The '80s Redux (Issue 2)

The Eighties Club

The Politics and Pop Culture of the 1980s

ISSUE TWO (29 March 2003)

A "World" Without End: 10 Years Later, Music Industry Still Feeling Effects of Song

Richard Harrington, Washington Post (1 February 1995)

It was a little more than 10 years ago that 45 top music acts gathered at Hollywood's A&M Studios right after the American Music Awards. In the course of an all-night recording session, they pooled their energies and voices on a song written just a few days before by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson and intended to raise both consciousness and funds for famine relief in Africa.

The song was "We Are the World," and it went on to sell more than 4 million copies and spun off a successful album with donated tracks from a dozen acts. When the single debuted that February, it did so in grand fashion, simulcast on more than 8,000 radio stations worldwide. Little wonder that this year's American Music Awards, broadcast Monday night, honored the 10th anniversary of "We Are the World" with a 10-minute retrospective. There was also a somewhat clumsy reprise notable mostly for lollipop-sucking Symbol Man's nonparticipation, an echo of his no-show 10 years earlier when his name was Prince.

After Monday's show, Ken Kragen, one of the event's original organizers, hosted a reception at A&M Studios honoring a number of people "who had much to do with the success of this venture. We raised $61.8 million and we distributed $61.8 million -- that in itself is an amazing feat, that 100 percent of the money raised was distributed."

According to Kragen, USA for Africa's most significant accomplishment was "bringing to the forefront the issues of hunger, homelessness and poverty. `We Are the World,' combined a year later with Hands Across America, put those issues on the map, and they've never disappeared since, nor have the problems. We haven't solved them, but at least they're out in the open and they're dealt with in the media constantly, and I think we have a much better chance of solutions, and of people getting involved, when that happens."

....The genesis of "We Are the World" was Bob Geldof's Band Aid project in December 1984, when two dozen British stars recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas" as a famine relief song. Geldof had been galvanized into action by a BBC television documentary showing horrible images of starving children in Ethiopia; at the time, almost half of Africa's sub-Saharan countries were facing massive food shortages, lack of adequate health care and dwindling water supplies. Many countries were appealing to the West for emergency aid, but there was little public consciousness about the situation until that shocking footage started appearing on television.

In Los Angeles, Harry Belafonte saw the same footage and, conscious of Geldof's effort, contacted Kragen, who in turn enlisted Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie (both of whom he managed at the time) and producer Quincy Jones. Soon, United Support of Artists for Africa (USA for Africa) had drafted many of the stars who would be in town that Jan. 28 for the American Music Awards -- among them Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson and Tina Turner -- and the project was a go....

Instead, Kragen and the award show's producer, Dick Clark, shifted gears. Over the years, for instance, songwriters Richie and Jackson and the other performers have received plenty of attention for their involvement. "The people who haven't gotten the attention are the people who really fueled all this and made it happen," Kragen says.

Among those honored Monday night were Muhammad Amin, the Kenyan journalist "who originally shot the footage of the starving children of Ethiopia that so energized and affected the world," says Kragen.

Also singled out was NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, the first American journalist to put famine footage on the air, according to Kragen. "Michael Burke at the BBC had fought to get it on the air there, and Tom Brokaw pushed to get it on the air here at a time when nobody wanted to show such footage."....

"When `We Are the World' sold for $9.98, we got $8.98 of it," Kragen continues. "We only paid for the vinyl and the pressing, and that's one of the reasons we raised so much money."....

The following year....Kragen organized Hands Across America, which aimed to raise funds to combat hunger and homelessness in America by having folks buy positions in a human chain that would stretch unbroken across the country. Unfortunately, Hands Across America was perceived as a failure, though Kragen points out that "somewhere between 5 and 7 million Americans stood hand to hand, and that is a phenomenon....

Kragen says organizers "made the mistake early in allowing calculations to show that we would raise somewhere between $50 and $100 million if Hands Across America was successful. In fact, because we chose not to collect money on the lines and chose to let people stand in the line whether they paid for a place or not, we raised $34 million. And a line did run continuously down the East Coast to Arkansas, where the first break started....

