Let us imagine ourselves back in 1984.
Airstrip One has managed to resist the advance of Newspeak. Cinemas are clogged with brash entertainment such as Ghostbusters and the second Indiana Jones movie. A fat old codger who was around then tells me the two noises you could not escape emerged from a young Michigander in ecclesiastical jewellery and an older New Jerseyan dressed like your cousin from Leitrim. Bruce Springsteen had been a rock star for a decade, but Born on the USA made him into a genuine pop sensation.
Madonna followed up awesome singles such as Holiday and Borderline with the immediately ubiquitous Like a Virgin. That video of her writhing in a gondola was, I’m informed, harder to avoid than banners of Big Brother in the George Orwell novel referenced above. In the unlikely event anyone asked anyone else what those two performers would be up to in 39 years’s time, it seems unlikely that second person would respond: “Dunno. Pretty much what they are doing now, I guess.”
The Beatles had broken up only 14 years earlier. The world hadn’t got used to the notion of middle-aged rock musicians. Pop stars of genuinely pensionable age were still the stuff of science fiction. There had been no similar stretch for fans of Bing Crosby. He was dressing like a golfing uncle in his 20s. So why would he not be doing the same in his 60s?
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Last week, Madonna, now 64, confirmed she would be embarking on a tour of North America and Europe in 2023. No slouch, the onetime Ms Ciccone will be will be working through the back catalogue over 35 dates. “I am excited to explore as many songs as possible,” she told her fans. It doesn’t look as if she will be coming to Ireland, but Bruce Springsteen will. The Boss, back with the E Street Band, touches down at the RDS in May on his own passage about the globe.
Madonna has been through more convolutions than Bruce. She, perhaps, hit pop apotheosis with Like a Prayer in 1989. Nearly a decade later, Ray of Light successively took the sound in electronic directions. She has never gone away. The announcement of her tour has drawn predictably sexist and ageist coverage from the usual mid-market places, but she, like Springsteen, is merely daring to do what she has always done. There are fewer complaints about New Jersey’s finest asking Wendy to strap her hands round his engines. Never mind that Springsteen, still dealing in post-Dylan rootsy rock, has stayed even closer to the sounds and looks of his youth. It was ever thus.
No harm to either of them. Who would reject the opportunity to remain Madonna or Bruce Springsteen into one’s autumnal years. The Rolling Stones are doing the same. It scarcely seems possible, but next year Sir Michael Philip Jagger reaches the age of 80. Back in the 1970s, the colour supplements enjoyed commissioning artists’ impressions of what the era’s rock stars would look like in their 50s or 60s. There was a lot of cravat action and the occasional glimpse of a monocle.
The notion was that Mick and his contemporaries would age into 21st century variations on Noel Coward. The vogue for beat music long forgotten, they would, presumably, write columns for Punch and The Listener from vast piles in the Cotswolds. Not quite. A few weeks ago, Keith Richards, only a few months younger than his old pal, hinted that the band might be soon in front of their fans again.
In When I’m 64, Paul McCartney imagined someone of Madonna’s exact current age knitting a sweater, going for a ride and “doing the garden, digging the weeds”. There was no mention of donning conical bras and singing “erotic, erotic, put your hands all over my body” to the good burghers of Antwerp and Cleveland.
Once again, this is not one of those columns demanding that Bruce and Madonna and Keith act their age. But it does feel as if the artists’ unwillingness to either figuratively knit sweaters or to advance in radically new directions has allowed their followers to embrace cultural deceleration. Old school fans of the Walker Brothers needed to take an intellectual leap to maintain pace with Scott Walker’s later experiments in punching meat while wailing like an injured hyena.
Madonna has done a little bit of that, but, like Bruce and the Stones, she is back to sing Cherish and Dear Jessie (I hope) in the sports stadiums of Andalucía. Meanwhile, looking back at the culture of 1984, we note that a new Indiana Jones film and a new Ghostbusters picture are expected within the next year or so. There is no need to imagine ourselves back in that year. Should you wish, you can live there forever.
