If you want to find out what happened to the 80s, download the song Duel by Propaganda. The entire decade is trapped in that song. In fact, the more I listen to Duel, the more I feel as if my foot is entangled in a web of synthesizers and German singers. The first cut won’t hurt at all, the second only makes me wonder, and by the third I’m on my knees begging for the 80s to let me go.
I’m coming back as a singer in my next life. And I will only sing covers of 80s songs, rehashed and reshapped into a kind of gothic, big-shoulder-padded, excessive, new millenium, wink wink, package. I will only allow glossy pictures of myself to be circulated, and I might even pull a Cher and wear a thong during a concert. I've even seen my first video: I’m on a horse, by a river, and as I’m singing I drop a huge block of ice with Eminem trapped in it. As the block sinks, with Eminem begging for help, my white horse trots away (through a cemitery).
Download Duel and listen to it on repeat. It’s atrocious; it’s a car crash with corpses heavily made-up and green paint oozing out of the back seats; it’s a room full of echoes and rainbows painted on the walls; it’s the sound of a perfect idea that we cannot comprehend. This song is so wrong that it is right. This song should not be taken in excess. This song proves that there has been no history since 1989: we have all perished and now await the appearance of this song in our private ipods, so we may listen to it over and over and over.
Beware, this song is wrong. And the video for it? Not even Siouxsie and the Banshees could have managed such a direct attack on anything aesthetic. Propaganda must have been the avant garde. They composed the soundtrack for a Mad Max movie that never was.
Slowly, I’m letting myself go of this song.
Next stop: Feels Like Heaven, by Fiction Factory.
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