Moonwalk Down Memory Lane: 'That '80s Show' Makes It Official--the 'Re Decade' Is Back....

Patrick J. Kiger, Los Angeles Times (3 March 2002)

Given that there's been a lot going on in the world lately, this news may have escaped your attention: Finally, belatedly, '80s nostalgia has arrived.

If you had been watching more closely, the subtle but unmistakable signs were everywhere. Vintage 100% nylon parachute pants are for sale on the Internet, and designers' fall lines were full of acid- wash denim and '80s-style neon colors. Eighties cover bands, including The Breakfast Club and the DeLoreans, are doing eerily perfect replicas of Duran Duran's "Rio" and other era classics...."The A-Team" is on cable, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently concluded a mini-retrospective on '80s postmodernism.....

But to make things official, that harbinger of pop trends, the Fox Network, recently debuted a new half-hour sitcom, "That '80s Show," by the creators of "That '70s Show."....

You may be asking, "Where's the Beef?" After all, we've been hearing rumors, predictions and pronouncements of an '80s revival for years--at least as far back as 1993, when a corporate trend-research firm called Sputnik pointed to hipster jokes about Members Only jackets and Michael Jackson as signs of an incipient fad. But compared to previous eras, '80s retro, as a mass-market trend, took off with the sluggish acceleration of the original four-cylinder Pontiac Fiero....

During the actual 1980s, we burned through '60s chic so quickly that, by mid-decade, you already could go to a dance club in Hollywood for '70s night and see polyester-clad swingers discoing down to "Fly, Robin, Fly" and "Love to Love You Baby," reviving a style that had barely made it into the remainder bins. At that rate, like the feckless lover depicted in Prince's "Little Red Corvette," '80s pop culture seemed chronically in danger of running out of gas. A 1998 Roper poll showed that about one-third of adults under the age of 30 thought of the '80s--their coming-of-age era--as "the good old days." That doesn't sound too shabby until you consider that nearly half as many people that age preferred the '50s, an era before they were even born.

Part of the problem with '80s retro, perhaps, is that previous waves of nostalgia have always centered upon a yearning for the seeming naivete of a simpler age. Fifties hot-rodders and prom queens were an appealing fantasy for children of the '70s, partly because they didn't have to wait in long lines for gasoline or grapple with the implications of feminism. It's a little tricky to work up that sort of warm feeling about the junk bond traders and corporate- takeover pirates of the '80s, when cynicism was a virtue and the big event was the Predators' Ball.

Beyond that, the '80s was an era obsessed with ironically re-interpreting the past, to the extent that Esquire magazine contemporaneously knocked it as the "Re Decade." It was so heavily retro that it's a challenge to find something original to recycle. When you try to imitate Madonna imitating Marilyn Monroe on MTV, the joke gets a little too incestuous. And much of '80s fashion would be difficult to replicate, because the JFK-era tuxedo jackets and vintage lace that L.A. hipsters found at Aardvark's Odd Ark on Melrose Avenue are likely to be too moth-eaten and tattered for a third go-round....

Maybe it's time to give the '80s another chance. As we find ourselves in an age in which there's precious little going on that we dare laugh about, we have to admit that Bananarama is infinitely preferable to Osamarama. So let's flip up our shirt collars, lace up those candy-colored L.A. Gear sneakers and brush up on that moonwalking--or, as the age's poet laureate, Billy Idol, once put it, "It's a nice day to start agggaiiiiinn!" And once we scrape the jaded patina off a non-comprehensive sampling of the decade's artifacts, fads and icons, they do turn out to have a certain goofy charm.

Bad Hair Decade

Mullets, Mousse and Rat-Tails

In recent years the mullet (a.k.a. "hockey hair" or "business in the front, party in the back") has been lampooned as the classic tacky '80s male hairstyle, though, in fact, the "bi-level" cut, as it is known in barbering parlance, seems to have originated back in the '70s with English rock stars such as Slade and Rod Stewart. (The term "mullet" didn't come into usage until 1994, by way of the Beastie Boys' song "Mullet Head.") More distinctly '80s is a close-cropped back that's long on top, perhaps lacquered into a New Romantic pompadour or teased into a spiky bristle and bleached, a la Billy Idol. But the mullet's identification with the 1980s seems unshakable....

