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By Robert Alstead
To adapt David Crosby's maxim about the Sixties, if you were there in 1982 you will remember it. Pop was discovering the synthesizer and fashions were outlandish. This was a time when New Romantics garbed in baggy pants, floppy do’s and with mild names like Flock Of Seagulls, Soft Cell and The Human League topped the charts. Canada’s Men Without Hats took "The Safety Dance" to the top 10 in 20 countries.
Early electronica bands like Kraftwerk had been experimenting with synthesizers since the late Seventies, but it was now normal to turn on the television and see musicians plonking a keyboard with two fingers. Music traditionalists groaned, and groaned for two decades.
In 1982 we were beginning to see the impact of the digital revolution. Articles in newspapers and music mags spoke breathlessly about a great new audio technology. A shiny disc measuring just over four inches in diameter, it used only one side, didn’t warp or scratch and was played by a laser instead of a stylus. They were talking about CDs, of course. What the articles rarely told us was that over the next decade many of us would have to replace our lifetime music collections as vinyl and record players disappeared off shop shelves. Few could have prognosticated that two decades later we would be plucking tunes from around the world down a telephone line.
Ironically for a man who would become one of Canada’s most vociferous critics of digitizing audio, Neil Young made his one and only "electronic album," Trans, in 1982. It wasn’t released on CD, but on almost every song he used a vocoder to produce synthesized vocals. The album was panned by the critics but for Young who was fascinated by the potential to use the technology to communicate with his two children, both sufferers of cerebral palsy, it was an important experiment.
Young moved on to other things, which commercially was a wise decision. Technology-driven music aged faster, whereas classics like Hotel California and Mozart are still piped out in malls and down telephone lines. Probably will be for years to come. Against a backdrop of the global Walks For Peace, Prince responded to the darkening fin de siecle mood of 1982 with the release of his hit double-album, 1999.
In movies, a film about a boy who became best friends with a funny little creature with googly eyes and a glowing finger was breaking box office records at cinemas. E.T.’s special effects - like the characters lifting off into the sky on a bicycle - were amazing. What was lost on many subsequent filmmakers was that it was the story, not just the effects, that mattered.
While E.T. was trying to find a way home, Dustin Hoffman was dressing up in drag in Tootsie and Richard Attenborough’s retelling of the story of India’s spiritual and national leader, Gandhi, provided an inspiration for non-violent political change. Gandhi won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Ben Kingsley. Meanwhile, the 25 minute NFB short, If You Love This Planet, produced by Dr. Helen Caldicott, which showed images of post-holocaust Hiroshima and called for immediate disarmament won an Oscar for best documentary short.
In the same year, the word Rambo entered the vernacular with the first in the trilogy of films about Sylvester Stallone’s shoot-em-up ‘Nam vet. The violence was mindless but tame by modern standards. Movies like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down would be bloodier and more gruesome. War would appear "real." But you could always count on one thing: the Americans would win in the end. In 1991 the Gulf War made CNN a household name as war news became entertainment, giving birth to “militainment.”
In Pink Floyd: The Wall, children were learning to rebel with the refrain "We don’t need no education!" Canadian kids were getting more wholesome lessons in dealing with coming-of-age issues in the Toronto-set Degrassi television series, The Kids of Degrassi Street. Its mix of multi-racial and economically diverse characters broke the mold of teen television challenging viewers to weigh ethical questions on money, friendship, teen pregnancy and even suicide. Degrassi is now one of the most active teen web sites (www.degrassi.tv) in Canada.
Ah, the web. Who could have forseen it back then? Well, Vancouver-based author William Gibson for a start. He was hammering out his debut novel, Neuromancer, on an old manual typewriter. He described the novel as "1982 with the volume turned up, with all the knobs turned up."
A story of a hacker who lived for "the bodiless exultation of cyberspace," it envisaged a dystopian future in which our selfish use of technological advancements for self-serving, material gain was eroding our humanity. How much this vision is true now is debatable. What’s certain is that twenty years on, digital technology is molding our culture, our lifestyles, our relationships and our very thought patterns. How we create and recreate with it matters more than ever.
Robert Alstead runs movie ezine iofilm.
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