a refusal to give up on the desire for the future. This refusal gives the melancholia a political dimension […] a failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism” (Fisher 2014: 21-2). This allies hauntology with Raymond Williams’ “residual ideology” (1977: 122), dynamic traces of the past that inspire the present; what he calls “retrospect as aspiration” (1973: 42) “the happier past [….] as an impulse to change” (1973: 43).
Similarly, for Marcuse, memory functions “to preserve promises and potentialities which are betrayed and even outlawed by the mature, civilized individual”, and the past becomes “the vehicle of future liberation” (1956: 19). So, as Traverso argues, we need to get beyond Freud’s assertion in Mourning and Melancholia that mourning is a process we pass through and move on from (Traverso 2016: 45). For Traverso, 1980s AIDS activism, for instance, was a “fruitful act of mourning that, instead of paralyzing actions” represented “a militancy … which drew its strength from within melancholy and bereavement” (20). For Traverso, “Marxist teleology implied remembrance as a key element of its utopian imagination” (2016: 71), quoting Trotsky’s assertion that revolution is “raised from the deeps of memory” to “break a road into the future” (Traverso 2016: 71).
‘We are the World’: the Social and the 80s
Far from being about 80s nostalgia then, this article focuses on the 80s as a dystopia, but in which a longing for utopia can still be located. One instance of that dystopia was the way the social became reduced as a concept in the 80s, from Thatcher’s “there’s no such thing as society”, to competitive individualism, from “greed is good” ... to USA for Africa’s ‘We Are the World’. Such superstar collaborations were constitutive of the 80s, philosophically reframing and physically representing its reduced vision of the ‘social’. Such collectives are best compared to the era’s drug of choice: cocaine: you do it together, but from its accoutrements – high-denomination notes; a mirror – to the result – egotistic, master-of-the-universe volubility – cocaine is not actually social but competitively individualist. So what better format for superstar collaboration than that cockiest and most narcissistic of genres, the power ballad? We are the world.
This is largely how Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 collaboration, ‘Under Pressure’ (UK 1; US 29) has been received (Ewing 2000): competitive egotism masquerading as social concern, for people whose idea of pressure was the size of their tax bills. ‘Under Pressure’s evocation of ‘pressure’ however is an acknowledgement of the impact of neoliberalism: the burning down buildings could be literal – late capitalism’s rewriting of the urban landscape through endless ‘development’; insurance scams – or metaphorical: economic devastation. Or, pursuing the Jungian theme in Talking Heads’ ‘Burning Down the House’ (1983), the image can reference how 80s ideology reprogrammed the collective psyche. “People on streets”, meanwhile itemises homelessness but also demonstrations, picket lines: struggle: the victims and the vanquished. In all of this the social, Williams’ “communal idea” [1973: 42]), is explicit.
The song’s response to this “pressure” – “keep coming up with love but it’s so slashed and torn” is more therefore than superstar platitude. It’s a reassertion of the lost countercultural sense of the word ‘love’ – as in “love-in”, “summer of love” – where agape and Eros conjoined; where love songs were about love for all mankind (The Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ [], Donovan’s ‘Wear Your Love Like Heaven’). Moreover, the song acknowledges ‘love’s beleaguered status in this 80s hostile environment – not just “slashed and torn”, but “such an old-fashioned word”. So yes, “It’s a sad hippie song” (O’Leary 2018: 170), a ghost of the counterculture, but it’s a more active haunting than that: “love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night […] love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves”. These lines are a tribute to the vanquished and a plea for the social contract as against 80s hard-nosed individualism, with the social explicitly anchored in that “old-fashioned” countercultural meaning of ‘love’. Consequently Mercury’s ecstatically giddy repetition of “give love, give love, give love…” (2:48-2:57) is haunting in an exhilarating, active sense; channelling the counterculture through the heart of the 80s; utterly inhabiting one of its key cultural forms, the power ballad. The haunt in this song then is nothing to do with 80s nostalgia – it evokes an 80s dystopia – but everything to do with 60s utopianism.
Few people are more 80s than Prince: he pervaded and effectively constituted the era. Yet that constitution was subversive, because his mid-80s albums explicitly harked back to the counterculture, elevating the social both visually and musically. His breakthrough album, Purple Rain (1984) introduced his backing band, The Revolution, which, like Sly and the Family Stone in the 60s, was a utopian collective of women, men, blacks, whites, Latinx, straights and queers (just as his music was a mash-up of white/black/new wave/soul).