Another perverse male affectation of the age was a small braid at the back of the neck, known as the rat-tail, worn most famously by the members of New Kids on the Block. The messy, multicolored bird's- nest coiffure popularized by the likes of Cyndi Lauper and Madonna achieved its aerodynamically improbable configurations with the help of a new product, styling mousse, first developed in Europe and introduced in the United States in early 1984 by L'Oreal. The foamy fixative became an overnight sensation, achieving $250 million in sales the first year. Trendy African Americans affected Jheri curls, a bouncy mass of ringlets named after Jheri Redding, a hair-product mogul. If you were willing to sleep in a plastic cap and apply copious amounts of hair oil, you could achieve the look worn by L.A. Clippers forward Michael Cage and Michael Jackson, whose chemically enhanced coiffure caught fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium in 1984.

Fashion Faux Pas

Members Only, Bugle Boy and L.A. Gear

At the dawn of the decade, an obscure company called Europe Craft Imports revolutionized the men's outerwear market with a tight- fitting shiny cotton jacket, adorned with a throat latch, snap epaulets and, most important, a small but conspicuous "Members Only" tag over the left breast pocket. True, there was a certain inherent paradox to a $65 mass-market product, available in two dozen hues, whose name spoke of exclusivity.

That didn't seem to faze the typical '80s Lothario, who appreciated a design that allowed the flipped-up collar of his Polo shirt to remain fashionably visible while retro-dancing to Motown classics at Crush Club Continental on North Cahuenga Boulevard or waiting in line outside L.A.'s other hot '80s singles scenes. (No wonder that a couple of decades later, singer Sheryl Crow would lyrically observe: "He seems to be stuck in the '80s/He wears his Members Only jacket/'cause he thinks it turns on all the ladies.") Scrunched-up (as opposed to rolled-up) sleeves were mandatory. Members Only jackets were in such demand that, by 1984, counterfeiters were selling $5 million worth of phony ones a year.

The origin of the leg warmers fad is a little less clear. One historical source suggests that the bunched-up tube of knitted cotton, a traditional bit of ballet garb, first emerged as an everyday accessory during the frigid East Coast winter of 1981-1982, when women started wearing them under their slacks. Others suspect it was the influence of "Jane Fonda's Workout," the 1982 video whose cover showed the actress-turned-fitness maven flexing her cotton- enshrouded gastrocnemius muscles. In any case, leg warmer sales rose more than 340% that year, according to Forbes magazine.

Leg warmers were the first inkling of fitness fashion, in which leotards and baggy sweatshirts--slipping off one shoulder, as worn by "Flashdance" actress Jennifer Beals--became acceptable street wear, creating the illusion that women were continually headed to, or coming back from, an aerobics studio. In L.A., where that wasn't necessarily an illusion, exercise fanatics had by 1985 taken to wearing two or three pairs of leg warmers at a time, in varying colors.

Perhaps the most inexplicable fashion trend of the late '80s was acid-wash denim, an Italian invention whose name was a bit misleading. Instead of soaking jeans in acid, clothing makers put them in giant washers, along with pumice stones soaked in bleach, for three to four hours at a time. The tumbling created random spots and streaks on the garments, giving them a sort of factory-reject look that teens and young adults found irresistibly chic....

In 1983, Chatsworth-based clothing manufacturer Bugle Boy, inspired by Michael Jackson's hardware-laden wardrobe, dreamed up tight-fitting parachute pants, which were made of nylon and decorated with multiple zippers. The style caught on, supposedly because the slippery texture was ideal for break dancing. Demand mushroomed so fast that in 1983 and 1984, Bugle Boy and a single retailer, Merry Go Round, had the fad all to themselves. They sold 10 million pairs in a single year....

