COLUMN: Escape to the 80s

I've gotta be honest. When the shelter-in-place order initially came down, there was a tiny part of me that was psyched.

For a guy who revels in laziness, I do an annoying amount of stuff. I write this column. I work in our advertising department. I DJ to a packed dance club every weekend. I work at a friend's retail store. I have a lot of things going on in my life.

The one thing I don't have, though, is enough free time.

Running from job to job while maintaining a modest social life means I'm never home as much as I'd like. As a result, my house is always messy, my cupboards are usually either barren or filled with expired food from the Mesozoic Era, and there's a list of unfinished projects I could show you -- except finishing that list is one of those unfinished projects.

But suddenly there I was, handed a golden opportunity, even if I had to wear gloves and a mask to accept it. By government decree, I had to stay home. Perhaps this was finally the time I needed to whittle down my to-do list.

That was my mindset back in March at least. Here we are in June, a week or so away from Illinois graduating to Stage 4 of reopening, and do you think I've accomplished even ONE of those things on my unfinished list of unfinished projects? NOPE.

Well, okay. I got one thing done.

In my younger and less slothful days, I was a Friday night regular at Bettendorf's Stage 2 teen club. The friendships I made at that crazy club will last a lifetime and the music they played remains the soundtrack that unspools in my brain anytime I find myself in a quiet room.

For years now, friends and fellow Stage 2 alumns have been bugging me to make a mix of all those old-school songs near and dear to our hearts. On the very first week of lockdown, I figured it was just the project to take my mind off toxic diseases and the economic collapse of the free world. Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer would just have to wait -- I had a mix to work out. For nearly two weeks straight, I spent my days in the basement dusting off old vinyl and firing up my turntables. 

In the end, I crafted a three-hour-long megamix of vintage 80s gems I was proud of. (In fact, you can stream it for free right now at mixcloud.com/shane-brown11 if you're so inclined.)

Little did I know, though, that my foray into those classic jams was just the beginning of the nostalgia rabbithole for me. For the past three months, I've pretty much been trapped in the 1980s. 

Pulling out all that old synthpop put me in the mood for more. The next day, I was bopping around the house to Duran Duran. Then came OMD and the Human League. On one sunny quarantine day, I decided it was prudent to go on a country drive blaring Dexy's Midnight Runners to an audience of myself and a few highly confused cows. Every time I reached for something to listen to, it was music recorded some 35 years ago.

And my obsession didn't stop there. I have a DVR currently sitting at 98% capacity, filled to the brim with TV shows I need to catch up on. Instead, what did I decide to binge during lockdown? All eleven seasons of Cheers, which I've probably already seen eleven times over. The Golden Girls, a show I didn't even like IN the 80s. I wasted an entire day watching reruns of Murder She Wrote. I swear to you, if I'd had access to The Love Boat, I probably would've watched it.

The weirdest thing? I didn't even realize I was doing it. I just thought they were songs and shows that fit my mood and sounded entertaining. I wasn't purposely trying to fire up the Way-Back Machine or anything. It just seemed... nice.

For a kid growing up on a farm in rural Galesburg, the 80s were a pretty gentle decade. Watch a show like The Golden Girls and you'll have a couple of chuckles and probably learn a morality lesson by the end of every episode. Listen to 80s radio jams and about the most ribald thing you'll encounter is George Michael wanting your sex, whatever that was supposed to mean. This was a decade where we seriously had popular radio hits telling us we didn't have to take our clothes off to have a good time, we could dance and party all night and drink some cherry wine, uh huh.

Even the murders on "Murder She Wrote" are some of the most polite murders I've ever seen. On today's TV dial, even what passes for bland procedural dramas are usually full of severed heads, serial killers, and stunningly graphic dialogue before the first ad break. Imagine Jessica Fletcher strolling into an episode of "Law & Order SVU." The poor thing would have an aneurysm faster than you could say "Executive Producer Dick Wolf."

Maybe my little nostalgia trip was an attempt to go back to those gentler times. I'm starting to think escaping to the 80s was my subconscious' best effort to flee the assorted civil unrest, murder hornets, and killer viruses that've welcomed us into the not-so-roaring 2020s.

In reality, the 1980s weren't all about walking on sunshine and safety dancing. I seem to recall the 80s having a killer virus of its own, and it wasn't like systemic racism took a decade off or anything. There was also a little thing called the Cold War. Some of those hummable 80s hits are pretty lyrically frightening. "99 Luftballoons" is the most fun you'll ever have bopping around to a song about nuclear annihilation. That was a daily fear back then. I was just a kid in the early 80s, but old enough to remember our school still having "duck and cover" drills. 

Maybe the safety and comfort of my little nostalgia trip had less to do with the 1980s themselves and more with it being the era in which I was a kid. I never cared about the Iran-Contra Affair or the Cold War -- not when there were bikes to ride and video games to play. The only thing that TRULY scared me in the 1980s was the life-sized stuffed St. Bernard my aunt won at the fair and gave me, and my mom wouldn't let me throw it away no matter how maliciously its eyes glared at me all night long. Oh, and then when you finally DID manage to fall asleep, there was always a chance Freddy Krueger would show up and slice you into bits so tiny even Jessica Fletcher wouldn't be able to find them.

So who knows? Maybe dealing with an upside-down world is just a thing we all have to endure from time to troubled time. Maybe one day in 2050, our kids will be sick of worrying about the killer robots or President Baron Trump or whatever the future holds, and they'll go down to their basements and watch reruns of Breaking Bad and listen to Lil Uzi Vert to remind them of simpler, gentler times.

All I know is I need to step out of the 80s and back into the warm viral 2020 sun. Next week, I'll be returning to the DJ booth with guard up and mask donned. If I learned one thing from the 1980s, it's that all we really wanna do is dance with somebody who loves us.