Walking with Music: Freedom?

Back then youths were happy enough because they could listen to music while walking. The magical walkman’s cheap but unforgettable click sound, the cassette’s visibility which shows at which point of the album you are at, the colourful plastic bracelets, unique hairstyles, and so on… It was a time when the world had just come out of the liberation movements of the 70s, and was unfortunately moving towards a more thoughtless era: an era of neo-conservatism and apolitical youth masses, a time of more trivial and yet diversified commercial products.

Unsurprisingly, portraying the tendencies of a time period through cultural and artistic products gives us a better idea of the situation back then. In this year’s selection, the Cannes Festival is welcoming some films in different sections which refer to pop songs from the 80s.

In Tony Manero, in which the protagonist obsessively watches the film Saturday Night Fever over and over, there are unforgettable dancing scenes and typical 70s fashions. Raul wants to win a TV competition for Manero impersonators. Besides watching Fever and repeating the dialogues in his broken English accent, he continuously listens and dances to 80s Latin songs which carry a feeling of incompleteness. For some, music produced in the 80s has a strong element of kitsch - not only referring to bad taste as in the common-usage of the word, but also to a kind of raw and unfinished state. The sensations which are passed onto the spectator are fake and deceptive, but still highly attractive.

In one scene of the animated film Waltz with Bashir, Israeli soldiers are also listening to pop hits from the 80s. In this case, the story itself is set in those years, during the Israeli-Lebanese conflict at the beginning of the decade. The soldiers mostly don’t have a clue why they are going to war in Lebanon and are having fun with these songs, dancing around and brandishing their guns. The structures of 80s pop songs are were similar to these unquestioning soldiers: fake and temporary sentiments, no worries or reflection on the state of the world… They asked the listener to consume them fast and ‘ask for more’, in the slogan’s commercial sense. The contradiction in Waltz with Bashir is that war needs to be questioned. The soldiers - children of 80s - are just not aware of it yet.

In the Bosnian film Snow, a woman selling home-made conserves and a truck driver listen to the 1988 Italian song Libertá whilst talking about people who died in the war. The song mentions the importance of unity: “Freedom, you made lots of people cry, but without you there is loneliness”. The underlying meaning of the music is different here, firstly because freedom is a timeless struggle - a song mentioning it going back to the 80s is a true example of this - and secondly, because this decade didn’t bring the world more freedom than the one before it.

It is important to note that the 80s created a generation who expressed their ideas not with profound words but with colours, kitsch and shiny accessories. Besides this however, these years also had their own dynamics amongst the youths who were demanding more rights. As the decade during which MTV appeared (1981) and American pop culture rose up against the political backdrop of the fall of Berlin wall (1989), it brought the world to a point where youth was more and more apolitical. The Smurfs, Voltron, Karate Kid, VHS, Terminator, Elm Street, Ronald Reagan, Back to the Future, Madonna… Did this diversity in outputs actually indicate more freedom, or did it bind us to a colourful atmosphere in which where all the rules were already decided?

Esra Demirkiran