And, of course, there's the quintessential '80s footwear, L.A. Gear sneakers. The Marina del Rey-based brand was founded in 1986 by Robert Greenberg, a multitalented impresario who once made $3 million in three months peddling E.T.-themed shoelaces. While Nike and Adidas shoes were functional, L.A. Gear shoes were all about fashion. One model came in gold lame, while others had punk-rock style chains. With celebrity spokespeople such as Paula Abdul, Belinda Carlisle and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, L.A. Gear quickly became the No. 3 sneaker brand in America behind Nike and Reebok.

In 1989, the company tried to put itself over the top with "Bad," a black buckle-laden shoe endorsed by Jackson. "Bad" turned out to be as popular among teenagers as the nasty principal in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." L.A. Gear tried to convince trendoids that the next wave in athletic shoes involved lots of clunky hardware, but it ended up losing millions.

Hell on Wheels

DeLoreans, Yugos and Pontiac Fieros

The '70s, which spawned such oddities as the egg-shaped AMC Pacer, is difficult to challenge as the weirdest automotive era ever. But the '80s had no shortage of doomed automotive experiments.

In 1980, former General Motors wunderkind-turned-independent car manufacturer John Z. DeLorean--backed by the British government and celebrity investors such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Johnny Carson-- unveiled the DMC-12, a high-end sports car that became known simply as "The DeLorean." Produced at a factory in strife-torn Northern Ireland, the innovative vehicle featured a stainless-steel body (that was designed to stay rust-free forever), gull-wing doors and a glass- reinforced plastic undercarriage. The DeLorean's rear-mounted V-6 engine enabled it to go from zero to 60 mph in eight seconds, but at a pricey $26,000--the equivalent of $60,000 today--sales sputtered. Fewer than 9,000 of the cars were built before the company went out of business in 1982.

....The DeLorean car--which probably achieved its greatest acceptance as Michael J. Fox's time machine in the 1985 hit "Back to the Future" and its sequels--continues to have a cult following....

The same year that DeLorean became defunct, GM launched the Pontiac Fiero, whose innovative design featured an all-plastic body and an engine in the middle of the chassis. One hundred thousand of the stylish two-seaters were sold during the first model year. Unfortunately, the car that was supposed to turn Pontiac into GM's "excitement division" didn't quite live up to its hype. In an effort to contain costs, GM put an underpowered four-cylinder engine in the Fiero--it looked like a sports car but performed like a subcompact....[T]he Fiero became a casualty of company political struggles and was discontinued in 1988.

No one ever suggested that the Yugo was innovative, except maybe in terms of price, but it was the only Serbian-made car ever sold in America. "What do you expect for $4,000?" a headline in the trade newspaper Automotive Industries once asked rhetorically. Slapped together by hand by $1-per-hour workers, the boxy vehicles were so shabby that shortly after their 1985 U.S. debut, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration judged the Yugo to have the worst crash performance of any car it had tested. The car's underwhelming performance inspired scores of jokes ("What do you call a Yugo at the top of a hill? A mirage." And "Why do Yugos come with heated rear windows? To keep your hands warm while you're pushing")....

The Box Boom

Kaypro, Pac-Man and the Helix Wheely 5000

Though personal computers made their debut in the late '70s, that didn't stop Time magazine from picking the PC instead of a human as person of the year (well, "machine of the year") in 1982....Back then, the technological cutting edge was the Kaypro II, which displayed headache-inducing fluorescent green characters on a nine-inch screen. The Kaypro's microprocessor ran at a snail's-pace 2.5 megahertz and stored information on pancake-sized floppy disks instead of a hard drive....

The portable personal stereo, better known as the boombox, actually first appeared on the consumer electronics market in the late '70s. But by 1980, when nearly 8 million of them were sold, they had become a deafening presence on city sidewalks across America. "My radio, believe me, I like it loud," LL Cool J rapped in 1985. "I'm the man with a box that can rock the crowd/Walkin' down the street, to the hard-core beat/While my JVC vibrates the concrete . . ."

