first round

(11) Timbuk 3, “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)”
broke
(6) Buckner & Garcia, “Pac Man Fever”
258-79
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/9/23.

Situation: Comedy: sebastian stockman on “the future’s so bright (i gotta wear shades”)

“Did you see ‘Wonder Years’ last night?”
Fifth grade. This passed for a pickup line.
“No,” said my crush. “… Why’d they kiss or something?”
“Uhhhhh …. ” I said, voice skipping up several octaves. “No, just wondering!”
I played it cool. But of course Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper had kissed. Fortunately, back there in the late 80s, my denial was plausible. There was no easy way to find out for sure; it would be summertime before that one played again.
But Kevin and Winnie had kissed, and it gave me, briefly, bravado enough to broach the subject with the girl who’d kissed me behind the piano in Mrs. Maclean’s class the year before.
It was the afternoon they found out Winnie’s brother died in Vietnam. Kevin (Fred Savage) walks out to “the big climbing tree in Harper’s Woods,” where he somehow knew he’d find Winnie (Danica McKellar). He sits next to her on the tree’s low-slung trunk, and wraps her in his New York Jets letter jacket. They embrace, then kiss chastely.
As the camera pulls back Daniel Stern, in voiceover as grown-up Kevin, tells us he thinks “about the events of that day again and again—and somehow I know Winnie does, too—whenever some blowhard starts talking about the anonymity of the suburbs, the mindlessness of the TV generation, because we know that inside each one of those identical boxes … were families bound together in the pain and struggle of love.”
Unadulterated Baby Boomer Apologetics, and I drank it straight. Growing up in rural Lafayette County, Missouri, on a gravel road about five miles out of Alma, our farming community of 400, I didn’t know from identical boxes or anonymous suburbs. What I did know about the world outside I learned from half-hour comedies, in reruns and primetime.
I learned that a hickey was a scandal and that by looking into someone’s eyes you could discern whether or not they’d gotten lucky the night before. I learned about diet pills and that the worst thing you can say to a significant other is “I told you so.” There was, apparently, a world where people talked about their problems and their feelings instead of simmering with barely-suppressed passive-aggressive rage.
We didn’t have Nick at Nite. We turned on Channel 62 or 41 until it was time for the new network shows at 7. My kids binge, I vegged: “Growing Pains,” “Family Ties,” “Kate and Allie,” “Dear John,” “Andy Griffith,” “Dick Van Dyke,” “The Cosby Show,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Who’s The Boss,” “Cheers.” Everything ran together into my head where, with my warped critical faculties, I pieced together an idea of how the world worked, inferring social norms via their violation on sitcoms: Plato’s Cave with a laugh track.

Fillmore High

“Head of the Class” was a classroom sitcom in the “Welcome Back, Kotter” mode—a charismatic teacher enters the lives of an at-first unresponsive but quickly loyal group of students. The late-80s twist was that, instead of “Kotter”’s Gabe Kaplan confronting his delinquent Sweathogs, “Head of the Class”’s Howard Hessemann shows up as the substitute history teacher for a bunch of MENSA members in the Individualized Honors Program at Manhattan’s fictional Millard Fillmore High. Could the former Dr. Johnny Fever teach these geeks there was more to life than books? You had to tune in—on, I wanna say, Wednesdays 8:30/7:30 Central—to find out.
The IHP had one of each kind of nerd—the poet, the math geek, the computer guy, the first-generation immigrant, the speech-and-debate specialist, the conservative, the 11-year-old cello-playing super genius, the leather-vested bad boy who didn’t want to be there, and so on.
The gang is alternately coddled and berated by Dr. Samuels, Fillmore High’s principal, who usually wants them left alone to prepare for their next academic bowl against Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, or—in a very special 1988 two-parter actually filmed in Moscow—a team of Russian high school students (first line of The New York Times review (!) of the episode(!?): “The new Soviet openness creeps into prime-time entertainment… “)
I loved the show for what I took to be its knowing banter (I was eight) and even more for its acceptance and acknowledgment of a world outside the frame. I first encountered the Broadway musical on “Head of the Class” via the school’s productions of “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Hair.” From “Head of the Class” I learned, sorta, about the Cuban Missile Crisis. More on that later.
And “Head of the Class” is how I, outside of town in a farmhouse where cable couldn’t go, encountered Timbuk 3’s “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades),” for all I knew at first, the IHP gang had written it. Was there anything they couldn’t do?

