Aqua — Back to the ’80s
Guess what? Aqua — a loose affiliation of talentless Norwegian Eurovision rejects — has decided to wager its final shred of credibility on the decade that style forgot — that’s right, the ’80s.Apparently we oughtta ‘get back to’ the Reagan Era for some satellites, skinny ties, Top Gun, Twisted Sister, Mr T, moon boots, Dynasty, Rubik’s Cube, and the Commodore 64.
Come again?!
Aqua is old enough to know better. They’ll remember the ’80s and should know darn well one of the world’s great indisputable truths:
The ’80s were crap.
And if this was a royal commission and ‘Council Assisting’ was wheeling in five barrows full of trumped-up evidence to the contrary, I would need only to mouth the words “Michael Bolton’s Mullet” for the former Chief Justice to clear the courtroom and be ordering cups of Lan Choo and Custard Creams in his chambers for elevenses.
For those not convinced, I’ll rephrase my original contention.
The ’80s were crrrrrrap.
Let me table the purportedly wunderbar Commodore 64 as further evidence. It was crap. Your niece’s Tamagotchi is like the proverbial NASA mainframe in comparison. You had to load in programs via cassette. Cassettes I tell you! Spend a couple of days of hardcore Basic programming and, hot diggity, you might get this infernal contraption to print out a dot matrix of a half demolished Space Invader base. Ace!
No, the ’80s were unequivocally crap and any effort by some Scando-airheads to rehabilitate it should be treated with all the enthusiasm of a holocaust denial.
The Rubik’s Cube?! Apparently there’s a subculture of hyper-nerds that can routinely solve the puzzle behind their back, one handed while reciting 10-digit prime numbers. But the rest of the world was duped. Hoodwinked. We had no chance of solving Dr Rubik’s diabolical trinket of satan. Which goes some way to explaining why any Cube you’re now likely to encounter has been pulled apart and reassembled a hundred times, or the stickers pulled off and rearranged.
Yes, the ’80s were crap. So unremittingly crap that Aqua’s original lyrics alluding to Michael Jackson being black were elided for the sake of not rocking any boats. Blimey. Sorry to speak ill of the dead but Off The Wall was the only MJ album worth listening to and that was released in 1979! Otherwise, all the Peter Pan of pop bequeathed to the ’80s was Weird Al Yankovic, as well as years of mouthy misfits sporting single fingerless gloves and sleeveless anoraks.
The ’80s can be consigned to the dung heap of history as far as I’m concerned. You can take all your shiny tracksuits, your dangly clown ear rings, yuppies, Hawthorn premierships, Noiseworks, legwarmers… bung them in a giant time capsule and fire them off in one of Aqua’s satellites.
Take it from someone who was a teenager in the ’80s and who only narrowly avoided owning a pair of Adidas Romes, Fabergé jeans and a pink polo shirt: the ’80s were crap.