Imagination
I came across this explicit video of Belouis Some’s song Imagination and suddenly I remembered: back in the eighties MTV had an hour of uncensored videos every Saturday after midnight. Duran Duran’s Girls on Film with naked girls having a pillow fight, breasts, buttocks, nipples, never a penis and I vividly remember this video featuring full frontal nudity and that divine triangle, that tuft of pubic hair now snubbed by so many, woman’s most precious jewelry.
Also there was a certain female beauty that you only saw in the eighties, like you sometimes see a face that belongs to the 19th century. In the eighties you had Sheila E., all those girls Prince surrounded himself with and the anonymous beauty in the above video, also the one in Kajagoogoo´s Too Shy video. You don´t see these women anymore.
Yes, children, the eighties were a great time to be alive. Everybody was afraid of AIDS but imagination soared and you could look but not touch and there was a lot to see, especially on Dutch television.
I also clearly remember the moment it all started to go wrong. That was in the movie An American Werewolf in Paris, a poor follow-up on the brilliant horror-comedy by John Landis, An American Werewolf in London. Two American tourists are in the train talking about European girls, horrified by the fact that they don’t shave their armpits.
That’s when Europeans too started to be grossed out by their own bodies and that’s why these days we have to do with plastic perfection in the shape of Beyoncé and the like. (PB)
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