The Song

Is “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” a wry satire of the late-80s’ rampant greed-is-good attitude, with the song’s clueless speaker in gormless pursuit of that “50 thou a year” which “will buy a lot of beer” regardless of the consequences for the planet or its future?
Or, as presented in the lip-synched music video by this history class at the end of history, is it a full-throated rallying cry for the ascendant technocracy? (Cue Michael Buffer: “Let’s get rrrrrready to do neoliberrrrralism!”)
Depends who you ask.
The band’s members insist it’s the former, and have been doing so since the song came out.
“A lot of people thought it was some kind of real optimistic song about how Reaganomics is going to save us all,” songwriter and lead singer Pat MacDonald told The Orlando Sentinel in 1987, under the headline “TIMBUK 3’S ANTI-NUKE ‘SHADES’ TURNS INTO MISUNDERSTOOD HIT.”
MacDonald met Barbara Kooyman in the late-70s in Madison, Wisconsin, where they played in separate bands. It wasn’t until after they married and moved to Austin that they formed Timbuk 3. “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” was the first single off their debut album “Greetings from Timbuk 3.”
“I was surprised,” MacDonald told the Sentinel. “But then I should’ve known it would happen that way because I know people listen to lyrics real peripherally.”
The reporter, Gary Graff, at first seems to accept MacDonald’s framing. He calls the song’s title chorus line a “deadpanned anti-nuclear witticism.” But “Shades” has no lyric as clear as “born down in a dead-man’s town,” or anything close, really. And Graff admits that “it’s easy for a casual listener to be misled—or at the very least, confused—by MacDonald’s intent. You can only get the satire … if you fixate on his delivery.”
Even then, “satire” seems a stretch. And MacDonald’s best defense is to point to lyrics that aren’t in the song as recorded: “Well I’m well aware/of the world out there/Getting blown to bits/But what do I care?”
MacDonald “thought they were were too heavy-handed. The idea is already expressed in the song without having to spell it out like that.” [Ed. note: False] “So it wouldn’t have been as good a song.” [Ed. note: Probably?] “And it definitely wouldn’t have been played on the radio.” [Ed. Note: True].
Nor would it have made a perfect backdrop to the IHP kids’ video. In it, the author is dead and whatever wisps of ironic distance the singer might be trying to stake out from its career-oriented speaker are obliterated by this network television interpretation.
You can find the video on Youtube. The version I’m watching was posted by an account called “cringevision,” and it is certainly chockablock with a chonky 80s’ corniness.
The class is presenting the video to Dr. Samuels, who seems skeptical—they’ve spent too much time on this contribution to the Fillmore High 80s time capsule—this seems like just another of Mr. Moore’s distractions. (In a joke slipped in by some writer’s-room subversive, just before pushing play Dennis assures Dr. Samuels “You’re going to love it.” Dr. Samuels: “That’s what they said about Pink Flamingoes.” There’s a dissertation to be done on the distance between John Waters and ABC’s 1987 sitcom slate, but … not here.)
The audience watches the enthusiastic class watch the skeptical Samuels watch the video. It begins with Mr. Moore walking into the classroom, opening something that looks like a glowing laptop, then recoiling as a 3D image of Samuels pops up, the top of his head opens and the members of the class fly out.
The harmonica riff kicks into high gear as Mr. Moore mugs a “what the hell?” face for the camera, bites his lip and peers back in. Eric, the bad boy, is dressed in different outfits, performing as all the members of the band—harmonica/lead lip-syncher, drummer, keyboardist, guitar, and bass.
After the 20-second musical intro and establishing shots, we see Dennis Blunden—computer whiz, slob, and target of so dozens of fat jokes—crack his knuckles and taps at the keys on his computer. This generates floating televisions that feature shoulders-up shots of one of the eight other IHP kids, wearing sunglasses and “grooving” to the music against backdrops of static.
There is no real narrative to this thing, and it would be tedious to try to describe all of its scenes (I tried). Jawarhalal and Janice work in a chemistry lab; Alan is sworn in as president by Sarah; Arvid slides down the rings of Saturn. The point of the video is to illustrate the text—not the subtext—of the song.
And, as a statement of what it was like to be in a gifted and talented program in the late 80s, it’s almost perfect—a celebration of pure potential, an assertion of absolute faith in a system that will duly reward its most talented.

