I identify as an ‘80s soul. And I have one public regret in life; that I was not born in this great period. That my birth certificate does not attest to this fact. But soul, mind and spirit resonate with the ‘80s. I am on the ‘80s frequency. There is a laxity I find in the generations that followed. As though to say, some alien, some species came around and plugged out the spirit of the times.
There is a passionate feeling that characterised everything in the 80s, the kind that was absent in the ‘90s, the early 2000s and now the 2020s. It all got sloppy and numbed downhill. From the adverts to the music. Suddenly, there was no pursuit of the Magnum Opus. No one got interested once again in building heavy works. Everything became light, the music, the love, the legacies. No one desired to build a cathedral once again.
There was a semblance of greatness in the early 2000s. The time when the Chameleones and Bebe Cools of this world had returned from Nairobi. The time when we thought of ideas such as the Pearl of Africa Music Awards. The time when the Sylvia Oworis of this world were bold with the African Woman magazines, with launching midnight shopping sprees. I would be misguided to forget the Santa Anzos of this world. But that was the early 2000s. When 2005 happened, there was a death, a corruption of this optimism, this idea that we could outlive ourselves through our works. From then on, it was money or nothing. Mormon became the god of our times.
I always thought of myself as a counterculture child. I had come to identify with the message of the late 60s, the summer of love. I had time-travelled to the Haight-Ashbury district. And right there, I had listened to Timothy Leary’s message – turn on, tune in, drop out. It was unbelievable what had happened then, with the hippies, with the Black rights movement, with the anti-war movements, with the women right’s movements. But I still could not fully connect with this generation that had dropped acid, rebelled against everything and produced what we now know as Silicon Valley.
It is the ‘80s that became the source and summit of my soul. In the ‘80s, I found a home, and I am now convicted, no generation is yet to reach the greatness of the ‘80s. At least, in the modern times. One could argue that there was the renaissance, the times of the Medicis. The times when humanity made leap after leap. The times when men and women produced Summas.
If you were wondering how the NRA could happen with chaps in their 20s, it was about the times. It was the Zeitgeist. It was in the water, it was in the air, it was in the land. We all drink from the spirit of our times. It takes magic to escape the spirit of your times.
Imagine waking up to a breakfast of Tina Turner chiming; “What’s Love, but a second-hand emotion?” And then to a fruit salad of Prince’s Purple Rain? What about a Bob Marley and the Wailers’ lunch? Could you be loved? Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind. That my friend was all in the waters, in the air, in the lands of the ‘80s. It is what everyone breathed in and out.
Today, the Zeitgeist and Psyche has been injured... we enjoy our whiskys but without the touch of refinement, without the conversations that define the whisky. We enjoy the whisky for show, for a ‘fitting-in’. We have everything but without the spirit of things. We have the big cars, but they are robbed of that taste, that elegance, that aura. It is a generational emptiness.
We have the best interior designs in our houses and offices, better than the world has witnessed, but there is a lack of life in the houses. The kind of life present in homes where children have scribbled all-over the white walls, with cushions thrown across the room. It is the luwombo without the aroma. Even our ginger does not spice anymore, and our akabanga is lacking.
A song is released today, trends like hot cake for two weeks and then it is complete digital dust within a month. We long for songs that we would never tire of, we long for the timeless, but no way, we have been blessed with bubble gum, to be chewed and spat out at will. We lack the power of ruin-value in whatever we create. Ruin value – the fact that one should create something great that even when ruined, it will maintain a lasting beauty. This is why glass transcends plastic. Even when shattered, glass has a ruin-value devoid of perfect plastic.
The solution? We ought to start injecting some of the 80s spirit into the world of today. Our obsession for more is because we seek to touch something ‘real’, something that affirms our lives. But we cannot find it, so we keep piling stuff, we keep trying harder drugs. We keep seeking more outrage moments. No, we just need that essence of the ‘80s, a dose of ‘80s everyday will cure our emptiness.
Post-Script: Mbu there is a Muhanuuzi aesthetic. An elegance and beauty that just is, without trying too much. Oba it’s also an ‘80s thing? Oba?
