The stories of growing up during the Cold War, with perhaps subconscious but perpetual fear of nuclear attacks, once seemed part of history, something of our parents’ or grandparents’ generations. Then, with the fall of the USSR, we didn’t think about it as much.
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But the last time a full nuclear war wholly captured the American consciousness as a real and central threat to the continued existence of the world was during the ‘80s, with the intensification of the Cold War during its final chapter.īack then, the prospect of the Americans and Russians bombing the shit out of each other made the possibility of not only nuclear war, but the very concept of nuclear energy, a mainstream concern. There are always concerns about certain countries reaching nuclear capability the topic is never too far from our headlines or our minds. For the first time in my life, we also live with some degree of actual fear that nuclear war could break out at any given moment. But that same pop music was also the soundtrack of a new era of nuclear anxiety.Īs of late, I’ve been hearing those classic ’80s songs differently. Sure, it is still tempting to look back on the ‘80s for more than those songs’ undying hooks, to look back and figure them as simpler times.
Those are the years where pop music sounded like the future, but also preceded the real arrival of the future in the true mainstream introduction of the internet era in the ‘90s, a turning point with complete and still-evolving societal ramifications. Those are the years of proms in John Hughes films, and our own proms, and childhood, and all that shit. That was the decade they looked back on as their innocence, the same way we look back on the ‘80s as ours. It’s an interesting paradox: We often remember the decade and its pop music in fond, neon hues, the same decade that was shot through with apocalyptic darkness and in turn had a nostalgic bent towards the ‘50s. Nostalgia for that decade and its pop culture has both seemed to move in cycles and be ever-present for something like the last 15 years.