Pop-and-Lockdown 2: Electric Boogaloo
This winter, get ready to rock it... to lock it (down).
As I write this, the sky outside is a dark and odious gray. The clouds sit low and angry over town, shrouding the surrounding mountain peaks, bringing with them a chill wind that is currently sweeping away the relentless summer heat. For the first time in months, I heard the rumble of thunder, which, out here, is treated by locals with a sort of strange, almost diefic reverence. Though rain, especially during certain months, is not uncommon, I’m still somewhat surprised to see that thunderstorms aren’t. Growing up in Texas instilled in me the erroneous idea that lightning and thunder accompany rain. It’s alien to me, the feverish anticipation with which the locals wait for storms. It’s treated like an event. Not a particularly good one, but, not some encroaching disaster, either. Just… something different.
But, the oppressive darkness of an approaching storm always has a way of building tension in your gut. I suppose it comes back to some sort of inherited memory or reaction conditioned into our forebears who worked the land - for all the live-giving, nourshing power that came with rain, when it came alongside lightning, I’m sure these people had mixed feelings. After all, this was a time in which lightning was not the relative non-issue it is today. Sure, I can recall neighboring houses in my youth catching fire after being struck by a wayward bolt of lightning, but the fire department was always there to put it out. None of those houses burned to the ground - within a month or two, the damage was usually repaired, and the affected houses are there today. The only time I can recall a house actually burning to the ground was by an act of deliberate arson; some lunatic woman killed her daughter while she was asleep in her bed to spite her husband, doused much of the house in gasoline, and sat outside in a lawn chair and watched the thing burn down.
I digress.
In the advent of modern fire control practices, an errant lightning strike could erase your modest home from the face of the Earth in short order - with you in it, if you weren’t careful. There is, I think, a reason, that Zeus’s weapon of choice was lightning and considered the default manifestation of the wrath of God, just as it is no small wonder why it is personified in various pagan cultures by warrior figures like Thor and Chaac of Norse and Mayan mythology, respectively, or monstrous beings, such as the ogre-like Raijin of Japan.
This is all to say that there is some sort of awful build up to a storm. A tightness in your stomach. The smell of ozone in the air, wind whipping at your face. I can recall when I lived in West Texas, standing at the edge of the city, or driving across the vast stretches of the Llano Estacado, where the sky always felt so much bigger than it did in a cluttered city like Austin or here in the mountains. Out there, on the plains, even a simple rain, without the fury and bluster of a storm, would magnify into what looked like approaching apocalyptic event.
When you’re out there, in the middle of a cotton field, watching that wall of black clouds creeping closer, furiously blinking away the dust blown into your face, holding on to your hat to keep it pinned to your head as gales sweep across the flat earth… it’s a humbling, almost haunting experience. Nothing really puts into perspective just how small and helpless you really are; that storm is a-comin’, and there aint’ a damn thing you can do to stop is save hunker down and pray that it ain’t as mean as it looks.
And on May 4th, 1984, culture was rocked to its foundations when the seminal cinematic masterpiece and staple of American film, Breakin’, was released to cinemas across the country, and took it… by storm.
Grossing thirty-eight million dollars on a budget 1/38th that, and best remembered for being the big-screen debut of rapper and future Law & Order star, Ice-T, the story of Breakin’ features a multi-racial breakdance crew that… breakdance. And that’s pretty much it. I saw it once on VHS when I was a kid, when my sister rented it from Blockbuster one weekend. The above Zapp song was not in the film, but it sounds like something that could have reasonably been. I also hope that you have good health insurance if you click play, because you will need neurosurgery to get that fucking song out of your head. And if you clicked play without that warning - suffer with me.1
More importantly, on December 19th, 1984 - only a scant seven months after Breakin’ redefined American cinema - silver screens across the nation were graced by none other than Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Have you ever seen a show where they have an episode in which the cast have to save, like, a roller rink or a local hang-out spot from a cartoonishly greedy land-developer who wants to make an old-folks home or a shopping mall or something on the spot where all the hippest and coolest kids in town hang-out? And it’s usually played as a joke, to the point that there’s usually that one character that says, Hey, wasn’t there a movie about this?