Prince could do so little wrong in the 80s that his follow-up, Around the World in a Day (1985) could swerve into unfashionable psychedelia and still succeed. The album was trailed – outside America – by ‘Paisley Park’ (UK 18), complete with psychedelic sleeve, tinkling middle-Eastern finger cymbals and woozily feedbacking guitars. Not to mention an achingly nostalgic psychedelic Sesame Street-style video, chock full of kids, capes, kaftans, McGuinn shades and, naturally, paisley. With its processed drums and decaying synthesizers, the song was also utterly contemporary: the 60s not just haunting but possessing the 80s. The lyrics hymn a utopian space “of profound inner peace” where “love is the color this place imparts” – ‘love’ again used in the countercultural sense; indeed “Paisley Park is in your heart”, love as the utopian spatial. Crucial to the song’s haunt – at the time; not just in retrospect – melancholy is incorporated into the song’s sunny swoon: Paisley Park is offered as a salve to a betrayed widow and a man whose home has been condemned under ‘regeneration’. Not only are parks essentially social spaces, they played a key role in the counterculture: People’s Park, as noted; while Golden Gate Park was the axis of the Haight-Asbury hippie scene. Where Carlisle’s utopia is privatised, Prince’s is communal: “Come 2 the park/And play with us”. That Prince’s Paisley Park studio and home should now be a museum is thus entirely appropriate.
Some distance from such sublimity, Grateful Dead cohort Bruce Hornsby’s 1986, ‘The Way It Is’ (US no. 1; UK no. 15) is ostensibly typically 80s fare: big drums, fretless bass, acoustic piano managing that 80s trick of sounding artificial and synths filling every spare space like an anxious host. The result is blandness itself but both carries a haunting melancholy, and serves as a Trojan Horse for the lyric. It could be an answer to ‘This Is It’ (see below) and the “cognitive locking” of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005: 114). “That’s just the way it is” is a sarcastic echoing of neoliberalism’s naturalisation of poverty; the poor are always with us etc. The first verse describes the stacked class war of the 1980s: gutted welfare lines on one side; glutted yuppies on the other. “The man in the silk suit hurries by… just for fun he says ‘get a job” is a neat summation of the shredding of the social contract and the lionizing of acquisitiveness. The third verse explicitly enumerates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and its inability to tackle systemic racism. ‘Systemic’ is the key word here: the song disavows individualism and reaffirms the social, both in negative (the effect of neoliberal economics; the sneering yuppie) and positive (collective action) terms. There is such a thing as society; ‘love’ in the countercultural sense, endures.
‘The Power of Love: Love and the 80s
It was against such countercultural traces, such hippie hauntings that ‘love’ as a concept was being, as the 80s progressed, privatised: not just restricted to the personal realm, but turned into a product; a transaction; an investment. Madonna’s 1984 ‘Material Girl’ (US 2; UK 3) exemplifies this neoliberalism of the interpersonal. The song’s ungrammatical double entendre is ideological, making the material – reality – and materialism – acquisitiveness –one and the same. Love here is a business transaction, an investment in futures that lives or dies by the profit imperative: “If they can't raise my interest then I/Have to let them be”. While far more appealing, ‘Into the Groove’ is still a marketization of love: “you’ve got to prove your love to me” is Madonna Inc. inviting competitive tender bids for a possible post. She might as well be dancing “all by [her]self”.
This reconception of the love song – and of love itself – was endemic to the 80s. Hall and Oates were the paradigmatic yacht rockers, essaying a bleached-white soul cut with electronic new wave edge. Their ‘I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)’ (US 1; UK 8) is actually addressed to a business manager rather than a lover. This common confusion does not just conjoin business and pleasure but renders the transactional libidinal, brought to jouissance by the twinkling synths, body-popping rhythm and Hall’s ecstatic vocal. This seductiveness undermines what might otherwise be a protest - “you got the body now you want my soul”. There simply wasn’t much sense this pair would “say no go” to anything, such is the personable positivity of their music, and having assiduously repackaged themselves – bodies and all – as 80s product. Super high-quality product but product nonetheless.
No such claims can be made for Robert Palmer’s 1988 hit, ‘Simply Irresistible’ (US 2). Here the language of the love song has become perverted: “How can it be permissible/She compromise my principle”. It’s a song of complete capitulation: “She’s a powerful force/You're obliged to conform when there's no other course [….] The trend is irreversible”. This is a love song to neoliberalism, so masochistic is its embrace of capitalist realism that there is no vestige of even right wing utopianism about it.
