Skinny ties and all.
By Matt Farr 

A few days ago, I stopped by Old Navy after work to check out the cheap shirts. I'm notoriously cheap when I can get away with it, and Old Navy has bargains to tempt the most miserly among us. I mean, if Old Navy isn't exploiting the workers of some poor country in order to make a profit on the amazingly detailed button-down shirts that I buy for $8 each, then I don't understand math. Or economics. Or something.

Anyway, I was sluicing my way through the bargain rack, when I heard a somewhat familiar song on the Old Navy music system. 

So true, funny how it seems
Always in time, but never in line for dreams
Head over heels when toe to toe
This is the sound of my soul
This is the so-o-o-und...

I bought a ticket to the world
But now I've come back again
Why do I find it hard to write the next line
Oh I want the truth to be said

I know this much is true
I know this much is true!

Stop me before I wear a white jacket again! Spandau Ballet in the early 1980s.

These are the words from a song by an English group called Spandau Ballet. The original single came out in 1983, when I was a freshman in college. It's a song that's immediately identified with the early 80s and a faction of English pop groups called "New Romantics."

Reading the lines on the page above, they look almost silly in their hopeless romanticism. But in 1983, no other song came close, or was even in the same category, for a heartfelt slow dance with a sorority babe. To my 18-year-old mind, it was the most romantic song ever recorded. Tony Hadley, the lead singer of Spandau Ballet, delivered the most flawless, passionate vocal performance ever recorded. 

With a thrill in my head and a pill on my tongue
dissolve the nerves that have just begun
Listening to Marvin (all night long)
This is the sound of my soul
This is the so-o-o-und...

Always slipping from my hands,
Sets a time of its own
Take your seaside arms and write the next line
Oh I want the truth to be known

In my college days, I steered clear of soft rock like Culture Club, A-Ha, A Flock of Seagulls, the Go-Go's, and Hall & Oates. I listened to the edgier stuff of the time, like the Violent Femmes, Prince, Jim Carroll Band, The Nails, U2, Depeche Mode, XTC and Talking Heads, seasoned with some Van Halen, Dire Straights and Bruce Springsteen for straight ahead rock n' roll. 

Lionel Richie, master of the sappy ballad, was the enemy.

The English bands that were part of the "New Romantics" movement were all about clothes. Spandau Ballet was no exception.

Yet Spandau Ballet's biggest hit transcended coolness. Even though I despised most of the schmaltzy romantic crap on the radio, I could not disparage the power and beauty of this one song. "True" was performed by a bunch of yellow-suited English guys with foppish hairdos; it was hopelessly romantic; but it was perfect. It soared in all the right places, and it had passion.

Besides, girls liked it, and it was a great slow dance song.

I know this much is true
I know this much is true!

I still believe this one song to be timeless. It sounds as fresh and wonderful when I hear it now as it did when I was 18. In fact, the original version was recently featured in the movies "Charlie's Angels" and "The Wedding Singer."

What I heard in Old Navy, however, was a new, disco-beat "True." The song had been sped up from its original dreamy pace, and new, techno touches had been added. Gone as well was the original vocal track; in its place was a mélange of singers, male and female, attempting to improve upon a performance that was already perfection itself.

Now, it's not like this new version sucked. It was actually pretty good - the singing was warm and sincere, and the music was catchy and enjoyable. The people remaking the song obviously liked the old song, and weren't doing a remake simply for the purposes of mocking it or cashing in. Yet I had to kick myself to keep from grumbling, "That's not nearly as good as the original. What's with this disco beat they've added? The vocals aren't nearly as heartfelt. Are they just making fun of it?"

My arteries are hardening and my joints are aching. I can see the day a-comin' when I'll be telling the kids in my neighborhood, "Back in my day, we didn't have no fancy school buses. We had to walk six miles to school through ice water in our bare feet!"

Yep. Eventually, you realize that you're not that teenager anymore. You're getting old. You're turning into a damned fossil.

I bought a ticket to the world,
but now I've come back again
Why do I find it hard to write the next line?
Oh I want the truth to be said

This much is true
I know, I know, I know this much is true

I remember the first time I realized that I was getting older, and the music that used to be underground was becoming classic rock. It was 1990, and I was bowling with some friends on a Friday night at the "Rock & Bowl." It was 10 p.m. and the bowling alley DJ played "Turning Japanese" by the Vapors, a song that used to be the litmus test of coolness. At one time, if you even knew the song, you were cool. And if you knew that the song was by the Vapors, man, you was frosty cold.

"A fluke," I thought. "Maybe it got mixed into their record collection by a wayward college student."

Then they played "Girlfriend is Better" by the Talking Heads, and I knew it was no accident. When formerly ultra-cool, super-unknown, up-to-the-minute music becomes the theme music for your neighborhood bowling alley, its cool quotient is nearly spent. 

When you're a teenager, music is everything. Then you get older, and you start wondering about the appeal of the latest hit songs. Then you start criticizing the baggy pants, the dyed blond hair, and the body piercings. You start to realize that you don't know most of the artists in the Hot Recordings rack at Target, much less any of their latest hit songs.

Eventually, you write something like Allan Bloom did in The Closing of the American Mind:

"Though students today do not have books, they most emphatically do have music. Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

"Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire - not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. 

"Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy."

And Bloom wrote that in 1987, twelve years before Eminem.

Yet for many a wigged-out teenager, the only solace you can find is in the words of a song by some band that's too weird, too controversial, and too extreme to ever make it to the Top 40. It's been that way since Elvis, and probably before that too. And part of the appeal is that your parents don't like it. The kids that loved "Jail House Rock" grew up to be the parents who hated their kids' Led Zeppelin. Now those lemon-squeezin' kids are facing the Wu-Tang Clan and wondering, "Is this music?"

The dapper lads of Spandau Ballet. I'm saving my skinny ties for the day that they're back in style.

I know this much is true.

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©2000 Matthew Farr