The Human League, "(Keep Feeling) Fascination"

Everybody’s got an Unaccountable Pet Peeve. And by unaccountable, I mean it doesn’t make steady progress advancing toward your last nerve—it was right there from the jump, so you have to think about why you react to it the way you do. If in the end you’re able to muster an explanation for it, it may or may not make sense to people who think they know you.

For example, my grandmother had a rivalry with the Pep Boys. By which I mean to say, she detested them. This warm and lovely woman would turn fully feral if you mentioned the Pep Boys to her. As far as we’re aware, Grandma Helen had exactly zero dealings with Manny, Moe, Jack or any of their thousands of employees. The best I can figure now is she was a regular at the Bob Evans restaurant down by the Eastwood Mall, there was a Pep Boys maybe a hundred yards from that Bob Evans, and I wonder if she got tangled up in the Mall parking lot once or twice, skirting around the concrete islands in her Mercury Cougar, and the traffic kept flushing her into the Pep Boys. That car had a massive blind spot, and my father tells me she got to a point where she would make only right turns in it.¹ So a big ol’ Pep Boys complex mushrooms up on your usual and accustomed route to chicken ‘n’ biscuits, and maybe you have to make a series of lefts to circumnavigate it. Could be now, twenty years later, we have the inklings of an accounting for my Gram’s animus against the Pep Boys.

But the truth is, we’ll never know. We never got a satisfactory answer for why she had it in for Pete Sampras, either, other than I don’t like his smug face. She loved her Bob Evans and her tennis, and she despised Pete Sampras and the Pep Boys. That was that.

All this to say that even the warmest and best of us have our Unaccountable Pet Peeves. Mine is the Ad Council, and I’m here today to do the important self-inquisitive work of figuring out why.

I wouldn’t expect that the annals of American media history have documented the origins of the Public Service Announcement. But it’s not hard to reverse-engineer the elevator pitch:

First Man with Briefcase: … So then it hit me: you know how we’re using jingles, songs, and short skits to convince people to buy products?

Second Man with Briefcase: Yeah.

First Man: Well, what if we tried the same thing, but instead we were selling judgy, unsolicited advice that subtly communicated to people that we think they’re shitty and irresponsible?

Second Man: Why would we do that?

First Man: To persuade them to be better.

Second Man: Oh.

BING!

Elevator Operator [they had elevator operators in those days]: 15th Floor, Department of Insufferable Assholes.

First Man: That’s my stop!

Now whether or not the Ad Council is actually the worst or just the most prominent offender in the PSA space is a fair question. For example, I was surprised to learn earlier today that the Ad Council had no involvement with the You! I learned it by watching you! PSA that the entirety of Generation X spent half a decade ridiculing. If you were awake and alert and American in the 1980s, you’ll remember this one, but here’s a short summary:

INT. TEENAGER’S BEDROOM

A boy is listening to loud rock music on his headphones. His father turns off the stereo and shows him an open wooden box with drug paraphernalia in it. “Is this yours?” he asks. Junior demurs. Pop isn’t having it: “Your mother said she found it in her closet.” Some cross-talk follows, then Pop takes command of the room. “ANSWER ME! Who taught you how to do this stuff?” Here Junior plays the trump card: “YOU, all right? I learned it by watching YOU!” And a voice-over sums up the problem:

Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs.

This 1987 PSA was the brainchild of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, and in at least the four years that followed, the words I learned it by watching you! were shouted aloud to laughter and occasional applause at least once per weekday in every high school cafeteria in the Contiguous 48. We had all seen this ad spot over and over on MTV, and not a one of us received its message as serious or sincere. If you were cornered by burnouts in the lunch line and things were getting ugly, incanting the words YOU, all right? I learned it by watching YOU! gave you at least a 50/50 chance of de-escalating the situation and trading high fives with your aggressors. Fractured and balkanized and riven by infighting as we were, the full complement of America’s teens were united in our contempt for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. And let’s be clear: this wasn’t because we were all in favor of a Drugged-Up America. It was because we all hated Bad Art.