“I study nuclear science.”

Almost every day growing up, I rode on a patch of rural-Missouri blacktop called "NN," past a square of chain-link fence in the middle of a cornfield, not three miles from where I watched all that TV. Inside the fence was gravel, a number of poles and antennae-type structures jutted up out of the ground. Hanging from the fence and facing the road was a square blue sign with "A-8" in white lettering. For a long time, I assumed it was some sort of water-pumping station. I was 9 or 10, which means it was 1987 or ’88, by the time it occurred to me to actually ask what "A-8" might be.
“That's a nuclear missile,” Dad said. Specifically, a Minuteman II, one of thousands sprinkled across the rural U.S.
Helpfully, Dad went on to explain that if, “God forbid,” I should ever see it go off, it wouldn't head east over St. Louis —> Indianapolis —> Philadelphia to Russia, but north, over the Pole, to shorten its distance to Moscow. I don't know for sure that this was true, nor do I know why, true or not, he thought this might be a helpful piece of information. Add to this the headquartering of the Stealth Bomber at nearby Whiteman Air Force Base, the Steve Gutenberg/John Lithgow/Jason Robards movie “The Day After" in which a warhead airbursts over Kansas City (a mere 60 miles away), plus the CIA spy Aldrich Ames and you have the receipt for dozens of late-night anxiety attacks in my pre-adolescence.
In a fumbling attempt to comfort me, the old man offered that if there was a nuclear exchange, we'd “never know it,” because so many of our missiles were pointed at their missiles and vice versa.
This didn't help.
Those missiles never did go off—they were decommissioned and hauled away in the early years of this century. But this is all to say that the phrase “nuclear science” hit different in 1987. We weren’t even a decade removed from Three-Mile Island, and it had been less than a year since Chernobyl.
So, score one for MacDonald: that first line is ominous.
But it’s just one phrase and the party starts now.

“I love my classes.”

MacDonald says his school-loving protagonist is a willing future cog in a machine bent on self-devouring itself. But MacDonald relies here on a rock trope that was getting less sturdy by the year: giving the finger to the establishment.
The song’s hero is not smoking in the boys room, nor is he hot for teacher. He loves his classes. He needn’t fight for his right to party, because he’s “got a job waitin’/for my graduation” and “fifty thou a year will buy a lot of beer.” (NB: 50,000 1986 dollars is $136, 482.66 today, so we’re still pretty good on the beer front).
Read in earnest, as they mostly were, these lyrics don’t just give us a celebration of Reaganomics. We also get a fitting soundtrack for Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”
In the summer of 1989—before the Berlin Wall fell but after the IHP gang made its trip to Moscow—Fukuyama, then a deputy director at the State Department, achieved the essayist’s dream: he published an argument whose thesis was so bad he would dine out on it for 35 years. Much-cited, much-derided, and incessantly-revisited, “The End of History?” declared “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.”
Fukuyama didn’t argue that events would stop happening, but that the Hegelian dialectic had completed its work and brought us to “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
In other words we (capitalism, the U.S., democracy) had won. The only thing to do now—as individuals in this society of victors—was lean hard into the realm of individual achievement.

“I’ve got a crazy teacher. He wears dark glasses.”