Yeah - Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo is pretty much the movie they’re joking about. It’s one of those bad movies that managed to endear itself to the public by just how absurd its very existence is. Yes, the cast from the first returns, but, apparently, while the first movie was campy, this one is so steeped in 80’s cheese it could kill someone who’s lactose intolerant. You probably won’t be shocked to hear that this movie flopped, and there was pretty much no demand for a follow-up to Breakin’, especially not to warrant an entire, theatrically-released sequel seven months after the first. If the movie is known for anything, it’s the silly subtitle of Electric Boogaloo, which has become vernacular in certain wings of pop culture as short-hand for something unnecessary, unwanted, and dreadfully stupid, if not outright bad - i.e. World War II could rightfully just be called, The War to End All Wars: Electric Boogaloo, if you really wanted to go that route. It comes from the defining song from the movie’s soundtrack, which is…
Well, it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever heard, but it doesn’t exactly inspire me to get off my thang and start popping-and-locking. And I’m an easy mark for this kind of music. Laugh if you want, but nothing gets my white ass moving like funk, soul, italo-disco, anything that makes me feel like I’m sitting in a room like this, dressed like Sonny Crockett (Bren Ten and all) and sipping mojitos with shapely women boasting a hair to body ratio of 3:1.
Believe it or not, but the genre is having something of a burgeoning renaissance - not in the broader culture, because being legitimately good in the 2020’s is pretty much grounds for immediate disqualification from being popular, but it having its own little moment as a resurgent subculture. Interestingly, the people doing the best work in the genre, in my opinion, are actually the Jews.
L’chaim, shalomies.2
Anyways, I am going somewhere with this, believe it or not. Namely, we’re about to get another sequel that no one wanted and no one was asking for, and, much like that approaching storm, I get this awful sense in my gut that there isn’t much we can do to stop it.
Look - you had to know this was coming. Sure, we all wanted to hope against hope it wouldn’t, but somewhere, in your heart of hearts, if you were being honest, you had to know this was going to make a come-back. The brief period of relative silence on COVID was simply a lull. The eye of the storm.
Personally, I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for a while, now. Part of the reason I’ve done what I’ve done and relocated from a large city to a small town was, in part, in full anticipation of the COVID II: Electric Boogaloo, so that I am hopefully in a location where mandatory masking and other draconian measures are not going to be widely enforced, if observed at all. Unfortunately, even here, I’ve heard through the grapevine that the local hospital - the largest in the area for quite a distance - is already floating the idea of reintroducing masks. I’ve even heard that, behind closed doors, the raging asshole that runs the place has stated that if it comes down to it - if - there will be no exemptions this time. Extrapolate from that what you will.
You would think for a place that lost over a quarter of its workforce during the first COVID panic over vaccine mandates, they wouldn’t be this fucking stupid, but, whatever. Rumbles of discontent abound, and I personally know a handful of people who are willing to walk. Some of whom, mind you, did get the first two shots, or just the one-and-done J&J shot, all reluctantly, and just have no interest in getting more.
But, outside of the hospital, mandatory masking was limited to only a small handful of establishments, many of which lost so much business and tarnished their reputations so badly with the public during the first go-around that I wouldn’t be surprised if they either learn their lesson or suffer the ultimate consequence of insulting, hen-pecking, and badgering your customers, so I have hope that, should the rest of the state decide to mask-up again, it won’t be something that gets much traction out here in the sticks.
Will any of this come to pass? Who knows. Maybe this is all just bluster on part of the government, or the voracious 24-hour media machine desperately flailing for something to fill head-line space while they breathlessly, feverishly wait for more bullshit about Trump, now that the hype around his mugshot has faded and people are asking too many questions about the Maui inferno to keep talking about it. Perhaps the powers that be attempt another mass lock-down and the population just kind of shrugs and says, in the immortal words of Melville’s Bartleby - I would prefer not to. And we all go about our business.