Elsewhere in the 80s, however, love refused to be packaged. Stevie Nicks’ 1983 hit, ‘Stand Back’ (US: 5) presented a startling 80s sonic rebrand for a 70s star: all traces of laid-back folk and country erased by booming Linn drums, swathes of synths and new wave urgency. Prince was both direct inspiration and collaborator on the song. But the repackaging was undercut both by Nicks herself – her wispy, disembodied voice pulls against the production’s plasticity; her diaphanous witchy capes in the video channel countercultural medievalism amidst contemporary camp – and the song’s content. Having been in a relationship with Fleetwood Mac bandmate, Lindsey Buckingham, since the 60s, Nicks was now entering a loveless, transactional marriage to her best friend’s widow – relationship as contractual obligation. The wedding is evoked in the song as joyless, bureaucratized: “standing in a line”, with Nicks’ implication of the era’s growing welfare lines adding to the evocation of people as product, as numbers. Nicks then invokes Buckingham – the past; the 60s – to come and save her: that he fails to do so (“no man came”), means he becomes the ghost at the wedding feast. The chorus’s instruction to “stand back” then is a different kind of 80s imperative: a plea to step back from ideologically foreshortened ‘reality’, and regain a more utopian vision. The marriage would last a mere three months, but even without such biographical knowledge, ‘Stand Back’ is a song which refuses the 80s’ reduction of love and haunts – indeed possesses – the 80s present with the 60s past.
Carly Simon’s ‘Coming Around Again’ from 1986 (US 18; UK 10) features another female countercultural survivor; another sonically updated star of the 70s, and another refusal of capitulation to conventional expectations. Here, 80s sonic expectations are embraced with such excess – swooning syndrums; jerky bass synth; Emulator xylophone – that they destabilise rather than modernise the power ballad format. Similarly 80s emotional expectations are embraced but destabilized in the lyric: the narrator plays the part of the diligent housewife – “pay the grocer/fix the toaster” – in a relationship that looks “so good on paper”: more transactional language, underlined by the sarcastic “so romantic!” Yet she can’t adopt the rictus grin of crushing conformity “to play the game”. Instead she “screams” her lullaby, “break(s) a window” and threatens to “fall apart”. Simon is dramatizing, in the interpersonal realm, the struggle against the demands of the dominant that Traverso emphasises and that underlies apparent ‘consent’ to neoliberalism (Alderson 2016: 58). “There’s more room in a broken heart”, shows how the space taken for consent is created from something broken. There’s a subtle sense that things used to better – the relationship, the times (“I know nothing stays the same”), so the counterculture is located in what otherwise is mysterious: it’s what will be ‘coming around again’? Thus the refrain, “I believe in love” is not a resigned concession to conformity, but a reaffirmation of ‘love’ in the countercultural sense. ‘Love’ is thus restored to its countercultural meaning as against its 80s privatisation.
‘This is It!’: Realism, the Past and the 80s
Check out at any 80s chart and it’s astonishing how many of the era’s hits carry an implicit exclamation mark. ‘Express Yourself”! ‘Open Your Heart’! The biggest-selling album of the 80s, Michael Jackson’s 1982 Thriller, features song after song of imperatives to face reality: ‘Wanna Be Starting Something’; ‘The Girl is Mine’; ‘Beat It’. With ‘realism’ a key neoliberal motif (Fisher 2009; Beckett 2016: xix), such songs might be dubbed TINA songs after Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’: the insistence on a bounded, processed ‘reality’. These 80s controlling imperatives stand in stark contrast to the liberating 60s imperatives of Sly and the Family Stone (‘Stand!’, ‘Dance to the Music’! ‘Sing a Simple Song’!): a processed, clenched-teeth ‘joy’.
‘Yacht rock’ like Jackson is conventionally associated with good living and escapism (Orlofsky 2011), but the distance into which yacht rock sails has distinctly bounded horizons. Circumscribed by neoliberal ideology, yacht rock is a tanning salon simulacra of perfection in which true utopianism is occluded. Take the yacht rock dream-team of Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald: their ‘This Is It’ from neoliberal year zero, 1979 (US 11) declares, “Make no mistake where you are … your back’s to the corner/this is it”. Romantic, huh? Because whatever the song’s avowed intentions, what’s being communicated here is essentially the neoliberal superego: “Don’t you run/no way to hide/no time for wonderin’ why/it’s here, the moment is now.” Note that last line: as facing reality is almost always synonymous with the present moment, the bounding of horizons tends to take on a temporal as well as a spatial aspect. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher calls neoliberalism “a culture that privileges only the present and the immediate”, in which “the extirpation of the long term extends backwards as well as forwards in time” (2009: 59). So McDonald, on 1986’s ‘Sweet Freedom’ (US 7; UK 12) recuperates the countercultural term ‘freedom’ in designer neoliberal suits, and advises: “reach […] out to meet the changes”. The lyric dismisses, “dancing to a different drum” as “all the madness in yesterday” (the counterculture, clearly), while counselling, “There’s no turnin’ back”.