In the first episode, Mr. Moore, an out-of-work actor and long-term substitute encounters this group of sullen smarties uninterested in engaging him. He quizzes them on the Cuban Missile Crisis. They know the signal dates and events (at least from the American perspective). But Mr. Moore says they’ve omitted “the single most important factor … a little item called a baseball.” He tosses it in the air and catches it.
Hessemann/Fever/Moore gives the apocryphal account of Castro’s having tried out for the New York Giants, who decided he was “just not big league material … But if Fidel Castro had had the strength to throw a baseball past Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle there might not have been a missile crisis and today Castro’d be on TV doing beer commercials.”
“That is really dumb,” says Alan, the conservative. “That’s like saying if Ronald Reagan had been a better actor, we’d have a left-wing Supreme Court.”
There’s a beat, a bell, and that’s a sitcom.
The historiography here is … shaky at best. But Moore’s point—which he’ll make roughly once an episode—is that, more than facts and figures, dates and names, history is sliding doors and contingencies. Individual relationships matter (Mr. Moore is a former hippie and current liberal, but he is not a Marxist), and sometimes, nerds, you should get your noses out of your books and into the real world.
“Touch grass,” he might say today.
Dr. Johnny Fever, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

“I’m doing all right, gettin’ good grades.”

When this episode and its video first aired, Mark Zuckerberg was not quite three years old. Bill Gates had appeared on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans for the first time just a few months before.
In 1987’s burgeoning meritocracy on the cusp of a credentialism explosion, getting good grades is a prerequisite for “doing all right.” The line reads less like irony and—against the backdrop of the video—more like the final full acceptance, and even endorsement, of the only remaining path for upward mobility in this country. By the late 90s, it would be a commonplace that the jocks could have high school; the nerds would make out better in the long run.
The IHP kids are at some sort of midpoint on a smaller-scale Hegelian dialectic of Jocks vs. Nerds. Long having dispensed with the gentleman’s C and the idea of legacy admissions (not the practice, mind you, but the acknowledgment of it), “Head of the Class” has moved us on the continuum from nerds as gross outcasts or grinds—as seen in, say, “Weird Science” or “Revenge of the Nerds”—to this midway point where they’re featured on television and starring in “cool” music videos. In 1987, it’s still a ways off, but we’re on the irrevocable road toward the world-bestriding colossi of Jobs and Bezos and Gates and Zuck.
The nerds could have declared victory over the jocks—declared their own end of history—at pretty much any point over the last 15 or 20 years. But why don’t we go ahead and call it officially. Let’s plant the flag on a fleeting moment during Super Bowl LVII. As the broadcast returns from commercial sometime in the second half, Fox cameras find Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk sitting next to each other in a box. Needlessly glossing the shot, announcer Kevin Burkhardt observes, “Some brilliant minds in that photo.”
OK, so it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a photograph. But in that offhand and inaccurate aside, Burkhardt—spokesman for the jocks!—neatly synthesizes the culture’s current and long-time attitude toward nerds, wealth, and power. That 90s assumption about nerds making out better in the long run has become nerds=money and, because money=power, power must … equal nerds?
The idea that anyone who has money is smart—they’re doing something right!—is so ingrained that we find it hard to imagine things otherwise.

“I’m heavenly blessed, and worldly-wise. I’m a peeping-tom techie with x-ray eyes.”

Which is our current hellscape.
Zuckerberg, in diapers when this video dropped, got his start with a “hot or not?” website where he invited people to rate their female classmates and has parlayed that into a business whose model is to collect petabytes of data on your online social interactions. Surveillance capitalism: there are many examples, but this one is mine.
And yes, Pat MacDonald, I know: “peeping-tom” signals the speaker’s position as probable creep and the “x-ray eyes” are probably the result of radiation exposure. But it comes too late in the song, and the chorus is too insistent.
To hear “the future’s so bright /(I gotta wear shades)” as either the ironic boast of a speaker who has no clue or as the rueful declaration of a speaker who does have a clue but doesn’t care, you have to read very closely—and it would help to know the songwriter personaly.

