"Forever Young" and Nuclear War
Since I originally posted it in June 2006, the most read article on Memes is one called Forever Young and the Politics of Meaning, a short meditation on the way in which context and personal experience change the meaning of a text. It generated a reasonably brisk debate at the time, but then I moved on, and most of the commenters did also.
But for the last three and a half years we have had an average of four visits a week from people googling something like “meaning of forever young.” I’ve visited other sites that come up in this search, and I think that it is time I added my view on the song, because I don’t think many people get it.
The song was originally written by German synth-pop outfit Alphaville, and “Forever Young” was the title track on their 1984 debut album. For me the clue is in the date of the original release: 1984 was smack in the middle of the Cold War and the song captures the sense of existential dread and fatalism that afflicted many young people at that time:
Let’s dance in style, let’s dance for a while
Heaven can wait we’re only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst
Are you going to drop the bomb or not?
This isn’t a political song; there is no advocating about arms reduction or political solutions, just the plea to forget politics and go out dancing. While the songwriters don’t want to die, anything seems better than waiting around for an apocalypse that ordinary people felt they didn’t have a way of stopping.
Let us die young or let us live forever
We don’t have the power but we never say neverPraising our leaders we’re getting in tune
The music’s played by the madman
It is hard to remember what things were like at that time, but the threat of nuclear war wasn’t just an academic question: it hung over us all the time. For an indication, try and find a copy of the 1983 nuclear holocaust film The Day After, or the completely devastating graphic novel by Raymond Briggs, When the Wind Blows. Dying young didn’t seem so bad, given the alternatives.
It’s so hard to get old without a cause
I don’t want to perish like a fading horse
Youth is like diamonds in the sun
And diamonds are forever
There were plenty of people writing anti-nuclear songs in those days: Sting’s Russians Nena’s 99 Luftballons, and of course, pretty much the whole of Red Sails in the Sunset, the 1984 album by Midnight Oil, but few caught the terror as well as Alphaville.
While the 2005 cover by Australian band Youth Group is probably the better-known version, I’m starting to like the original better. The combination of the fatalistic lyrics and the synth-pop beat creates a slightly chilling juxtaposition that neatly captures the 1980s zeitgeist. The song has been covered many times, by people as diverse as Laura Branigan and metal band Atrocity. It is even currently featuring in an Australian television commercial for New Zealand tourism.
None of the covers come close to capturing the chilling sense of desperation subsumed into dance of the Alphaville version. This is no “Working Class Man” or “Born in the USA” railing against political injustice: this is a particularly northern European drink-yourself-to-oblivion response to the issue. I wasn’t aware of the song in 1984, and I probably wouldn’t have approved—I liked political songs better. But from this perspective, I’m understanding where they are coming from, and I love the melancholy.
But now I see that Jay-Z has released a cover, so I might have to write about it again soon…
Your Comments
Catriona writes:
For some reason, I was just thinking about this the other day—not the song, but the general idea. I was thinking that my generation (and I’m a just-turned 33) were really the last to grow up in the shadow of the bomb—I mean, consciously aware that we might die awfully and suddenly or, perhaps worse, die not so suddenly after all.
I was thirteen the year the Berlin Wall came down, so I was too young to have anything but a nascent political sense during the 1980s (and I speak only for myself on the subject of political development at that age). But I certainly spent those years aware of and frightened by the bomb—and I’m still frightened by the bomb.
The students I teach now? By and large, they weren’t yet born when the Berlin Wall came down. Good for them.
Posted: 8 02 2010 - 18:36 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
Yeah. A few times while writing this post I found myself saying “the kids today don’t understand…” which is patronising and probably historically naive, but it’s hard to capture the feeling of those times—it really was a cloud that hung over everything.
I wish I had known the song in those days—it seems like a very sensible attitude to take in the circumstances.
Posted: 8 02 2010 - 19:25 | Permanent link to this comment
Matthew Smith writes:
For me it was all aids and drugs – I didn’t understand about the bomb even though I read When the Wind Blows, I didn’t understand what those spots were, I thought it was a happy ending! Same thing though, the mix of fatalism and a “to hell with it let’s just have fun” attitude (except for me personally it was more like “you guys go and have fun, I’ll be over here hiding under a rock with my maths textbook”)
Posted: 8 02 2010 - 20:52 | Permanent link to this comment
ben writes:
Yeah, the pervasiveness of the spectre of nuclear war can never be underestimated, and it’s interesting that some of this stuff resurfaces occasionally, as an allegory for slightly less spectacular ecological and economic problems. (The remake of Edge of Darkness is possibly relevant here, and Dollhouse’s strange foray into Mad Max territory.) It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, etc, etc.
This leads me back to something I wrote about pop and nuclear war a few years ago — about a popular sensibility that was fairly obvious, but also so pervasive that I felt I could see it everywhere in less obvious guises, to the point that I felt I was over-reading.
Posted: 9 02 2010 - 11:30 | Permanent link to this comment
ben writes:
On the point about drinking yourself into oblivion versus a more obviously political response: I, too, preferred the latter when I was young, but hedonistic melancholy really appeals to me now. The Divinyls offer love in the middle of fatalism, but acts like the Manic Street Preachers even abandon love in trying to articulate an ambivalent hybrid of hedonism and working class anger in songs like A Design for Life:
Everyone says you either love or hate the Manics, but I’ve always been ambivalent, because you can see the tragedy, but also the strain of these kinds of gestures.
Posted: 9 02 2010 - 12:17 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
That was a great post, Ben. I was beginning to think that I was just me, but you captured the sense of gloom of the 80s really well.
I wonder whether periods of existential dread always produce art that is carefree, popular, and (face it) largely ephemeral? I’d do some research if I could be bothered…
Posted: 12 02 2010 - 12:32 | Permanent link to this comment