However, some 80s songs still defiantly look back. Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ (US 2; UK 25) is another slice of psychedelicised 80s pop, musically string-swept; full of tinkling finger cymbals, and lyrically suffused with nostalgic yearning (something easily missed at the time). The story is vaporous as patchouli oil but occupies the mythic register via the notalgic distance between tale and telling. The girl is physical in pervy Prince tradition but also symbolic, mythical. Primary, in raspberry beret, free of spirit (“she came in through the out door”), free of love, she is a hippie chick (check out the 80s flower children in the video), but surely also the counterculture itself. Together she and our drop-out lover (“busy doing something close to nothing”) Easy Ride on his bike back to the garden (“down by old man Johnson’s farm”) – beautifully psychedelicised in the video – before the epiphanic, elemental, ah, climax. Again, for all the salaciousness, there is a mythic, yearning, utopian element here: years later, the narrator is still haunted, not just by her but by what she represents: lost youth, for sure; but the loss of the counterculture that lived such dreams too.
Don Henley’s international 1984 hit, ‘Boys of Summer’ (US 5; UK 12) taps so many of these themes that it provides the title to this article, and is considered here at some length. On the surface, ‘Boys of Summer’ is archetypal yacht rock – slick, shiny, modern, escapist. But despite the acres of synth chords, the echoing, processed drums, and the song’s breathless clip, the song is so steeped in melancholy that all these modern elements become otherworldly, eerie. This derives in part from Henley’s characteristically plaintive, keening vocal; partly from the topic – a spurned lover haunting the summer streets of LA; coasting on memories – but also in the detail: why are the beach, streets and lake all empty?
The ex, it turns out, is off having fun in the sun with younger men – the titular boys. So this a song of autumn to summer; and the narrator’s beta-male bluster in the second verse about getting her back and showing her what he’s made of is a claim for the solidity and dependability of age as against the ephemerality and fleetingness of youth. The meta-elements are hard to avoid: Henley was a star of the 70s, a former Eagle gone solo in middle age, so the song becomes a plea for contemporary currency as an artist as much as a lover. Thus Henley’s characteristic laid back country vibe ditched for new-wave urgency and synth-pop sonics; thus a drummer starting his song with the sound of a drum machine.
The song’s meta-levels keep increasing as the song progresses however, and in the final verse, during his endless driving, the narrator spots “a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac”. ‘Heads’ are hippies; ‘Dead Heads’ fanatical followers of the Grateful Dead, who kept the 60s Haight-Ashbury scene alive via their countercultural roadshow into the 80s. Some, by then, would be driving aspirational Cadillacs. Ostensibly the Dead Head sticker then is a metaphor for a sentimental attachment to something no longer relevant. “Don’t look back, you can never look back” warns the “little voice inside [the narrator’s] head”. Yuppies retaining a badge of their youthful hippie utopianism against adult neoliberal ‘reality’ thus mirrors the narrator clinging to a relationship that no longer exists. As such though, it’s a strangely specific, distracting image with which to end the song, a finale that undermines all that has led up to it: if the relationship/counterculture were of no value, why all the fuss, why the yearning – why the haunt?
The song makes much more sense by foregrounding that final image, and seeing the Dead Head sticker as the song’s structure of feeling; what the singer, during all that endless driving, has been circling around. In this reading, ‘Boys of Summer’ is as much about being haunted by the collective as by the personal past. “I thought I knew what love was/what did I know?” thus invokes love in both the interpersonal and the countercultural sense; “Those days are gone forever/I should just let ‘em go but…” refers not just to the relationship but to the 60s. The song is haunted by the counterculture, and those chiding directives – “what did I know?”; “let ‘em go”, “don’t look back” – can thus be seen as the neoliberal superego: “a little voice inside my head”, reasserting its reduced reality. This now begins to explain the song’s eerie luminosity: those empty streets, the deserted beach, the lover’s uninhabited house – they all evoke the loss of the social, an affective and cultural space that has been curtailed; privatised; gone solo. Within this alienated space, the singer relentlessly, neurotically tries to reconnect to that more meaningful, social past. Far from representing an acceptance of the bounded horizons of capitalist realism then, the song’s use of synths, drum machines and that nervy, agitated tempo actually inhabits, haunts, possesses the 80s present with the 60s past; defiantly flying a countercultural freak flag in the alienated, dystopian depths of the 80s.