Timbuk 3 laughs last

In compromising for radio play, MacDonald removed the explicit condemnation from his lyrics. He expected the culture to share his assumptions, about careerism, about nukes. It did not.
But, more than 35 years on, and seen in the context of its cultural uptake, “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” is a ruined monument to late-80s hubris. Ozymandias in board shorts.
We assumed, like Fukuyama, that things were only looking up from there. And now we have these two trunkless legs of stone—“The End of History” and the “Head of the Class” video—to remind us in retrospect that in addition to that still-unsecured total victory of liberal democracy the bright futures on that night in 1987 included catastrophes on the personal, professional and societal scales: from the violent dissolution of Robin Givens’ marriage to Mike Tyson, to Dan Schneider’s (he was Dennis) downfall as the Harvey Weinstein of Nickelodeon, to the tech world’s remorseless drive for automatization, higher profits and constant growth, exacerbated by a general failure by anyone involved to have taken a single goddamn humanities class.
And the future is still bright for all of us, in just the way MacDonald intended. We all could still use some shades, whether they’re for the mushroom cloud, the glare reflecting off a sun-scorched earth, or the light at the end of the tunnel.

Sebastian Stockman is a Teaching Professor in English at Northeastern University. Among other places, his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has been noted in Best American Essays and Best American Sportswriting. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., and writes an (occasional, free) newsletter at https://sebastianstockman.substack.com/

allison dushane on “pac-man fever”

I got a pocket full of quarters, and I'm headed to the arcade

For readers of a certain age, the opening line of Buckner & Garcia’s “Pac-Man Fever” will evoke memories of time when video games were awe-inspiring, trips to the arcade were made by bicycle instead of minivan, and the technology that powered the games was poised to transform the world.  In 1978, the year I was born, the release of Space Invaders heralded the golden age of arcade video games, and in 1980, Pac-Man arrived and gave video game culture its first unofficial mascot.
I grew up squarely in that space between Generation X and the Millenials that has been aptly described as The Oregon Trail Generation. I can mark the eras of my childhood through the video game consoles my brother and I received for Christmas, starting with the Atari 2600 in elementary school, coming home from swim practice in the summer to play the original Nintendo, and moving into adolescence with the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. When I was too young to head to the arcade myself with friends, I developed a love for arcade games through weekly visits with my parents to the local pizza-and-arcade joint, Pistol Pete’s.  As I showed off the prizes bought with Skee-Ball tickets to the neighborhood kids, they would ask “oh, did you have a birthday party?” “No,” I would reply, “just Tuesday.” My dad favored Moon Patrol and Donkey Kong, my mom dominated Ms. Pac-Man, and I watched older kids play to figure out the trick to being good at Galaga (you must allow your own ship to be taken by the enemy so you could shoot its captor down and have it return to double your firepower). These video game “secrets” operated like social currency, traded between siblings, cousins, and friends on the playground, during sleepovers, and out in the street as the streetlights began to come on and everyone headed home. 

I've got Pac-Man fever (Pac-Man fever)
I'm going out of my mind (going out of my mind)

