Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 1970s

by Pagan Kennedy

A history of the lost years of the 1970s, the "Decade that Taste Forgot," captures all the turbulence, inconsistencies, hedonism, and serious social action of the much-maligned years that connected the idealistic 1960s and the greedy 1980s. Original. 25,000 first printing.

Genres: History, Pop Culture, Nonfiction, Cultural

182 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

About the author

Pagan Kennedy is a regular contributor to the New York Times and author of eleven books. A biography titled Black Livingstone made the NewYork Times Notable list and earned Massachusetts Book Award honors. She also has been the recipient of a Barnes and Noble Discover Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Smithsonian Fellowship for science writing. Visit her online at www.pagankennedy.net.

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Reviews

[robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of fascinating insights here that are still relevant. Some examples:

1. After Kent State the TV show Mod Squad had an episode on campus violence, but of course, the students did the killing, not the government. In popular culture the peace movement was perceived as violent.

2. The disco backlash was elitism: "Where once rock had been an alternative form of high culture, disco seemed commercialized, crass, and, let's admit it, lower class."

3. Charlie's Angels brought "the sensibility of porn to prime time. Over centuries, our culture has used the narrative form to make meaning. Charlie's Angels dispensed with plot in favor of fashion."

4. Racists had feared black men polluting white blood through miscegenation. Anita Bryant and the Moral Majority blocked gay men from jobs by arguing that they recruit. Jerry Falwell said, "Homosexuals do not reproduce. They recruit!" The common thread in both hate movements? Fear of reproduction -- fear that straights would be seduced into homosexuality. However, the only thing that did get reproduced was a freer attitude towards sexuality. "Increasingly modes of behavior once stigmatized as part of the psychopathology of homosexuality -- and described by such loaded terms as promiscuity or inability to form meaningful relationships -- are becoming part of the heterosexual norm. It became the swingingest era ever (that brief interlude between the legalization of abortion and the discovery of AIDS)." "In addition, gays -- many of whom were estranged from their relatives -- tended to cobble together impromptu families made up of friends and coworkers, a new kind of community that we see singles exploring on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi, too."

5. "We watched the Brady Bunch for a sense of belonging absent in our own inadequate families."

6. Hipness became a commodity. Corporations and the media reduced revolutionary liberation movements by "embracing the counterculture's style but not its substance, simultaneously popularizing and undermining radicalism." "Our understanding of history would never be the same after the seventies, when our past was turned into a series of fashion movements that seemingly happened on some other planet. To make the sixties safe for nostalgia, time needed to be fragmented so events less than ten years old would seem as remote as the middle ages. The implication is that radical politics are motivated by nostalgia," trapped in the past. "By the eighties, protesters against U.S. policy in Central America were ridiculed as nutty retro-fashion enthusiasts longing for the sixties. Meanwhile Reagan rode to power on a wave of longing" for a past America, for the fifties. "Politics began to speak the language of nostalgia, a pastiche of the past."

7. "Something happened to reality in the seventies: it was replaced by TV. Miniseries like Holocaust and Roots became national events. These massive watch-ins were the seventies' answer to Woodstock."

8. "The hosts of Real People subtly ridiculed each week's batch of real people. The implied message: either you adopt the all-pervasive values of TV (consumerism, conformity) or you become a modern carnival geek, gawked at by a national audience. The show taught us how to be a fake person, the hosts serving as role models -- grown up versions of the cruel, popular kids in high school. The token black had to try hard to keep his place in the clique."



PLATFORMS argues that in the 70s the family fell apart and media became the community, the place where singles sought solace from their loneliness, escape from their isolation.

Pagan Kennedy (what a name!) writes (22,28,57,107,120): "No wonder those of us who grew up in the seventies are now obsessed with pop culture. We spent our formative years chasing fads. Our social status depended on it. We suffered under TV culture's tyranny of grooviness."

"It was no longer good enough to be a freak, as it had been in the sixties. Now the freaks divided themselves by allegiances to bands, beer brands, or car makes. We may have thought we were defining ourselves as individuals, but what we were really doing was consuming."

"Designer jeans were the ultimate irony -- the traditional uniform of the working class given a rich sounding name (like Studio 54 or Gloria Vanderbilt) and sold back to the working class. The seventies reveled in the culture of the common denominator. When tastemakers look back, they cringe at rollerboogie, CB's, and Three's Company because these are relics of a time when everyone -- no matter their socioeconomic status -- longed to be part of the freewheeling working class."

"Richard Nixon said, 'What's on the tube is what counts.' By the seventies, the brainwashing drug of choice was TV."

"We suburban kids felt stupefied by all the time we wasted. Going to the mall was like watching TV, only it was real. We went there because we were bored but it only made us more bored. Invoking the names of stores that used to be in the North Riverside Mall makes me feel progressively deadened. Every one is another nail in the coffin of a misspent youth."

"Many found themselves cut off from others, living alone and watching TV alone. Corporations courted the single person. When the family fell apart the market stepped in, offering us ready-made communities and prepackaged intimacies. The mall, the rise of TV, therapy, cults, discos, senior retirement villages -- all bespoke a consumer culture rushing in to fill the vacuum where private life had once been. What is porn but a company selling you ersatz intimacy. Media became more than a message, it became a substitute for human contact. Which is why a Norman Rockwell painting may not be so different from a topless playmate. What pornography is to sex, commercialized nostalgia is to history: a way to substitute media images for real contact. The past has been turned into a theme park."

"To grow up in the seventies was to be profoundly alienated -- always the ones watching TV, but never the teenagers who got to appear on TV as demonstrators, hippies, radicals, and drug casualties. Our lives never seemed as cool as the lives we saw on TV. We tried to buy the products that would get us there, but it never seemed to work. Who among us wouldn't like to escape from our plastic prisons into a reality unmediated by consumer products, malls, media. It was the plastic screen of TV culture that kept us from experiencing anything directly."

[Shant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book came out of nowhere and hit it out of the park for me. A lot of decade retrospectives try to be mixed in their tone or focus only on the advances of the era, but Kennedy wastes no time explaining how/why most people think the 70's are the nadir of the twentieth century.
For people who still prefer the 70's to other time periods, this book at least has slightly new truth bombs on nostalgia marketing, the problem with dividing things by decades, and the intersection of civil rights and capitalism.
I thought the appendix was kind of unnecessary and I wish she flat out talked about Jonestown and the Son of Sam killer, but no problem.

[Deke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about the 70s, written in the 90s, read an additional 25 years later. Some good insight here, but perhaps as cultural critique has grown and developed over the past quarter century, the tools and perspectives have grown considerably and this book consequently feels as though it misses many opportunities, for which it really shouldn't be faulted. Favorite passage: the idea that the Love Boat is basically a disaster movie (like the Poseidon Adventure) but with the disaster offscreen, and everyone you see on screen is appearing constantly cheery with great effort as if to comfort and distract everyone from the horrors offscreen. Good one.

[Petty Lisbon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt like a weirdly academic version of a VH1 I Love the Decades program. Not entirely bad, but it was too serious to be funny and too light to be used as a real learning tool. I liked what she said for topics like disco or blaxploitation movies but those came in a little too late.

[Smiley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

" ... she wants to understand them," Richard Linklater says in the back-cover blurb. "Because the seventies are our future," she says near the end.

Pagan Kennedy reveals the '70s are the last decade we can parse, where we can reveal where things came from.

In the '80s, we had no idea where Chips Ahoy came from or whatever.

Read this book.

She's a Sage.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fluffy but interesting read.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't remember it as this bad, probably because I was only a kid and didn't notice a lot of the awful quirks of the 70's.