The 8-Track Tape & The Assasins Bullet

By Mike Marino

The 8-track tape, just like the rotating disco ball in a gay bar, hit the pop culture scene with nuclear impact...then, thanks to changing times and an even more rapid fire semi-automatioc changing world of technology, faded away faster then an avalanche!.

Hula-hoops a generation earlier and lava lamps of the Sixties along with polyester and tie dyed clothing peaked and ultimately fell on the pop culture battlefield looking for all the world as the dead and dying blue and grey laid out pretty as a black and white picture in an 8X10 negative Civil War photograph by the Matthew Brady Bunch. Icons come and icons go.

The Hula Hoop and Twister...ones a tease, the other a sexual act. C'mon...two people facing each other, groin to groin, gyrating with hula hoop hip action, thrusting to and fro, back and forth, with full throttle action kicked into gear...a few minutes of that and then it's off to a group session of twister, crawling all over each other in a Rubics cube of what could be construed as sexual positions on the floor, climbing, crawling, pawing, bumping, mounting, dismounting...this all on the heels of a devastating round of strip poker where half the room is in the buff and Twister accessible!

Take Hollywood and Memphis. Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. The king and queen of the teen dream pop prom. Didn't make it to social security but adorn t-shirts from Brooklyn to Tokyo along with Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and John Lennon. Forever young, (forever Jung?) in sizes small to large. Elvis, almost didn't make the icon archives gracefully as he was beginning to wear at the seams and sat waivering on the border of cartoon or buffoon. The rest of the rest in peace crowd though...what would they look like today? Lining up for the Larry King show, himself a living corpse that in one interview confused Ringo with the dead George in front of Paul, and Georges widow..like all cadavers, King just moved on in his own little dream world where you run in slow motion and the slower mummy can actually catch up to you to cause great harm.

Janis, God bless her Texas soul, would be a Sophie Tucker fixture on the Oprah show. Dean would probably try for a "Rebel Without a Cause" part two reunion but casting Corey Feldman as Sal Mineo, and himself as the father played originally by Jim Backus. Dean would not have the following today had he lived and couldn't even get himself punked by Ashton Kutcher.

Let's face it...they die young, get t-shirted, and are frozen in Dorian Gray time like a TV dinner. Those that have kept alive in spite of things and failing careers are wheeled out on occassion to our great horror. Tina Louise, Ginger on "Gilligans Island", Tuesday Weld the blonde nuclear bombshell of Dobie Gillis, the girl who played Ellie Mae on "Beverly Hillbillies"...40 years have gone by and they re-emerge as though nothing has changed, except as in Shangri-la you don't age until you leave the mountain..well, they left the mountain and age caught up with them as though an avalanche has raced down the hill. It's not that THEY have aged that bothers us...it's that it is a reminder that we also have right alongside of them, but we see ourselves everyday..complain a bit about wrinkles, grey hair, etc but we still view them as young...their youth, our youth, our illusion that nothing has changed and they show up and shatter our own false reality like broken glass flying everywhere from the Twin Towers.

Small town America and Route 66, America's Mainstreet are dust in the wind of nostalgia. Wal-Mart and the interstate combined an inevitable sucker punch that was long over due anyway. The rolling assembly lines of Detroit, spelled the end of the horse and buggy era, and the interstate highway system and it's speed and convienience in a world that had less and less time available was a welcome beacon to the demise of the two lane. Nobody had the time anymore to meander mindlessly through small town after small town while trying to get to their "destination."

Great old dives, cafes and diners have stepped aside for the chain restaurants..no, don't blame McDonalds, blame places like Stuckeys, still revered as roadside nostalgia, they helped foster the chain concept to kill the mom and pops. They literally took pecan rolls and shoved them up our collective nostalgia ass. Thankfully Wall Drug is holding the fort, the last stand of the asphalt Alamo!

The front page challenge of the newspaper industry today is to merely remain afloat in an ocean of digital information. Bobbing up and down in a digital sea, the printed newspaper has been eroded as a viable source of news, to the status of an informational dingy good for classified ads for garage sales, obits and not much more. It is not the Titantic it once was. It's the 8-track tape of news and information. Out dated, out moded, like the public phone booth.

See those any more? No. They never worked anyway when they were plentiful sentinels on the streets but thanks to cell phones...they have disappeared as a dinosaur as is the hard line phone in the home...good bye to the Princess Phone, iconic as she was, she has lost her virginity and become passe...another icon-a-tech product bites the dust. Clark Kent is still in a state of super shock.

The typewriter is a boat anchor in comparison to the small, light weight lap tops of today. Atari games, Pac Man, River Raid and other cartridge games of the early 80's are now a curiosity along with 78 rpm records and Victrola machines and penny arcades. Radio with it's constant babble has been replaced by MP3's.

When it comes to polyester..where the fuck is PETA when you need them! Do you know, really know how many polyesters have to die to make one really shiny shirt..the kind worn at disco's in the era by swarthy, sweaty dago's and by trailer trash in parks across America? Usually by Mrs. White Trash who just completed a course of cosmetology and opened a hairsalon in the spare room of her trailer. The polyester is now on the endangered species list but small herds still survive in the seaside forests of New Jersey.

Which brings us now to tie-dyed..used to be cool to wear, when you're in you teens in the sixties. Today they are generally worn by those who are over the hill, over the weight limit and they look ridiculous. Like the classic car buff in his early 40's who buys a 57 Chevy to fix up as though it is his past he is resurrecting instead of someone elses as they weren't even born until the 1970's and didn't even have a license until the 1980's!! The Fab Fifties Wannabes...the Sixties are grabbed onto like a life preserver by the Twenty somethings...that's fine but it's not their generation of nostalgia and for the most part think all the Sixties were about were the Beatles and Peace and Love! They forget the assasinations, the Civil Rights hangings and Freedom Bus Rides and Chicago.

Their worship of our era would be similar to our generation in 1965 grabbing a hold of American pop culture in 1925...I don't think Rudy Vallee would have made it to the top of our hit parade. So in reality...all I am doing is "talkin' bout my g..g...g...generation....so tear down your posters of Jimi Hendrix until you understand the times and you finally answer Jimi's question...Are you Experienced?

3-D is making a comeback but it was obnoxious when it first came out and we sat google eyed in theaters. Does anything spell geek more than 3-D glasses? But to a certain degree the glasses were cool..from a geek perspective...kind of made us look like psychedelic Mr. Magoo's. Lava Lamps are back with a vengeance and so is the Mini Cooper. Vinyl is trying to comeback from the sewer of nostalgia that it fell into in favor of CD's which are waning due to MP3's...cries of "get a horse" didn't stem the automobile tide and of course "if man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings.." Screw that...we made our own! Why wait for heavenly divine intervention?

I have learned to live with change...technological and in pop culture...but damn, I do miss Davy Crockett coon skin caps and Beatle boots!