I’m fairly certain the powers that be would promptly find something to punish us dissenting plebs for our ignorance, but, hey - it’s a nice dream. Personally, I want to see Joe Biden on camera, weeping and sobbing and gnashing his teeth in impotent anger and despair, wailing, “C’mon, jack! Just one more shot, man, just - put on the fuckin’ mask, man! Don’t be selfish!"
Let’s not kid ourselves - he wouldn’t be that coherent.
What I’m saying here is, you’re seeing the warning signs now. Red flags are flying like a Chinese military parade. Each one of these articles about a resurgent virus is the equivalent to a rumble of thunder in the distance. You can chance staying outside - maybe the storm will go around your homestead and avoid you altogether. That’s a distinct possibility. I’ve seen a lot of normie-con types going psshaw and giving little dismissive waves at the idea of a new round of lockdowns.
“Pft. Yeah, right. That’ll never happen. People can’t be that dumb. No one’s gonna fall for that shit twice. No one’s gonna listen to Brandon, haha.”
And then they crack open a Bud Light, because I guess we don’t care about that anymore so it’s okay to retvrn to the tried-and-true boomer tradition of drinking something that tastes worse than stale piss. Like, c’mon, guys. Have some self-respect. Drink a fucking Rainier, or at least a Miller High Life.
What I’m saying is that, the closer we come to the 2024 elections, which is in scarcely a year, hard as that is to believe… don’t discount anything. Discounting the Category 5 Shit-Show that was the elections themselves, we all saw what they were willing to do in order to destabilize the country in the lead-up to 2020. I’ll admit that my tin-foil hat is a bit tight around my head, but I don’t think it was a coincidence that there was a massive increase in mass shootings and public violence in the months before the election. And no - I’m not even talking about the Summer of Love, either. Though, that was also part of it. It’s no coincidence that the establishment actively encouraged the complete and total anarcho-tyranny that turned the centers of every city over 300,000 into a warzone for weeks.
Will it be fresh rounds of lockdowns? Renewed riots? Maybe it will be a string of very conveniently timed natural disasters. Perhaps there will be some sort of flashpoint in the proxy-conflict with Russia, and the special military operation boils over into a hot war between NATO and the growing bloc of opposing nations, and the elections are… postponed, shall we say, for, er… reasons. Maybe this is just life in modern America from now on, and we will have a constant, rhythmic, and predictable spike in various crises every election year, and we’ll have to suffer through this cycle like seasons of discontent from now until the whole wretched system breaks apart when the center cannot hold.
I can’t say with any certainty what form the trouble will take, but make no mistake - there are clouds gathering on the horizon, and whatever you may think about the cause, the source, or even what side of the political spectrum you fall on, you should be able to see it all fomenting in real-time, if you keep your eyes open and are honest with yourself. Truth be told, I genuinely don’t think most on the left want to deal with a new COVID panic any more than the right does. Yes, you have a small contingent of brain-fucked lunatics and busybodies that derived their first shred of self-importance they ever experienced in their lives from the whole fiasco, and have been chomping at the bit to feel that important again, but - call me crazy - deluded as they are, I think the people who are still wearing masks are only doing so because they were hoping to avoid this from happening again. I could be totally wrong, but I think most of them, given the choice, rather go maskless, but they’ve been so inculcated in the fear-mongering by the media that they really don’t think they have a choice. Not unless they want to catch COVID and die miserably, with ventilator tubes shoved down their throats and choking on their own spit. But, whatever. It doesn’t really matter what they believe, because nothing that anyone believes is going to keep what’s going to happen from happening.
All I’m saying is be smart. Be open-minded. Be vigilant. Watch the skies and prepare accordingly. If we aren’t facing down the Lockdowns 2: Electric Boogaloo, I certainly think we’re about to be looking at 2020 2: Electric Boogaloo.
I just hope that, if nothing else, the soundtrack is better the second time around.
I am not exaggerating when I say that I will be doing something as mundane walking down the dairy section of the supermarket and the opening bars of this fucking song will begin to play in my head for no reason whatsoever.
The man behind Tuxedo is one Mayer Hawthorne, born Andrew Mayer Cohen.
Very nice! A major difference between now and then is that this time we're already organized.
Same. I moved To West Virginia from Maryland to keep my family safe