When anyone mentions the 1980s, it depends on what ’80s they are talking about. It wasn’t all Day-Glo colors and jean miniskirts (sadly); nor was it hair metal, parachute pants, and white-collared dress shirts. Do you mean the ’80s when rap was growing up and we used mixtapes like currency? Or when I would wear Chuck Taylors and rolled-up Levis and get yelled at for dressing differently?
Having approximately 2 million 1980s playlists on my computer, I take such questions seriously. For VQR, I wanted to create a new playlist to give a sense of what the radio wasn’t often like, though, sometimes, if you were lucky, was. At first I’d thought to do only songs off the beaten path, but what’s an ’80s mix without “Time After Time”? These are not just first loves of mine but songs about that very subject, about falling in love and falling apart. Listen to the very end if you can, because like all good things—like the looks from the ’80s themselves, acid wash and all—First Loves comes full circle.
Kevin Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He previously served as director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Young is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including Stones, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize; Brown; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Jelly Roll: a blues, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; Bunk, a New York Times Notable Book, longlisted for the National Book Award and named on many “best of” lists for 2017; and The Grey Album, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The poetry editor of the New Yorker, where he hosts the poetry podcast, Young is the editor of nine other volumes, most recently the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Society of American Historians, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He is a contributing editor to VQR.
