Like many videos from the era, it can be hard (and pointless) to parse. The video for “Twilight Zone” was the consummate visual for the song. What “Marquee Moon” was to Punk, “Twilight Zone” was to 80s Pop - epic, urgent, mysterious and positively essential. But I could listen to that hook and that story for hours. The album version is almost eight minutes. The radio version is almost five minutes, quite long for a single. It’s literally sliced through the bone by a bullet. The song breaks midway through for a bass and guitar solo, mostly because the tension is so great that the song needs to be cut in half. That bass - placed front and center - hypnotizes while laser beams shoot out and the lead singer reads the pages from a spy thriller in New Wave English. Though I didn’t have the words back then, I now mostly understand what grabbed me about “Twilight Zone.” The song is built around a bass line that is so obvious and so luxurious that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been lifted by DFA Records or Jay Z or a million lesser acts. But I don’t recall asking: Where did they come from? Or - where had they gone? And - would they ever come back? I can’t explain why I didn’t investigate further. I never asked my parents to see if they might be playing in concert anywhere nearby. I never called into Z-100 to request the song. I never bought “Cut,” the album it was featured on. After the song disappeared from the airwaves, I did not pursue the matter further. As far as I was concerned, that’s where it started and ended. For at least a decade, I did not know a single thing about Golden Earring, other than that they had a previous hit with “Radar Love.” In 1982, all that mattered was that “Twilight Zone” was the greatest song my eight year old ears had ever encountered. Released almost exactly one year after MTV launched, it was the first and last song I heard (or saw) from the band. But, of all of the songs from those halcyon days of Music Television, Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone” left the deepest mark. Bruce was the platonic cool dad, throwing the ball around. Michael was bigger than the planet and able to illuminate pavement tiles. I can see them all: Prince was so mysterious and electrifying on an oversized motorcycle. I have hundreds of these memories, seared through a combination of songcraft, radio repetition and MTV’s strange exuberance. Survivor weren’t a generic, slightly Hard Rock band. They were hysterically funny comedians, wrestling with Aussie giants and agoraphobia. Men at Work weren’t just a bunch of pleasant, jangly popsmiths. She was the blonde matron with white wings and bright eyes floating through a dreamscape at an English boarding school while howling a Jim Steinman song. Bonnie Tyler was no longer the voice that I confused for Kim Carnes. After 1981, though, music was visually imprinted. I do still have memories of Pop music before 1981, but they are fleeting and probably unreliable. Regardless of the context, however, music felt intoxicating and penetrating, but rarely was it everlasting.īut, after August of 1981, came MTV, and, with it, my musical memories shifted from grainy tans and oranges into technicolor. When away from our radios, we might catch a sad whiff of The Carpenters or James Taylor while accompanying our parents to the bank or the supermarket. The most popular songs would be played two or three times per hour without much consideration. Coked up radio programmers assaulted us with hits, briefly but intensely. If you were a child of the Eighties, there is before August 1981 - the month that MTV debuted - and there is everything after.
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