Music to whose ears?

The soundtrack of my college years – 1980s pop – follows me everywhere I go in Gainesville: the Gator Corner Dining Center, friends’ cars en route to Westside Park’s basketball courts, Maude’s coffee shop, Durty Nelly’s Irish Pub, Albertson’s, you name it.

It’s as if I’d never left, and neither did the let’s-keep-our-legs-warm-at-any-aesthetic-cost decade.

It wasn’t always like this. As undergrad Gators, my friends and I listened mostly to the music of our day. Now, students tune in more to the music of their elders.

As the Talking Heads might say, It stopped making sense long ago. Folks around Hogtown – including freshmen born after most of this music hit FM radio and MTV – are subjected to Billy Idol, the Bangles and Prince more than they are to Britney Spears, the Black Eyed Peas and, well, the post-Artist Formerly Known as Prince Prince.

Go figure.

For me, it’s confusing: on one hand, I relish the pangs of sweet nostalgia; on the other, who wants to do the time warp again and again? (Wrong decade, I know, but I couldn’t resist.) It can play games with your head, even if you no longer bang it.

The other day at Gator Dining, I felt dizzy, not to mention nauseated and just plain old, during a string of particularly mind-tripping ’80s hits.

It started out well. Chewing a mouthful of gravy-soaked pot roast, I learned that “One Thing Leads to Another.” Although I already knew that – having heard The Fixx preach it for more than 20 years and having seen for myself that, by golly, they’re right – I appreciated being reminded of how things work.

This moment of clarity gained traction when one of the greatest musical acts in history, Wang Chung, bellowed, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” Of course! What else? And if not tonight, when?

But then U2’s Bono brought me down by kvetching, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” It immediately dawned on me that I’m in worse shape than everybody – those having fun, those causing things to lead to other things, and those who seek things. I’ve found what I was looking for – and it’s the ’80s. Help!

I counted down the seconds, hoping the next song would uplift my funk. Instead, I found myself in Funk Town as Foreigner cried out, “I Want to Know What Love Is.” I lost what little appetite I had left. I know what love is – and, as the J. Geils Band pointed out on more than one (or 100) occasion(s) – it stinks.

So I ran, I ran so far away. I just ran, but I couldn’t get away! The music of the ’80s haunts me like a sentimental bounty hunter.

Listen, being nostalgic poses grave spiritual danger. It blocks reality. It’s like sitting backwards as you ride your bike.

Or, put it this way: The past is like Moscow – a good place to visit, on occasion, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

I go out of my way to avoid getting sucked into that  cheesy decade. I stay home on clubs’ and bars’ ’80s music nights and I constantly look for new artists. The only old singers to whom I listen are the ones who reinvent themselves.

Elvis Costello has been my musical savior. Unlike, let’s say, the Rolling Stones, he keeps evolving, so he never makes me feel stuck in the ’80s, when I started immersing myself in his work. I just bought “My Flame Burns Blue,” his 2004 performance at The Hague’s North Sea Jazz Festival. I don’t have to skip the album’s two ’80s tunes (“Clubland” and “Almost Blue”) because he’s reworked them so creatively, they ground me right here, right now.

But I can only escape the ’80s for so long.

The other night, as I walked into Durty Nelly’s to meet a friend, The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” greeted me like an old flame. I heard that song for the first time in 1987 in this very place. It was called Rickenbacker’s then.

Today, it looks and sounds exactly the same.

I gave up. I let myself disappear into the smoky aura and stayed in the ’80s until I woke up the next morning.

I guess it could be worse: Everybody could start playing the whiney songs of the 1990s.