Eighties pop music was about padded jackets, pink cheeks and teased quirks, not loyalty or sincerity.
The idea was: Joy is a firework of brightly colored and garishly burnt money.
A distressing number of the heroines and heralds of this idea are gone: Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, George Michael, Prince;
Leading figures of a happiness that can be bought in a strangely innocent way, which “replaces the countless documented and well-acquired freedoms” of the West with the one and only “unconscientious freedom of trade”, in which, with Marx and Engels, “everything that stands and stands evaporates”, from Marriage vows until permanent employment.
Dietmar Dath
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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Under such circumstances, the erotic or heroic experience that young people are looking for can only take place where, advertised, it takes on the form of a commodity – like the pop single including an MTV video clip, the core work of art of the time.
The best-known song-plus short film to date by singer Patricia Mae Andrzejewski, who was born in Brooklyn in 1953 to a metal worker and a beautician and made a career as "Pat Benatar", is called "Love is a Battlefield" (1983).
It sings about and illustrates the pain barrier for all forms of happiness in which one is dependent on other people: should there be a societal loyalty requirement so that this happiness does not die too quickly ("But I'm trapped by your love/And I 'm chained to your side"),
Or, on the contrary, must “freedom of trade without conscience” also regulate interpersonal relationships, as a love exchange where only those who can afford it win?
In the "Love is a Battlefield" video, Pat Benatar leaves the traditionalist home and takes the bus to the big city, where she ends up as a rental dance chick in a sleazy shed.
Against the pimp guy who rules there, she instigates an uprising of exploited sex workers with a shoulder-shaking dance, who finally leave the den of robbers in a formation, assure each other of solidarity with gestures and then go their separate ways.
where she ends up as a rental dance kitty in a sleazy shed.
Against the pimp guy who rules there, she instigates an uprising of exploited sex workers with a shoulder-shaking dance, who finally leave the den of robbers in a formation, assure each other of solidarity with gestures and then go their separate ways.
where she ends up as a rental dance kitty in a sleazy shed.
Against the pimp guy who rules there, she instigates an uprising of exploited sex workers with a shoulder-shaking dance, who finally leave the den of robbers in a formation, assure each other of solidarity with gestures and then go their separate ways.
Two years later, with "Sex as a Weapon", the artist followed up with an attack on the TV-supported advertising front of the unleashed love trade, a, in retrospect, rather tame exercise in soft-rock feminism that existed elsewhere at the time (in Germany 1982 dry, as is typical for the country, by Ina Deter's "The country needs new men"), which, however, was not backed by any assertive social force.
This symbolic defiance was once again, like blaxploitation cinema or fun punk, an extension of the product range of the culture industry, albeit a rather benign one.
But what do you do when you can't rock things out like that?
You just conjure up the vaporized, loyalty and God, for example, like Pat Benatar with "We Belong" back in 1984,
including one of the prettiest (angel children) choirs this side of Queen and Jim Steinman.
Her marriage to guitarist Neil Giraldo, celebrated in this way, has produced two daughters and meanwhile a Romeo and Juliet musical called "Invincible" about their shared, rather shock-resistant love life.
Both spouses may never have heard of Adorno, but their bagpipe music has been about one of his most fragile ideas for more than thirty years: "The command to be loyal that society issues is a means to bondage, but only through loyalty does freedom achieve insubordination to the command of society”, namely when this command wants to carve out of people omni-flexible spare parts that are incapable of binding, who no longer resist even the most stupid networked exploitation of their desires.
Why not make music against it vigorously until retirement age, in undaunted market irrelevance?
Today Pat Benatar turns seventy.