Bill Kauffman listens to 1984, concludes it would have been better with the Partridge Family
Bill Kauffman listens to 1984, concludes it would have been better with the Partridge Family
"As the obscure twentieth-century playwright Wanda Frank observed, in matters of mass culture the question of nuggets or dross largely depends upon which year you were born."
Bill Kauffman is one of my favorite writers. His nearly unclassifiable book Look Homeward America (“blending history, memoir, digressive literariness, and polemic”), gave me license to lean into my own idiosyncrasies. It cosigned and fortified a concept I had first gleaned from my friend T. Kyle King: that even within single sentences, a writer can take sideroads to strange and glorious places. We don’t dare call such detours “tangents” because they’re so enchanting they quickly become the primary destination. And with Kauffman, the more off-the-wall the analogy, or the more offbeat the reference, the more likely it is to stay lodged in the reader’s psyche forever.
(But perhaps the most persuasive evidence for Bill’s literary greatness is his continued ability to make Batavia, New York—or at least the lost Batavia of his fever dreams—sound as exotic as New Orleans or Savannah.)
So, you can imagine my awe and gratitude when Bill chose our lil’ Substack adventure as the focus for his recent column in The Spectator. This is one of those “pinch myself to confirm it’s real” moments. I am including some of my favorite bits below, but you can (and should) read the full piece here. And to those readers who have just come onboard because of his piece, thank you—and hello!
Instead of finding Morlocks and Eloi, as H.G. Wells’s time traveler did, this married father of two in Tempe, Arizona, encountered Walter Mondale and Night Ranger — and he lived to tell his entertainingly perceptive tale.
I particularly enjoy Lurie’s descants on pop music — even though I loathe the tunes he lauds. His boyhood radio memories (Ray Parker Jr., Van Halen) are not mine (the Grass Roots, the Partridge Family) ….
Lurie even descended into the hellish world of MTV, whose archetypal video, he notes, features “an innocent, sheltered young woman [who] finds herself in a strange and initially terrifying new environment, but comes to a Kate Chopin-style sensual awakening courtesy of…a bunch of hard-rock knuckleheads.” (Fortunately, across town in 1984 Minneapolis the Replacements were banging out “Seen Your Video/it’s phony rock and roll.”)