“Pac-Man Fever,” which made its way from a local radio station to number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold 1.2 million copies in 1982, tapped into—and capitalized on—the 8-bit cultural zeitgeist. According to the book, Pac-Man Fever: The Story Behind the Unlikely 80s Hit that Defined a Worldwide Craze, Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia, commercial jingle writers looking for inspiration for a hit song, sat down at a Pac-Man tabletop machine in Georgia and were instantly hooked. Garcia came up with the opening line that, as Buckner would later remark in an interview, conveyed the spirt of the age: “People were just pouring quarters into these games, and so that line was just genius. It really captured what was going on at the time.” Major labels initially rejected the song, but they released it independently and had it played on local radio stations, where it received so many requests and ended up selling so many copies that Columbia records offered them a deal.
The “Pac-Man Fever” momentum became unstoppable after an appearance on Solid Gold, followed by interviews on all the major networks on regular rotation on the then brand-new MTV. If you haven’t yet listened to the song itself, then I suggest viewing this live performance, which as the top comment on YouTube attests, “is as 80s at it gets.” The performance features disco ball lighting and leotard-clad dancers performing aerobic moves to a song that juxtaposes the familiar synth sounds of the Pac-Man intro with a generic rock guitar-driven melody. The artists themselves, one holding a guitar and wearing a train conductor hat, and the other wearing an oversized blazer and standing behind a keyboard, embody the way in which “Pac-Man Fever” combines the divergent musical trends of the era.
As I learned while researching this essay, “Pac-Man Fever” was eventually released on an album of the same name, featuring other songs that attempted to recapture the magic of the title track. If you would like to follow me all the way down that surprisingly deep rabbit hole, you can listen to the whole album, which also includes artist commentary, on Spotify. According to that commentary, the band had to record samples from the songs straight from the arcade machines with an open mic, and there is a rumor that you can hear someone ordering a sandwich from the deli that housed the Pac-Man machine on that track. The second single, “Do the Donkey Kong,” almost technically disqualified “Pac-Man Fever” as a one-hit wonder, charting at #103 on the Billboard Hot 100. Other highlights include “Froggy’s Lament,” which features the lyric “Froggy takes one step at a time/ The way that he moves has no reason or rhyme,” punctuated by a line that now lives rent-free in my head: “Puff your magic wagger, Froggy!” “Ode to a Centipede” features a musical arrangement evocative of a Meatloaf single, fittingly invoking the existential drama of playing Centipede: “The centipede multiplies and divides/ Comes after you from every side…You can’t run/ You can’t hide.” Garcia remarks that the centipede “seemed like a really pathetic character to me, so when I wrote the music, I put it in a minor key.”

I've got all the patterns down, up until the ninth key
I've got Speedy on my tail, and I know it's either him or me

Ever since those days playing arcade games with my parents as a child, I sought them out in whatever settings they appear and developed a particular affinity for playing Ms. Pacman. Especially when I was in graduate school and the first years after moving for my first job, I hoarded quarters and chose bars based on the quality of their Ms. Pacman cabinet, now a retro fixture, vastly preferring the ones that were set to a higher speed. There is something soothing and reassuring about tracing the familiar patterns with the assurance that comes from years of practice and muscle memory that served as an antidote to the perpetual imposter syndrome that characterized that phase of academic life. There were two notable Ms. Pacman machines that I frequented in graduate school. One was located in the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, a music venue where I would pass the time before the band came on with a can of PBR resting next to the joystick, and where I first starting having conversations with strangers who would remark that I appeared to be very, very good at Ms. Pacman (a compliment that I enjoyed more than I want to admit).

You played Ms. Pac-Man, then sat next to me at the bar. I was too nervous to speak. Somebody told me your name. Friday night? Next quarter’s on me.

All of this brings me to the real reason why, upon learning that I had been chosen by lottery to write for the tourney this year and skimming the available songs, I knew immediately that I had to write about “Pac-Man Fever.” At lunch on a Sunday somewhere between 2002 and 2005, one of my friends passed me the Missed Connections section in the local independent weekly paper: “this has to be you, right?” Indeed, most of my cohort had been at Hell (the bar), on that very date. Of course, given that said friend and I had something of a tradition of perusing the Missed Connections on Sundays, my immediate reaction was amusement that he had gone to such lengths to play this prank. But he denied it. And the rest of my friends denied it and have denied it ever since. Either someone that I went to graduate school with is playing an impressively long game, or someone out there was rendered speechless by what I would like to believe are my stunning Ms. Pacman skills.

All my money's gone, so I'll be back tomorrow night

30 years after Pac-Man Fever captured lightning in a bottle, the surviving members of Buckner and Garcia performed the theme song on the soundtrack of Wreck it Ralph, a Disney film that celebrates the enduring popularity of arcade game culture and capitalized on a growing nostalgia for the times that it grew to signify. 20 years after being named in the Missed Connections section (itself a sign of a time right before everything happened on the internet), I still don’t know if I am thrilled or utterly creeped out by the prospect that a stranger really placed this ad. I am certain, though, that if any song deserves to win the ring this year, by virtue of capturing the essence of the 80s and of one-hit wonderness alike, it is the phenomenon of “Pac-Man Fever.”

Allison Dushane lives in Texas, where she teaches literature and still plays too many video games.