This Year: 1980

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

Some songs become mantras - personal or societal. Their refrains or verses burrow deeply into your head, reshaping how you think about life, becoming a quick response to all kinds of things.

And some songs are a mirror to reflect who you are at the time - you can come back to them and find the meaning has flipped entirely, that you now think the opposite of what you used to.

Same as it ever was.

My song for 1980 is Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads.

There were years when I would chant "this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife" in my head. I don't know if I was trying to convince myself of something, or complaining to the universe about something I was due, or having some kind of existential dread about the life I was living that didn't feel like mine. Maybe all of those, in turn or mixed together.

This is the best song I know that says "I don't know how I got here; I'm not sure what here is." It's a deeply modern song, about a deeply modern feeling - that sense of dislocation and separation, about having what you don't want and wanting what you don't have and just being in a way that doesn't feel right.

I think the refrain leans toward acceptance, as the verses lean towards anxiety. I think that's the tension of modern life. And it's all propelled by that funky, lumpy beat, anxious in its own underlying way, always feeling more complex, just on the verge of falling apart entirely.

Like all of us. Like all of our beautiful houses and large automobiles.

There is only one thing I would argue with in this song, but it's central. Or maybe it's something sneaky I'm just realizing in this moment. It's not once in a lifetime: something that will happen and end. It's once in a lifetime, in that this is what this lifetime is like. A lifetime is "once." This is it.

Same as it ever was.