‘Glory Days’: Haunted Heartlands – the Working Class and the 80s
The 80s genre of ‘heartland rock’ has a particular resonance right now given the post-election UK emphasis on Labour’s lost “heartlands”. The decimation of working class industries, landscapes, communities and organisations that began under Reagan and Thatcher has now largely been completed. And now as then, the working classes in those heartlands continue to vote for right-wing parties.
So how can music that is ontologically ‘authentic’ be ‘hauntological’? Stripped-down, essaying a full-bodied rock’n’roll that is anything-but ectoplasmic, with lyrics firmly anchored in gritty realism. The contrast with the ethereal androgyny of Prince seems acute. Yet heartland rock is, like the working class itself, neither just rugged masculinity, nor as white as it seems. Heartland rock is actually an intrinsically hauntological genre. Springsteen’s music, lyrics and aesthetic were haunted from the outset by 50s rock’n’roll and juvenile delinquent films; by 60s girl groups and folkies. And while there was always swagger, raunch and bombast, there was also vulnerability, yearning and regret, from ‘Lost in the Flood’ through ‘Backstreets’, ‘Racing in the Street’, The River’. What was being mourned was a community, a way of life, a culture, and Springsteen – who turned 18 in the Summer of Love – heads up a genre that mourns the counterculture and organised labour in tandem.
Courting 80s success, Springsteen adapted his sound, so the Born in the USA arrived stadium-ready with its huge, booming drums, its gleaming, fill-every-space synth chords and climb-every-monitor echo. So it is hard now to hear ‘Born in the USA’ (US 9; UK 5) as haunted: its brashness and populist patriotism are almost a parody of the ‘authentic’ (while ‘Glory Day’s is essentially lumpen). Yet the song is audibly, emotively haunted by the 60s: by the Vietnam War specifically but by the lost legacy of 1960s left social democracy in the era of Reagan Democrats too. ‘Born in the USA’ is a protest song, and every neck-popping fibre of the song shrieks of loss, with that loss located in the sixties.
John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp benefited from Springsteen’s success with his 1986 Scarecrow album, but had always carried a haunt of nostalgia in his music: the retrospective regret in the chorus of ‘Jack and Diane’ pulls against the cinematic teenage ‘now’ of the verse. Although the album is distinctly 80s, with its huge, crashing drum sound, the reference-points on Scarecrow are specifically 60s. In ‘Lonely Ol’ Night’ (US 6), you can hear that loneliness as existential to the Regan 80s: “I’m just so scared and lonely all at the same time”. “Scared” doesn’t make much sense emotionally; but makes plenty economically. Equally the lonely couple relating to The Four Tops’ ‘Standing in the Shadows of Love’ seems to highlight the way economic precarity becomes an emotional state of being: “And it's a sad sad sad sad feeling/When you're living on those in betweens.” That both this and ‘R.O.C.K. in the USA’ (US 2) come with black and white promos posits heartland rock as retro-realism, an implicit rebuttal of capitalist realism.
‘R.O.C.K. in the USA’ posits the musician as archetypally utopian figure: “With pipe dreams in their heads/And very little money in their hands/Some are black and some are white/Ain't to proud to sleep on the floor tonight.” And their inspiration again seems to be located in the 60s: “Filled our head full of dreams/Turned the world upside down” –the language of the Levellers, as transposed through the counterculture. That the song then pulls on a panoply of girl groups (Shangri-Las) and soul artists (Martha Reeves; James Brown) to exemplify this ‘rock’ ideal is itself a political statement that gets beyond heartland rock machismo and whiteness. Sure, 60s soul is not the counterculture, but it’s a gateway drug, the nexus of civil rights, soul music and Students for a Democratic Society being the immediate – and explicitly leftist – launchpad of the counterculture.