Let’s start with the baseline premise of this PSA, which was utterly implausible. It might have been supported by statistics: most assuredly researchers had identified a correlation between parents who used drugs and children who used drugs. But causation? The notion that Junior picked up his habit from Pop was a joke. Fully inconsistent with the psychology of being a teenager in 1987. Not a one of us—not one—looked to our parents for insights on what was or wasn’t cool, worthwhile, or important to do as teens. I was the exact opposite of a teenage rebel, I loved my parents dearly, and even I didn’t see them as role models for my conduct at the time. The way adolescence operated in 1987—it may be different now, but it doesn’t seem so—if your father was doing drugs, you’d be motivated to go full teetotal and become a management consultant.

But let’s even assume for now the outlandish proposition that in this particular circus of an American household, Junior regularly watched Pop light up spliffs and decided, yeah: that’s just what I want to do, too. Given this dynamic, does Pop really march upstairs and walk right into this showstopping retort from Junior? Dude has zero authority on these matters and should know it, unless he’s so completely zonked he doesn’t realize Junior is onto him. Mom would have been the much better messenger here, but where is she? Is she setting up Pop? Maybe Junior is completely clean and working with his mother to give Pop a short, sharp shock to the system?

I like that idea. Let’s chuck the voice-over ending and roll the cameras some more. Maybe Mom sends upstairs all Pop’s work colleagues who have been picking up the slack, the pals from the bowling team he’s been stiffing on Tuesday nights while he gets high, the next-door neighbor who has to scrape him off the lawn every Wednesday morning. The notion that all this is prelude to an intervention would be a hella more plausible read of the situation than the Partnership was selling.

And for that matter, why were they showing this on MTV? Why were we subjected to this schlock every hour on the hour, when by the logic of the ad, we were just innocent bystanders shunted into addiction by our parents? They should have been airing this PSA during Days of Our Lives, or the Thorn Birds and Shogun miniseries, or the Sunday NFL game broadcasts. But then again, between videos we had to sit through all these Freedom Rock ads, too, see “This Green City,” so maybe the ad buyers thought all the old druggy Boomers were watching MTV right alongside us? Ah, who knows.

As I watch Like Father, Like Son—as this PSA was poignantly titled—all over again in 2024, I see even more symptoms of Bad Art. Of course Junior is listening to rock music when Pop enters the room. Kids on drugs listen to rock music. The music itself, also of course, is terrible and sounds like nothing a teenager in 1987 would have been playing in his bedroom—again, unless this was a very distinctive teen who sent away for Stock Music That Sounds Like Starship. This would be consistent with the Circus of a House thesis I was developing earlier, where Mom, Pop, and Junior’s values, practices, and sensibilities wildly diverge from Mainstream America’s. But in that case the PSA loses too much of its force: This could happen to your family doesn’t land nearly as hard when The Family Depicted is eleven removes from reality.

And finally, there’s the voice-over. While it doesn’t account for even 10% of why Like Father, Like Son became a laughable cultural artifact, the voice-over nevertheless epitomizes why the ad was such a grand artistic failure. For whatever it was worth, Junior’s It was you! pronouncement had provided an actual dramatic moment. In a stroke he had fully turned the tables on his father, who stood defeated and without recourse, with his son halfway down the path to perdition and a back-alley OD. Letting that moment breathe, possibly with a swell from the orchestra, would have supplied a perfect ending to this dime-store tragedy.

But that’s not how PSAs work, because there might be one person in the viewing audience who hasn’t fully grasped the lesson. Accordingly, we need a disembodied John Houseman-type voice to swoop in and wrap all this up in a bow for us, and if the effect of him doing it is to dissipate entirely the accumulated force of these performances, so it goes. Some messages are too important to communicate solely by playacting. Never mind all the good reasons why drama is the oldest regularly-practiced communicative art form.

At this point defenders of the Partnership might point to the end of Oedipus Rex. The title character is devastated and has blinded himself after learning that he did indeed kill his father and marry his mother—just as the seer had foretold. The curtain could drop here, except that the Chorus needs to chime in with some observations about life:

Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him. Now, as we keep our watch and wait the final day, count no man happy until he dies, free of pain at last.