Boomboxes grew in size, as larger speakers, tape decks, 10-band equalizers, flashing disco lights and even burglar alarms were added to their design. Helix's Wheely 5000, produced in 1989, was perhaps the largest boombox ever, at 3 feet wide and 2 feet tall. It weighed a clavicle-crushing 41 pounds when loaded with 10 D batteries....

As legend has it, pioneering video game designer Tohru Iwatani looked at the empty space in a pizza after he'd removed a slice and got the inspiration for a game that stood out from Asteroids, Space Invaders and others on the market. In 1980, Iwatani's employer, Namco, and its partner, Bally Midway Manufacturing Co., unveiled the first video game featuring an identifiable character--a yellow circle who crawled up and down the pathways of a maze eating dots of light and fruit before he himself was consumed by pursuing ghosts. The character initially was dubbed Puck-man, but after the uncomfortable proximity to an English-language expletive was noted, its name was changed to Pac-Man.

Pac-Man was an instant hit in arcades across America, and the manufacturers sold 100,000 games in the first year alone....

.Olivia Newton-John shows off her leg(warmer)s

Coke & the CIA: The Real Thing?

Jo Ann Kawell, The Nation (28 September 1998)

When I asked about Gary Webb's book Dark Alliance at my neighborhood bookstore, the clerk, no Gen-Xer, replied, "Oh, is it based on that new computer game? There's a movie, too, isn't there?" At first I found her confusion of the journalist's controversial investigation of the cocaine trade with Lucas Arts' Star Wars spinoff, Dark Forces, rather surprising--especially since the front window of this Berkeley independent sported a large poster for a "Dark Alliance" forum featuring Webb. But perhaps it shouldn't have been: After Webb's reports of connections between Los Angeles crack dealers, Nicaraguan contra forces and the CIA were published in the San Jose Mercury News in August 1996, most of the US press acted as though he had concocted a fictional scenario of "dark forces" better suited to a computer game than the pages of serious newspapers. Webb was vilified in a campaign led by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post and was eventually driven to quit his Merc News reporter job.

Webb's detractors called the charge that the CIA was "involved with" drug trafficking a "conspiracy theory." At the same time, however, others, particularly some black leaders, pointed to the series as evidence that the CIA was somehow "responsible for" the US crack "epidemic," which had especially devastating effects on black communities....

Webb's book Dark Alliance is an expansion of the Merc News series, including new material from research done since the series was published.....Longtime followers of the contra tale are likely to find new revelations in the book, and even those who were politically comatose or too young to read the newspapers during Reagan's Central American enterprises will find that the historical background Webb provides makes his story easy to follow, from the contra camps of Honduras to the courtrooms of California.

What Webb found, in essence, is that a good deal of the crack retailed on Los Angeles streets in the eighties was made from cocaine that had been bought wholesale from Nicaraguan dealers who had in turn used the proceeds to fund the contra forces then working to topple the Sandinista government. Since the contras were almost entirely a CIA creation, and the forces operated under tight and continuing agency supervision, this finding inevitably pointed toward some kind of agency "involvement" with cocaine trafficking. Though Webb never claimed, either in the series or now in the book, that the CIA--acting either through individual agents or as an institution--had itself arranged drug deals (that is, that it had actively conspired to deal coke), he does present evidence that the agency had taken very concrete steps to protect contra-connected drug dealers....

Despite the ruckus Webb's story caused, many aspects of it were far from new: Robert Parry and Brian Barger of the Associated Press had first reported on a contra/cocaine link in 1985, and a Congressional investigation headed by Senator John Kerry had concluded in 1989 that it was clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking; that the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations; and that elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the US government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.

The Kerry Committee report, dismissed by the Washington Post et al. as the ravings of conspiracy buffs, is no such thing and still makes edifying reading. Webb brought the story closer to home, literally to the Los Angeles street corners where crack sellers did their business. I won't rehash here precisely what Webb's critics had to say about this, since a number of writers have already dissected the media responses. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are the latest to jump into the fray, with their Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. They provide a good review of how the campaign against Webb evolved, and the forces behind it....What seems clear in retrospect is not that Webb got the story wrong but that he told the wrong story--one revealing that the US government's commitment to the War on Drugs was not quite as total or as consistent as official declarations made it seem.....

