Annivyrsary: 1990
ISSUE #91
Two weeks ago, I drove 15 miles to the only Barnes & Noble in the city that had a copy of I Used to Be Charming by Eve Babitz. Within minutes, the store was playing Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U," which I considered a personal violence. I'd come too far to turn and run; I heard the whole thing while bristling in the aisles. Later, researching this issue, I learned that Sinead O'Connor's version was about to turn 30 years old. Not only that, but Daniel Johnston's "Some Things Last a Long Time" was 30 as well, making 1990 maybe the greatest year for break-up songs of all time. More cosmic violence?
1990 was also the year that the Pale Blue Dot photo was beamed back to Earth by Voyager 1—as it left the Solar System, Carl Sagan told NASA to have the craft turn its camera around and take one last photo of the Earth against the black canvas of space. In the shot, our planet is barely bigger than a pixel.
Sagan also led the team who programmed the Golden Record, a phonograph full of sounds that represent the diversity of life on Earth—whale songs, Beethoven, greetings in 55 languages—for the ears of any intelligent extraterrestrial life that may stumble across Voyager 1 in the vastness of space.
The Golden Record also contains an hour-long recording of the brain waves of Ann Druyan, creative director of the project. "To the best of my abilities I tried to think about the history of ideas and human social organization. [...] Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love," Druyan said when asked about the recording experience. "Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding.”
When people see the Pale Blue Dot, often they get overwhelmed with existential dread. How can anything we do, all the petty things we care about, matter when we're all just algae in a sea of nothing? But just because we can't see something doesn't mean it's not flooded with significance.
That photo was taken on February 14, 1990. Every American down there in that pixel was either loving each other, pining for each other, mourning each other, feeding each other, or comforting each other—heads on shoulders, hands on backs, lips on napes of necks. Hidden from so far up, the cluster of all that pain and joy forms an invisible force, like a brain wave. The perceived violence turns out to be firecrackers exploding. The biology of love is rendered macrocosmic.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.