If this was good enough for Sophocles, it should be good enough for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Except that theories and practices of dramatic production have evolved considerably over the centuries, and we chucked the Chorus fairly early in the process. Shakespeare certainly wanted no part of it. And this gets me on the doorstep of ascertaining reason why I find PSAs so objectionable. The whole point of the exercise is to conscript Art—or if not Art (as we’re finding), at least Artistic modes and media—into the business of conveying important life advice to the public. This is a sound proposition, at least in theory. There is real rhetorical force in delivering a message artistically. Storytelling, music, and poetry affect us. They leave deeper, stronger impressions than do plainly-stated rational appeals. And so a million English teachers preach show, don’t tell to budding writers. If indeed PSA developers strictly adhered to the show, don’t tell model, their end products wouldn’t uniformly suck. But instead the mode of proceeding is show clumsily, then undermine the showing by telling.

Now you could argue that commercial advertisers follow much the same formula, and I’m not writing an overlong blog post dragging them. But I would argue that there are important differences between PSAs and commercials. For starters, commercial advertisers are better and more sophisticated at what they do. They’ve put considerable thought and attention (and money) into figuring out how not to irritate the hell out of the people they’re selling to. They may not have mastered it yet—ahem, State Farm—but all that R&D does help. Perhaps more importantly, advertisers recognize and embrace that at bottom, their messages are not serious. The content of a commercial isn’t Oedipus-level stuff. It’s jokes and jingles and recurring characters yukking it up. LiMu rhymes with emu, so let’s have big flightless birds in insurance ads. By comparison, PSAs are necessarily running uphill. The Partnership, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the Ad Council are carrying the burden of all our moral failings, and making us aware of them is a grim business.

That’s not to rule out snappy slogans, of course. CLICK IT OR TICKET proved the concept, however much it offended This Grammarian’s sensibilities. Proper attendance to parallel structure called for the sentence to read CLICK IT OR [GET A] TICKET, and the corner-cutting here has galled me for decades now. OVER THE LIMIT, UNDER ARREST solved for this, and I appreciated it. But up next came DRIVE SOBER OR GET PULLED OVER, and I wondered: You’re not gonna get Sondheim to write these, but still—who green-lit THIS? If the NHTSA is plumbing these depths, it must really believe that even a metrically flawed slant rhyme can save lives on the margin, as against just explaining to Americans that drunk driving is illegal and unsafe. Along these lines, I came up with this one just now:

IMPAIRED drivers IMPERIL lives.

That just fell out of my brain on a Sunday afternoon. Really, it’s that easy.

This brings me to the Ad Council and all of its unsolicited life advice. Because I’m a Cleveland baseball fan who lives in New England, I have to listen to Guardians home radio broadcasts on the MLB phone app. It used to be the app relayed the ad spots Cleveland area businesses bought from the team’s radio network: commercials for Valley Ford, Medical Mutual, Discount Drug Mart. Now it seems Major League Baseball is selling their own ad blocks over top of the network’s. They geolocate your phone, and if they can find a buyer who will pay to reach MLB app listeners, they’ll run the buyer’s ads instead. Accordingly, there’s a Boston-area divorce attorney that makes a lot of noise between innings, presumably on the theory that men listening to out-of-town baseball broadcasts on weeknights must be falling out with their wives.

It’s clear this isn’t a super-lucrative business, because I’m still hearing the Cleveland ads half the time, which means MLB struck out trying to sell those particular blocks. Enter the Ad Council, offering bottom dollar to snatch up vast swaths of cheap airtime during Guardians broadcasts, so it can rain down judgment and condescension on unsuspecting fans already struggling to support their team from a distance. This summer I was hearing three, four PSAs in a row between half-innings, often five or six times per game. Lessons I’ve had beaten into me this year include:

• Don’t buy a cheap bike helmet.

• Adopt a foster child, if you’re not an asshole.

• Buzzed driving is drunk driving.

• It’s high time you stopped being so toxically masculine and really engaged with your mental health.