If Cockburn and St. Clair had been content to thus catalogue all the CIA ventures that could, in general terms, be dubbed "drug-related," their book could have served as a useful reference work and ready counter to the disingenuous claims of CIA officials that the agency is not and has not ever--no, never!--been "involved with" illegal drugs or drug traffickers. But the authors push the point much further than this, arguing that the CIA should be held institutionally responsible for the huge influx of cocaine into the country in the eighties; indeed, that because of historical links to foreign drug producers and to the Mafia, which controlled US drug distribution for decades, the agency and its predecessors should be held accountable for virtually all the drug trafficking into the country through most of this century. They even posit, a bit indirectly, that the eighties cocaine influx and the resulting "crack epidemic" was the conscious product of a CIA bio-research program, a racist experiment in social control of minority communities. A conspiracy theory? With a vengeance. But as Cockburn and St. Clair would be the first to declare, when it comes to the CIA, conspiracy theories are not always wrong.

Unfortunately, Cockburn and St. Clair's overall approach to demonstrating these propositions is, to say the least, unsatisfying, and consists mostly of a historical roundup of CIA high crimes and misdemeanors, and of its alliances with a long list of nasty folks: Nazis, Mafiosi and a vast number of coup-crazy generals (many of whom also dabbled in drug dealing) and with murderers and torturers of various sorts (ditto on the drugs)....But in striving to make a case for the CIA as the world's biggest drug dealer, Cockburn and St. Clair have resorted to an ad hominem argument that their university rhetoric profs would surely have frowned upon--as if to say, "an agency with such a history of perfidy is surely capable of pushing crack to black children!" Much more serious, in their drive to single out the CIA and its allies as the main source of the US "drug problem," they avoid any coherent critique of US drug control policy and end up--ironically--shoring up the ideological pillars that support it.

Of course, Cockburn and St. Clair are far from alone these days in pointing to CIA allies--and thus, at least indirectly, the CIA--as a key "source" of drugs in the United States: "The contras and some of their Central American allies," Michael Levine claims, were responsible for "at least 50 percent of our national cocaine" supply in the eighties (a figure he says is "documented by the DEA"). "The rest of the [US] drug supply," Levine contends, "came from other CIA-supported groups." But such numbers--indeed, any statistics connected to the illegal drug trade, however official their source--are notoriously unreliable and, like the body counts of the Vietnam era, can be massaged to support any political or institutional agenda....

The fear that evil enemies are trying to flood the nation with drugs in order to sap our "moral fiber" or destroy our youth is one that "drug czar" Harry Anslinger played on during the Second World War, and one that has underlain US drug policy ever since. But no force other than good old supply and demand drives this flow, or needs to. No single human, or set of humans--not the Mafia, not the Medellín cartel, not the CIA--can completely control it or is to be blamed entirely for its existence. Throughout the history of US drug control efforts, each time one drug producer or trafficker or group of producers or traffickers has been put out of business, another has arisen to replace it. Drug control experts refer to this as the "balloon theory": Squeeze the trade in one place and it pops up in another. This will always be true as long as someone demands the drugs the traffickers provide. Thus, though it may well be that CIA backing gives certain traffickers a competitive advantage, those who think that without the CIA the United States would be drug-free, or nearly so, are simply deluding themselves.

All the same, I have more than a few doubts about a critique of US drug policy that focuses almost exclusively on, as a popular Berkeley bumper sticker puts it, the "CIA: Cocaine Import Agency." This excessive emphasis on the CIA's secret activities and shadowy alliances leads to a misrepresentation of both the reality of life in cocaine producing countries and of the nature of the mostly very public US drug control efforts in those countries....