Bryan Adams is an outlier here in terms of both talent and nationality, but his neo-Springsteen shtick and US popularity make him an honorary heartland rocker. ‘Summer of ‘69’, from 1985 (US 5), can’t be overlooked within 60s nostalgia, making prominent use of a chiming 12-string electric guitar – a fundamentally 60s sound that is “a nod to The Beatles, The Byrds and The Searchers”. The 12-string lingered through the long 60s hangover of the early 70s, almost disappeared in the late 70s, before re-emerging in the jangle of 60s retro bands like The Rain Parade and REM. Here the 12-string is intertwined with 80s sonics – a constant synth drone; the back-row of the stadium echo. If Adams now passes the title’s 60s reference off off as an apolitical double entendre, his older cowriter, Jim Vallance demurs. Yet the use of the mythic register again invokes the past as something larger than lost love: “Oh, when I look back now/That summer seemed to last forever”. This is utopian, heaven as a place on earth: “And if I had the choice/Yeah, I’d always wanna be there/Those were the best days of my life.” The yearning here seems to be as much about the 60s as the girl, but rooted in working class life (the promo is yet more b/w realist retro). This is particularly striking when you get to the temporal shift’s invocation of Bob Dylan: “And now the times are changin’…I look at you and wonder what went wrong”. The way the personal tracks political change here is not just post-‘River’ coincidence: for US and UK listeners it refuses neoliberal claim of executing a shift from 60s and 70s darkness to 80s sunlight. The song is thus a rare 80s reminder of the sheer joyousness of the 60s, resisting contemporary capitalist ‘realism’ and thus creating a space to imagine alternative futures.
‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’ Redux
At the end of history, the end of the 80s, time became cyclical again. So let’s return to where we started, with Belinda Carlisle’s ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’. What now apparent is that while everything about the song aspires to upbeatness – the aspirational vocabulary; its fast chug for a power ballad; the way synth-chords saturate every spare space (thank you Thomas Dolby); even Carlisle’s engineered face in the promo – there is something off here; a sense of lack. And it’s not just the usual 80s huge-but-hollow shtick, or the general schlockiness of the song. No, there is something melancholy in the melody – even the chorus is in a minor key (C sharp minor) – something that tugs curiously in the pre-chorus’s key change to G major (even if you are reluctant to be tugged). Sure, there is a reduced-horizon, pound-shop utopia here, one voided of the social, that defines heaven – eternity – as the likely temporary alliance between two individuals. A heaven that is curiously depopulated: the one social image is that of kids heard but not seen outside on the street – the ghost of the social haunting the lovers’ soundstage from the deep distance. This can’t but remind you of the fact that heaven is where people go when they die; indeed – massive spoiler alert – that is precisely the point of San Junipero. This heaven then is ghostly; hauntological. Right-wing utopianism would surely be more material in both Madonna’s senses: but not only is the sense of time and space ectoplasmic but not a single object is mentioned. Without the rush of indulgence or acquisition that we saw in all those iconic 80s movies, this love song is too vague, too ephemeral to even be transactional. Even the implied sexual congress is softcore, incorporeal; “You pull me close and we start to move/And we’re spinning with the stars above/And you lift me up in a wave of love.” It is this ethereality, this intangibility that begins to explain the melancholic pull in the pre-chorus: the song is haunted by the absence of heaven. Couldn’t this be due to there being a ‘heaven’, a utopia envisioned within living memory; when people thought they might be “ushering in the Kingdom of heaven on earth” (Lee and Shlain 1992).
If this submerged desire to “get back to the garden” of the 60s seems fanciful, consider two facts. Firstly, Carlisle had been in the Go-Go’s, a 60s influenced indie act (despite her 80s makeover Carlisle carries a hint of the 60s both in her fringe and her dancing). Secondly, one of the backing singers is Michelle Phillips, one quarter of The Mamas and the Papas, whose sound, look and communal joyfulness absolutely personified countercultural Californian utopianism. Why choose her rather than a professional backup singer? Even the songwriters were out for tender: money was no object. And this is the point: for all the money being thrown around, the libidinal rush of 80s consumption, 80s style and 80s music was as empty and illusory as a cocaine high; a processed utopianism that boomed hollowly amidst the era’s dystopian reality, and thus always risked invoking what was lacking, what was lost behind the surface glitz. Real joy, actual freedom; communality. The songs of the 80s outlined here, by contrast, possess an emotional depth, a musical luminosity derived from the haunt of the counterculture; a reminder of “the happier past [….] as an impulse to change” (Williams 1973: 43). Nostalgia in this sense then becomes not an enervated defeatism amidst contemporary dystopia but an active, utopian vision of how things could be.
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Toby Manning has written about music since the 1990s (but the current moment is, by the way, is the golden age). He teaches English Lit at University of Birmingham and City Lit adult education college. He lives, variously, in North Wales, London, Oxford or Birmingham. Social media splash image by Christopher William Wilke.