• People get Alzheimer’s. [Yeah, just that.]

• Real dads talk to their kids, just like moms do.

And every one of these obvious “life hacks” is rendered in saccharine and maudlin style. I do credit the writers for trying to find inobtrusive, inoffensive, possibly even charming ways to tell me how to live my life, but the end result is Bad Art piled on Bad Art piled on Bad Art, with each successive PSA the latest in a string of unprovoked assaults on my moral and aesthetic sensibilities. And like all terror attacks, two organizations instantly claim credit—here with the tagline This message was brought to you by [non-profit content partner] and THE AD COUNCIL. Maybe I’m driving around town with the ballgame on listening to this. Maybe I’m lying in bed following a late-night road game on the West Coast. Or I’m fielding this crap on a Sunday afternoon run, as I trudge up Belmont Hill. In all cases, my reaction is the same:

The Ad Council can fuck right off with their life advice.

Now I know that by saying this, I’m courting trouble. Up rises the left in this moment, to wag a finger at me: Maybe YOU don’t need to hear these messages because of your PRIVILEGE. Maybe YOU can afford a PRICEY bike helmet. And maybe your teenage kids aren’t dicks and you already LIKE to talk to them. But you don’t speak for AMERICA.

Okay, fine. Acknowledged.

And now voices from the right: You and your family should DIE. We’re going to burn your house to the ground, and we hope you go to HELL.

Hold on—where did this come from? I’d have thought you all would welcome another voice rejecting the “wisdom” of “elites.”

Yeah, but we know you vote DEMOCRAT. So DIE DIE DIE.

Oh, I see.

Still, recognizing what it might mean for me politically to call out the Ad Council, seeing now that I’m now cast out into the wilderness, shunned and canceled by the left and yet constitutionally—in both meanings of the word—incapable of mending fences with the right, I will hold my ground on this question: PSAs are the worst, they destroy Art, and the Ad Council in particular can go screw.

But you know who I will accept unsolicited life advice from? The Human goddam League. This is because the Human League make Good Art. Forty years ago I saw the video for “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” (Apple Music, Spotify), on MTV. The opening gag hooked me right away: the shot opens on a map with a marking on it that reads YOU ARE HERE. There’s an arrow pointing to a red dot. The camera zooms in on the map, which turns into actual 3-D physical space, an aerial overview of a massive red dot painted over most of a streetcorner. Inside the red dot is a red building. The camera sails through its red curtained window into a gray-walled interior room, where the Human League are set up and playing “Fascination.”

From a first listen I thought this song was fantastic, though it’s only now that I’ve decided to give some care and consideration to its component parts. You hear a song at ten years old, you like it, you sing along. You take it all as given. You don’t separately consider the burble of its bassline, or the slashing topline synth riff that sounds like nothing else in the 1980s, the so the conversation turned … bridge that plays three times in the arrangement, or the three-voice chorus that delivers the moral of the story—Keep feeling fascination: passion burning, love so strong! Keep feeling fascination: looking, learning, moving on. Forget everything I said before about Sophocles and choruses. All this is electro-funk perfection: the whole exceeding the sum of its parts, when each of those parts could carry a song all on its own.

This brick-by-brick analysis could only come decades later, after I became aware that the Human League were more than an ’80s novelty act with one smash hit and a couple secondary chart entries. They were in fact electronic pioneers whose debut single, “Being Boiled” (Apple Music, Spotify), together with Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” (Apple Music, Spotify) and O.M.D.’s “Electricity” (Apple Music, Spotify), comprised a trilogy of Kraftwerk-influenced submissions that broke synth-rock in England in the late ’70s. And of these three records, each one markedly different from the others in its sound, “Being Boiled” was first out of the gate.

1981 brought the first studio album, Dare!, which after three years’ looking I finally found at Big Dig Records in North Cambridge. This one is the critical favorite, earning a rare 5 stars from AllMusic and a listing in Robert Dimery’s 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (Amazon). The big hit here was “Don’t You Want Me” (Apple Music, Spotify), which I will maintain is the Best Man/ Woman Karaoke Duet Song for Gen Xers, just edging “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” (Apple Music, Spotify), which runs a bit long, and “Fairytale of New York” (Apple Music, Spotify), the lyrics of which I would urge you all to read and digest before cuing it up.

