And of course, she was entirely correct. We marvelled at the depth and breadth of ingredients, tried a locally produced creamy salsa, and lamented the restrictions in both luggage weights and duty-free exemptions that stopped us from spending a ridiculous amount of money.
In their candy aisle, however, I came across something I’d not seen in quite a while, and had believed was out of production: packages of Beemans chewing gum, something I thought they’d stopped selling 3-4 years ago.
Beemans (no apostrophe) is a brand that has always relied on a certain sense of nostalgia, having been around since the late 1800s. It has a reputation for being popular among pilots, and Chuck Yeager (Sam Sheppard) requests it by name twice in the movie, The Right Stuff. It turns out that reputation actually has its roots in fact, as the pepsin in it helped to calm stomachs upset by aerial maneuvering, and the chewing itself could help prevent the ear-popping caused by pressure changes due to altitude transitions.
I was already a fan of the gum by the time a tv commercial in the late ‘80s (featuring “I’m a Man” by the legendary Spencer Davis Group) created a resurgence in popularity. By the time I came across it in Specs it had been at least 5 years since I’d had any, so I bought 5 packs (and a pack of Blackjack gum) to share with the family.
We each had a piece as we walked from the House of Blues where we’d had dinner to the Toyota Centre to watch Muse, and it wasn’t quite as good as I remembered it, but it was still worth it for the brief sensation of temporal displacement.
After the opening act, Walk the Moon, left the stage, the house lights came up a bit, and taped music began to play over the roadies rearranging the stage. (I say 'taped' knowing full well that the music was almost certainly digital, but there you go.) An ominous, two-note bass line began to play, and I mentioned to Pete that it sounded like Ennio Morricone's score from the 1982 horror movie The Thing. A moment later the synths kicked in, and it turned out to be "Humanity Part 2" from that movie.
What an intriguing choice, I thought. Given the amount of retro Muse had pressed into their most recent album and the bulk of the tour merch we had seen on the concourse, it made a certain amount of sense though. I fully expected the playlist to turn to more familiar or conventional fare, but it didn't. I recognized the Stranger Things theme and part of Jan Hammer's Miami Vice, but we needed Tara's phone to tell us what some of the other tracks were.
Finding out that a creepily atmospheric piece was actually the end credit music from a 1983 horror movie called Blood Rage was not too surprising, but looking up some of the tracks afterward, I was stunned to discover there are many musicians and hobbyists devoted to recreating that particular synthesizer sound from the 1980s. Genre names like synthwave, retrowave, outrun and darkwave have, unbeknownst to me, been around since the early 2000s.
One of the tracks we heard, "A.H.B." by S U R V I V E sounded like it would have comfortably fit in either a movie from the '80s or a tv show about the '80s. Finding out that S U R V I V E is a quartet and that two of them composed the theme to the Netflix show Stranger Things tied things together pretty nicely.
In the interim at the concert, we also heard "Vortex" by Starforce and Cougar Synth as well as "Let's Cruise" by Jordan F., which seems to take a lot of inspiration from the beloved old Outrun video game.
In addition to being powerfully nostalgic, it's intriguing, easy-to-listen-to stuff, and trying to guess or predict the tracks being played really helped pass the time by until Muse took the stage.
Once home I tried to make a pre-show playlist in Google Play, but, alas, not a lot of the tracks were available in that medium. S U R V I V E's albums were, so I downloaded 2016's RR7349; it's not great driving music or anything, but excellent stuff to have on as you putter about the house or are playing a boardgame with friends (especially those close to my age).
But I wasn't ready to abandon that pre-concert experience altogether, so I started cobbling together pieces in a YouTube playlist instead called Pre-Simulation Theory.
No one else online seems to share my interest in the contents of the pre-show playlist (although it's cool to see an accounting of which songs were played by the headliner) so this collection is bound to be inaccurate and incomplete. To compensate, I added a synthwave compilation as well as a suggested track called "Cthulhu" by the band Gunship.
Gunship's Wikipedia entry contains a delightful definition of their sound that includes familiar imagery from my youth: "a neon-soaked, late night, sonic getaway drive, dripping with luscious analog synthesizers, cinematic vocals and cyberpunk values, exploding from the front cover of a dusty plastic VHS case which has lain forgotten since 1984."
Cyberpunk! There's a term that takes me back. If you have fond memories of watching imaginative futurescapes on bulky cassettes accompanied by the distinctive sounds of Korg and Moog synthesizers, you owe it to yourself to explore a little retrowave. I don't think it will be the next big thing, but it is refreshing and maybe even a bit comforting to hear something old coming back into style once again.
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