this is not pitchfork

Ah, 1982. Spiked hair, skinny ties, new wave and a club called Spit. Spit, in Levittown, NY, was the alternate personality of a disco known as Uncle Sam’s. Two nights a week, the disco ball would stop spinning and the new wave kids would be ushered in the back door. Spit was dark, crowded and filled with the kind of energy that can only come from kids pumped up on alcohol and a new music movement. We wore pleather mini skirts with torn fishnet stockings and Doc Martens. We put toothpaste in our hair and wore black eyeliner and too many earrings in some mashup of punk and goth. Which, at the time, is what new wave was all about. And Spit was where we found like minded souls, people who didn’t want to bang their heads or shake their groove thangs, but wanted to revel in this new sound that was part decadence, part pop. And we danced to that sound, much like our Uncle Sam’s counterparts danced to theirs, but we did it with an affectation of rebellion.

Duran Duran’s Planet Earth was one of those songs that got everybody off their asses and onto the dance floor. We didn’t dance so much as stay in one spot and sort of shuffle our feet around while nod our heads in time to the music while trying not to spill our beer. This song had a post apocalyptic feel to it, which summed up the time in our lives perfectly. High school was over, the real world that waited after college loomed ahead of us; we were in some vast wasteland of time with our youth behind us and our adult life breathing down our necks and we were going to absorb all the fun from it we could, while trying hard not to look like we were having too much fun. For those of us in Spit, where the soundtrack was highlighted by Planet Earth and the sound it ushered it, this was the time of our lives.

In late 1982, the band released Rio and became a huge hit in America (the self titled album was only a hit in England at the time). They re-released Duran Duran and the single Girls on Film and its soft porn video turned them into an MTV band. Oh sure, I still loved them. I still had a thing for Simon Lebon, before he went from cute to pretty. But no matter how many subsequent hits they had, no matter how many screaming teenage girls I had to fend off when I worked at the record store and a new Duran album was released, no matter how many singles were on the charts or how many of their albums went platinum, it was always, and will always be in my mind, Planet Earth that represents everything the band was to me.

Favorite song: Planet Earth
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