One thing slipping into the next

I woke up with this on my mind, so you get to think about it, too.

I was a devoted AMERICAN BANDSTAND and SOUL TRAIN kid, so I was watching in real time when Public Image Limited appeared on AB in 1980. It was one of the first instances that I remember of chaos interrupting a format not built for chaos.

AB was a show where teenagers danced to pop hits, and artists would appear to lip-sync their songs. PiL, of course, had no interest in formats, and John Lydon was already infamous for spectacle, so he yanked the kids out of the seats and made them dance to music that required a different sort of movement than most disco records encouraged. The song played, no lyrics matched the singer's lips, and the artifice of that tradition was discarded.

I read somewhere that the network, ABC, considered not airing the episode. But whatever host Dick Clark was thinking, he wisely allowed the band to do as they pleased, and later, Lydon praised Clark for letting it happen. Aside from immediately understanding that this music was not like anything on the radio at that moment, my strongest memory of the segment was that tingling sensation of watching people harmlessly break rules because they could.

Bonus: fashions. Disco outfits were giving way to a flamboyantly upbeat version of punk and New Wave, and the kids in the latter immediately began dancing to a song that the kids in matching baseball uniforms likely found undanceable. It was a strange cultural moment where two aesthetics were simultaneously bristling against and/or trying to absorb each other. This was also captured in films of the era like XANADU and THE APPLE, where the dominant disco culture assumed it would remain so even as gangs of young people in asymmetrical sunglasses and black-and-white checkerboard sleeveless t-shirts were nipping at its heels.

Ultimately, pop ate all of it like it always does, which is not quite the bummer it sounds like because at least we got the Go-Go's out of it.