Word: 80s
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...1970s a TV cartoon series called Schoolhouse Rock used catchy tunes to teach children about everything from verbs to the Constitution. Now teacher Ross Kapstein of Atlanta has given that idea an '80s twist by writing and recording a rap-song tribute to the basic theories of economics. Employing a funky beat and styling the title, RUN G.N.P., after rap stars Run-D.M.C., Kapstein hopes to help his seventh-graders at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School remember concepts like the law of supply and demand. Sample verse: "People's tastes change and so do I/ If I want...
...lyrical lines of unequal lengths and correspondingly non-correspondent meters. The instrumental bridge is a string quartet; the coda is also counched in lush strings, with Askew contributing a haunting, wordless "Madame Butterfly" type aria. This segues into an instrumental, "Acropolis Now," which begins promisingly as a hybrid between '80s rock and Greek folk guitar, but it begins to maunder soon after and degenerates into a fairly close approximation of a jam session by a forgotten, early '70s band. The side closes with the title track, which reverses the problems of the opening cut; a suitably anthemic chorus is surrounded...
What is important, however, is what happens while nothing happens. Kingston follows this "rebel with a cause" to the depths of his personality, and at the bottom comes up with a vision of America and the American dream and California, of integration and discrimination, of the '60s and the '80s. Although sometimes her work seems as out-of-focus as the glasses Wittman wears, it is on the whole breathtakingly fascinating...
...this continues, time could end up being to the '90s what money was to the '80s. In fact, for the callow yuppies of Wall Street, with their abundant salaries and meager freedom, leisure time is the one thing they find hard to buy. Their lives are so busy that merely to give someone the time of day seems an act of charity. They order gourmet takeout because microwave dinners have become just too much trouble. Canary sales are up (low-maintenance pets); Beaujolais nouveau is booming (a wine one needn't wait for). "I gave up pressure for Lent," says...
There is an additional irony: all the time-saving devices may actually make people work harder. Sometime in the early '80s, suggests futurist Selwyn Enzer, Americans came to worship career status as a measure of individual worth, and many were willing to sacrifice any amount of leisure time to get ahead. "Social scientists underestimated the sense of self-esteem that came with having a career," he observes. These days, if an entrepreneur has not made his first million by the time he is 30, his commitment to capital accumulation is suspect. And in the transition from an industrial...