I’ve been playing Dare! on the regular these past couple weeks, and it’s every bit as good as AllMusic and Dimery say. “Open Your Heart” (Apple Music, Spotify) was a discovery, and “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of” (Apple Music, Spotify), too, so it was no surprise to learn both these tracks were released as singles—although the latter didn’t come out until 2008 (!).

“The Things …” is Side A, Track 1, and on that score it’s probably the League’s first foray into listener counseling. First verse:

Take time to see the wonders of the world, to see the things you’ve only heard of. Dream life the way you think it ought to be. See things you thought you’d never ever see.

All that sounds right to me, and while the suggestions quickly take a turn for the specific—Take a lift to the top of the Empire State, take a drive across the Golden Gate—I have to assume vocalist Phil Oakey is only offering examples of a life well lived, and not dictating a uniform itinerary for us all. Consider the bridge:

Everybody needs love and adventure. Everybody needs cash to spend. Everybody needs love and affection. Everybody needs two or three friends.

This is the League’s answer to John Lennon. Love isn’t nothing—it appears twice in the list—but it’s not all you need. At least not by 1981.

“The Things That Dreams Are Made Of” isn’t any less up-in-my-business than anything I heard over the summer from the Ad Council, but I will take direction from the Human League on these matters, because the beat is terrific, they’re making highly innovative squelchy synthesized record-scratch sounds throughout the song, and—what is most important—they’re proffering a broader philosophy. We’re not down in the weeds talking about bike helmets, and no one here is so presumptuous as to suggest improvements to my parenting. Spot-on, this number, and for that matter of a piece with the central message of “Fascination,” which I’ve carried in my head for forty years now.

Keep feeling fascination: passion burning, love so strong. Keep feeling fascination: looking, learning, moving on. These lines boil down all of life into two essential bits of business—loving and learning. Fascination is an interesting word. It describes an experience that sits right at the border between the rational and irrational minds. People can fascinate, as can places and things—all the nouns have it in them. A person who fascinates you generates love. A fascinating place or thing gives cause to learn. If we’re on this Earth for any reason (I believe), it’s to be fascinated, and every minute of every day is packed full with triggers and opportunities for it to happen.

I had lunch with Florian the other day; he reported that he’d been assigned The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius for a class. I recalled that I’d read some of Chaucer’s Middle English translation when I was in college, and I pulled my bound volume of Chaucer off the shelf later that night, to have a look. A few hundred lines into the read, it had me thinking: when I’m dragged down in the moment for some dumb reason or another—work stress, politics local or national, physical aches and pains—I might consider Boethius’s strategy for processing and deflecting misfortune and upset. His answer, which worked well enough for an author waiting out the last days of his death sentence, was to look to one’s learning: to see all that is known, knowable, grasping to be known, and continue to explore it.

There’s a genius to that. But of course learning is only one part of the medicine. If it’s all you do, you’re liable to dance off over the horizon chasing the rarest, most interesting butterfly. Whereas loving locks your gaze on a fixed and guiding star. Loving binds you to others, secures commitments from you that are every bit as rewarding, and orders of magnitude more important, than indulging today’s curiosities. Now put these two together, and in the face of all this world’s injustice, you have a reason to live. In family, in music, in writing—all the things that are most important to me—I find fascination of both Oakeyan kinds: love so strong and looking, learning.

I don’t like to think about dying. As Sonya Echobelly not-so-famously sang, I can’t imagine the world without me (Apple Music, Spotify). At some point, though, all this will end for me, and if my epitaph were to read straight from the chorus of “Fascination” by the Human League—well, I could, um, “live” with that. Once more from the top, then, and let’s carve it in stone:

Keep feeling fascination: passion burning, love so strong. Keep feeling fascination: looking, learning, moving on.

1. In this respect the Cougar was like General Pinochet’s Cadillac (Apple Music, Spotify).