The distortion caused by trying to force a new critique of drug control policy into old molds is apparent in Whiteout, especially in a chapter on Bolivia in which Cockburn and St. Clair make a striking number of errors in their rush to portray the country as stereotypically groaning under the sway of evil forces led by the CIA. Indeed, the authors frequently seem unable to distinguish Bolivia from its neighbors. A single "soccer stadium" in which "thousands" of leftists were rounded up and murdered in the weeks following Bolivia's 1980 coup? The "Cocaine Coup" was far more brutal and bloody than previous Bolivian military takeovers, with the brunt of the violence directed, yes, against the left, but guys--the stadium you seem to be talking about was in Chile, in 1973. In Bolivia, 1980, the most horrific instances of "extrajudicial execution" took place outside the jails, and while even one such murder is too many, those did not occur on the massive scale they did in Chile or Argentina. "Indian insurgents" under attack from US-trained drug police? Plenty of 'em--next door in Peru.....

Some of these errors may be due to an over-hasty reading of source material (Levine seems to be a prime source), but others seem less explicable and aimed primarily at supporting a scenario in which the forces of good--leftist insurgents á la Che--do noble battle against the allied dark forces of military dictators, the CIA and drug traffickers.....

It seems safe to say that the CIA's main relation to the cocaine industry is not one of pushing drugs to Americans, of whatever color, via a conscious and purposeful institutional program but rather one of protecting the drug dealers it is allied with for other political reasons....But the War on Drugs continually escalates, at home and abroad, not because of CIA machinations but because US voters--black and white--continue to demand such escalation. It is time, then, for all of us to think again about what the real source of the US drug crisis is and what we care to do about it....

Tonight We're Going to Party Like It's 1981

Matt Munday, Times of London (14 December 2002)

For New York's cool clubbers, there's only one place where it's at: welcome to The Luxx, the Brooklyn home of electroclash, synth- pop's glittering tribute to the Eighties.

It's after midnight and we're inside The Luxx, the most talked-about New York club in years. It is, not altogether surprisingly, a youthful, polysexual glamour-fest. The 400-odd people packed on to the dancefloor have certainly made the effort. There are army combats paired with single-breasted suit jackets, biker boots and sequined shirts, shaved heads and fright wigs, sew-on patches and shoulder pads....

If all this sounds a bit Eighties, then that's because it is. Open for little over a year, The Luxx is now synonymous in the US media - from The New York Times to alternative music glossy Spin - with the Eighties revivalism currently sweeping both music and fashion.

There are no sniffy doormen and it's just $10 to get in. The club's down-to-earthness only seems to boost its in-crowd appeal. Pat Fields, the chief stylist for Sex and the City, is a regular and Chloe Sevigny, Naomi Campbell, Alexander McQueen and Hedi Slimane have all paid a visit.

The Luxx not only has the best-dressed clubbers in town, it has the most controversial new music, too. The dancefloor is vogueing impeccably to a bubblegum soundtrack of synthesizer pop - not only does The Luxx look like an explosion in Duran Duran's make-up closet, it sounds like one, too. But the records aired tonight are mostly new; a fresh generation of bands has emerged to reinvent synth-pop, mixing it with conceptual art, glam fashion and punky DIY performances where anyone with a synthesizer and a complete absence of shame can be a star.

This is the sound of New York City. It is called electroclash....

Electroclash was hailed as a youth-led, Technicolored barf in the face of all that had gone before...

Here in New York, The Luxx remains the hottest clubbing ticket in town. "Before electroclash, our club scene had been totally sterile for the past eight years," says Bruce Tantum, clubs editor at Time Out New York. "This is mostly because Manhattan has become such an expensive place to live. Ten years ago, when you could rent an apartment for $300 a month, you had a lot more creative, crazy people living there and hanging out at the clubs. The Luxx has recaptured that vibe by opening across the river in Williamsburg in Brooklyn. There are lots of cheap spaces there and right now it's where all the creative young people have set up."

Lion-maned producer Arthur Baker is DJing at The Luxx tonight....In the Eighties, he invented electro, black and hispanic New York's funkier take on European synth-pop. Musically at least, Baker feels he has come full circle....

