To Truly Understand the Past, Pick Up an Old Magazine

How alien are the ways we once described the world; how swiftly we freeze the past into its mere idea, a cartoon of this or that distant year or decade. I’m writing a book about the singer Kate Bush, and another about my education, projects that require much paging through magazines from the 1980s. In the London-based style monthly The Face, I find a cover story on “Electro: the beat that won’t be beaten.” It’s May 1984, the first wave of hip-hop is long past and this summer belongs to the Roland drum machine and the imported sounds of New York clubs. I turned 15 that month, and remember this musical cusp very well. What surprises me now in the pages of The Face: There are just the tiniest hints of the British miners’ strike and the swelling unemployment that are convulsing the country politically. And not a single mention yet of AIDS; in a Wrangler ad, a model’s speech bubble announces, oblivious: “I’m Positive.” In these magazine pages, it both is and is not the 1984 of my memory.