[November 30th
marks the 35th
anniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, one of the most popular
and influential 1980s albums. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of
such albums, including Jackson’s and other greats from the decade. I’d love
your AlbumStudying thoughts, on these or any others, in comments!]
On three different
ways a classic pop album can also offer political statements.
At nearly the
exact midpoint of Don
Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast (1984), sixth and seventh out of the
album’s eleven total tracks, are two songs that offer overt political and
social critiques of 1980s America. Track six is the title song (seemingly not
available on YouTube, sorry!), an epic, semi-allegorical commentary (not dissimilar
to “Hotel California”) on the gap between America’s ideals and where the nation
seems to have arrived in the mid-1980s. And track seven is “All She Wants to Do is Dance,”
an irresistible dance track (duh) that doubles as a scathing depiction of ugly
Americans (both individual and foreign-policy-related)
behaving badly in Central America. Like the title track of Henley’s next album,
The End of the Innocence (1989; also
not on YouTube!), these are well-crafted pop songs that at the same time offer
particularly overt and important criticisms of both the Reagan Administration specifically
and American society and culture in the decade more broadly, and by themselves
would be more than enough to make Building
the Perfect Beast a strikingly political pop album.
They’re not by
themselves, though, and Building
features other, more subtle and perhaps more interesting political pop songs as
well. One follows directly after “Dance” on the cassette and CD versions
(although interestingly not on the LP, perhaps because it was recorded a bit
later than the rest of the album): “A Month of Sundays” (also not on YouTube—Henley
might be committed to keeping his music off the site), a quiet ballad narrated
in the first-person by an aging farmer. Released a year before John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Rain
on the Scarecrow” (1985), Henley’s song is thus more ground-breaking than
it might seem, and at least has to be paired with Mellencamp’s song (and whole
Scarecrow album) as part of these
mid-1980s cultural engagements with farming communities and lives (a trend that
would also produce 1985’s
first Farm Aid concert, which featured both Henley and Mellencamp among
many other artists). And I would argue that Henley’s first-person speaker is
created with a bit more intimacy and subtlety than Mellencamp’s in “Scarecrow,”
particularly in the song’s mysterious and moving closing lines: “And I sit here
on the backporch in the twilight/And I hear the crickets hum/And I sit and watch
the lighting in the distance/But the showers never come/And I sit here listen
to the wind blow/And I sit here and rub my hands/And I sit here and listen to
the clock strike/And I wonder when I'll see my companion again.”
The album’s
other political pop songs don’t really seem political at all, but offer
important social commentaries nonetheless. I wrote about one of them in this
June 2016 post: the wonderful opening song “The Boys of Summer,” and its
multi-layered and even contradictory visions of nostalgia’s dangers and
appeals. “Boys” has a corollary in “The Sunset Grill,” a
song that frames the album’s conclusion and offers an even more complicated
image of the relationship between the past and the present in 1980s America. On
the one hand, “Sunset” uses a semi-mythic (or at least idealized) vision of the
past to critique the present, with lines like “These days a man makes you
something/And you never see his face.” But at the same time, the song ends with
playful lines that both imagine a possible future and embrace the flawed but
wonderful present: “Maybe we’ll leave come springtime/Meanwhile, have another
beer/What would we do without all these jerks anyway?/Besides, all our friends
are here.” That closing, especially when coupled with the next and final song “Land
of the Living” (chorus: “I wanna stay in the land of the living/I wanna stay
here with you”), offers an optimistic counterpoint and coda to some of the
album’s darker or more critical visions—and that’s a pretty important political
purpose for pop music as well!
Next
AlbumStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other ‘80s albums you’d highlight and analyze?
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