As Ozzy Osbourne sings, “Heirs of a Cold War, that’s what we’ve become / Inheriting troubles, I’m mentally numb!” And Ozzy would much rather go mentally numb some other way. But “Crazy Train” is a bluntly obvious song about the nuclear arms race, and the helpless terror felt by even the most pampered of citizens, including rock stars. But Cold War doomsday culture has always remained wildly popular, even after the context has been forgotten.Ĭase in point: “Crazy Train,” a classic that nobody today is surprised to hear at a wedding, a prom, a football game, or a SUV ad full of happy children singing along. It definitely hits different than it would have a year ago. Thinking the unthinkable-how is that transforming our minds, our imaginations, our nightmares? Hell, there’s even a Top Gun reboot this summer, starring Tom Cruise as Maverick, as if the showdown with the Russkies never ended. Now it’s easy to enjoy a movie like Top Gun as a kitschy little rom-com, with the cinema’s most erotically charged volleyball orgy, rather than propaganda for dropping the Big One.īut in 2022, that old-school anxiety is returning, for the first time in cultural memory. It’s weird how today you can hear mega-famous tunes like “1999” or “99 Luftballons” or “I Melt With You” or “ The Final Countdown,” without even noticing that they’re explicit Eighties songs about nuclear annihilation, which people were expecting any day. The apocalyptic imagination was on fire in the Eighties, the soundtrack to the era of The Day After, as the world reached the brink of getting blown up. As Prince would say, party over-whoops, out of time. But with Putin’s long, vicious war on Ukraine, and America waking up to the idea of Russia as a nuclear threat, a specific kind of Us vs. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it looked like the end for pop culture’s obsession with the threat of World War 3. But here’s one nobody wanted to see: the resurgence of Cold War anxiety. The past few years have seen plenty of Eighties revivals.
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