Larry Tee is on a one-man mission to tease out those elusive future hits. If anyone is the godfather of electroclash, it is this livewire 43-year-old with his non-stop repertoire of hilarious middle-finger patter and big, geeky specs. He promotes and DJs every Friday and Saturday at The Luxx....Tee has signed a roster of electroclash hopefuls, such as Morplay (a gay rap act) and foxy girl band WIT, to his record label, Mogul Electro. No mean achievement for a man who just three years ago was broke and in rehab for multiple drug addictions....

Later that afternoon, over veggie burgers and Coke in a diner around the corner, Larry introduces me to his brightest young hopes. They are the girlie group WIT, whose membership seems in a near- constant state of flux - in the past year they have been a duo, a trio and a foursome - but which is centred on two core members, Melissa Burns and Christine Doza. They certainly look the part. Burns is a feathery-blonde ex-model and star of more than 30 pop videos, while the equally stunning Doza, a brunette, is an ex-prom queen lipstick-lesbian-with-attitude.

....The girls aren't just pretty faces either. Fresh out of college, Doza is already a published feminist writer. And the band were actually conceived as one big, knowingly ironic, postmodernist wheeze. "Our name is a joke about ambition," explains Doza. "Female pop stars have always been associated with really strong ambition. When we were planning it, we were laughing, 'Yeah, we're gonna do whatever it takes!' and then we realised it made the acronym 'WIT'."

...."We're excited to be part of it all," says Burns. "Electroclash was the first big new sound in New York for our age group. You know how when house music first started and people were, like, 'Ah, it's just disco', but it wasn't, it was something completely different. Well, this is more than just recycling the Eighties. Dance music has been so serious for so long; this is on the lighter side. It's heavy on the image, heavy on the glamour, sexy and fun."

If ever a city needed to have fun again, it's New York...and although the electroclash kids' first salvos may have missed the target, their guerrilla campaign to reclaim the charts isn't over yet.

Toy Companies, Film/TV Studios Join to Market Familiar Franchises

Anne Sherber, Billboard (8 March 2003)

Despite the U.S. toy industry's decline of almost 3% in sales in 2002, according to data provided by the Toy Industry Assn., film and TV studios are still determined to carve out a piece of the $20 billion that Americans spend on playthings. As evidenced at the 100th American International Toy Fair, which took place Feb. 16-19 in various venues here, one key area of growth in the industry is the expanding relationship between toy manufacturers and film and TV studios in entertainment franchising.

Because of the expense and potential risks involved in launching new properties, toy manufacturers and film and TV studios continue to extend their respective reaches by jointly exploiting brands with which consumers are already familiar.

One way manufacturers and studios work together is by transforming a toy property into a line of films or videos, an idea resurrected from the early 1980s....

BRINGING BACK THE '80S

Los Angeles-based Dic Entertainment is reviving Strawberry Shortcake, a property popular in the early 1980s and one of the first characters to begin life as a toy before morphing into a successful video character. Through Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Dic will release four Strawberry Shortcake homevideo specials this year. The first two titles-Meet Strawberry Shortcake and Spring for Strawberry Shortcake-are due March 11. A Merry Berry Christmas and Strawberry Shortcake's Get Well Adventure will be released this fall. The video packaging will be embedded with scent crystals that will emit the strawberry scent associated with the franchise. The suggested retail price for each title is $12.98 for VHS and $14.98 for DVD.

According to Dic senior VP of home entertainment Carol Lee, Bandai will be the master toy licensee for the product. The company is best-known for its male-oriented products, including the Power Rangers, although Lee says it is anxious to enter the girls' market

Lee says that having a successful toy line already in stores before all of the Strawberry Shortcake videos are released is "hugely important" for Dic, noting that mass merchants that experience strong sales with related consumer products are much more receptive to the line's video programming.

Another 1980s property, the Care Bears, is continuing to grow in popularity. Canadian animation studio Nelvana, the property's license holder, will release a new Care Bears direct-to-video adventure that will tie in with the interactive toy plushes being produced by the property's master toy licensee, PlayAlong. The video does not have a scheduled release date yet....

The Eighties Club is not affiliated in any way with any of the publications from which these excerpts were derived, and does not profit in any way from the purchase of the complete articles. These excerpts are provided for educational purposes only.