MISCmedia for 9/27/99
More of What
They (And We) Don't Know

LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University's second annual list of pop-cult references incoming college students know about that their profs might not, and vice versa.

Never one to let a good shtick go uncopied, I asked for your recommendations in this regard via email and our MISC.Talk discussion boards.

While the ever-voracious nostalgia industry keeps bringing back old songs, fashions, movies, cars, and foods, many important aspects of bygone life remain bygone.

Thus, based partly on some of your suggestions, this list of cultural reference points distinguishing today's fake-ID bearers from pathetic fogeys such as myself:

• Streakers. (Suggested by Frank Bednash.) Public nudity as good, clean dirty fun, by usually-male young adults confronting society's put-ons with a brash, asexual smile. The closest things we have to that these days are staged rituals such as Madison, WI's Naked Mile or the Fremont Solstice Parade's nude bicyclists--but those are too advertised-in-advance to be real streaks.

• Helen Reddy. Forgotten '70s middle-of-the-road balladeer who emerged from Australia with the anthem "I Am Woman." Everything else she did was much tamer. As a Grammy Awards presenter, she refused to correctly announce the title of Richard Pryor's comedy album That Nigger's Crazy. But after her sales dwindled, she posed for an album cover in a see-thru blouse. The attempted image-change failed to save her career.

• The "sexual revolution." Today's young adults may see an American society still faught with sex-fear and sex-guilt, but might not realize we've had legal, above-ground hardcore porn for only 30 years and screen nudity for less than 40. And magazines like Mademoiselle used to run cover blurbs about how to snag a hubby, not how to achieve multiple orgasms.

• Old-time TV. Channels like Nick at Nite keep some of the most popular old shows in the public eye, but they can't replicate the shows' old context--a broadcast universe of just three main networks (plus PBS and one or two commercial indie channels per city), showing just nine minutes of ads (mostly full-minute ads) in a prime-time hour, fashioning programs for a "mass" audience instead of demographic target markets.

• Top 40 radio. The nostalgia industry keeps the old hits alive, but again it's the environment that's missing. Stations like the old KJR-AM would play anything that sold lots of 45s (back when 45s were still a prominent sales force). The same half-hour of airtime might include Bob Dylan, Lynard Skynard, Dolly Parton, the Carpenters, and Sgt. Barry Sadler!

• Space Food Sticks. Sort of like PowerBars, but tubular and marketed as the latest thing in futuristic nutrition.

• Mass-market paperbacks. They're still around, offering romances, whodunits, and diet advice. But they used to offer a much wider variety, including reprints of major hardcover titles (albeit sometimes disguised to seem more salacious--the cover painting for one paperback version of 1984 hid the "Anti-" on a woman's "Anti-Sex League" sash!).

  As late as the early '70s, college English profs could assign their students as many as 100 books for one semester; thanks to cheap paperback editions, the kids could afford to buy 'em all.

• Ads in comic books for the upcoming fall cartoon schedule. (Suggested by G. Soria.) In the '80s, every newspaper story about the graphic-novel explosion said something like "Pow! Bam! Comic books aren't just for kids anymore!" (Either that, or a catch phrase from the old Batman TV show that had never been used in the Batman comics, like Robin's "Holy __, Batman!")

  Now, only fogeys remember that comic books had ever been for kids.

• Competitive newspapers. Fewer and fewer U.S. towns have two completely separate dailies (in the west, pretty much only Denver and Salt Lake City). When all papers competed for readers, they tended to be smaller, brasher, livelier, looking and feeling more like a fun-chaotic downtown street scene than a sedate suburban lawn. The design language of an old Hearst front page is nearly incomprehensible to readers reared on the modern Gannett formula of big type, wide columns, and plenty of white space.

  Newspapers were also a lot more popular back when they were more populist, something the entire industry's forgotten.

• Regional beers. Before micros, before widespread imports, if you didn't want Bud or Coors or Miller you had something just as light but more local (or at least less than fully national)--an Old Style, Ballantine, Blatz, Dixie, Iron City, Piels, Grain Belt, Falstaff, Shaffer, Acme, Stag, Schmidt, Stroh's, Hamm's, or Lone Star--or, around here, a Rainier, Oly, Blitz-Weinhard, Lucky, or Heidelberg. Soon, these names might all be known only to bottle and can collectors.

IN OTHER NEWS: Who needs freakin' ideological "battles of the sexes"? Let's get on with the real thing!

TOMORROW: Concluding this series, some things young adults know that fogeys probably don't.

ELSEWHERE:

• There are other wacky-invention retrospective sites out there, but none with such "respectable" credentials....
• "A friend shall be defined herein as another girl with whom you are acquainted and whom you would feel comfortable calling without an express reason...."
• All the Brit swear words you never wanted to imagine....
• Darned near everybody loves new examples of Japanese slang! (found by Rebecca's Pocket....)
• Now THIS is what I call a "frozen treat!"...

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Part one of our gen-gap exploration.
• Home satellite dishes--still worth it?
• Brief looks at a few real-estate relics.
• Newspapers try to stem circulation declines by becoming even duller.
• Who's afraid of digital movie theaters?
• The truth behind Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner."
• Fun words about music from all over.
• The subtle beauty that is Amtrak Cascades; the first and second parts of our Vancouver journey.
• The lost seductive powers of architecture.
• Some of the supposed worst writers taught to teens; and a few examples of great writing they could be taught instead.

ARCHIVES:

• 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Longer articles and essays
• The origin and future of MISCmedia