Newsletter # 36
1984 vs. 2024: Miami Vice & Racism & Music. 7/30/25
Every year I publish a 1980s article vs. the current year and every following July I give you an exclusive article of content that was cut for length. This year’s exclusive is specifically based off the article “1984 vs. 2024: What Does Real Freedom Look Like?”
1984 vs. 2024: Miami Vice & Racism & Music
I realized Miami Vice is the answer.
Well, at least for this article. I mean for other stuff too. If your question is “What show popularized pastel T-shirts, Armani jackets, sockless loafers, and aviators?” then bingo. And while that question is probably crucial to a life well-lived, my quandary was in trying to figure out how to connect 1984’s themes of race and music. Yep, Miami Vice is the connection.
The theme of my original article was “freedom” and we see the cry for that at the heart of Doctor James Cone’s 1984 book For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church. Nowhere does he summarize the problem better than in saying: “Do not the widening gap between the rich and the poor and the real possibility of nuclear annihilation mean that we need to reevaluate our definition of freedom and the methods we have used to attain it?”
Cone was frustrated with governments and powerful institutions either proclaiming everyone was equally free or ignoring evidence to the contrary. His next statement, although not particularly concise, has so much to unpack that I could write a book on it. This isn’t that venue, but I do challenge you to think about what he says, then I’ll add some commentary. This will serve as our cornerstone. Cone remarks:
“However, as we look back over the black struggle in the United States, recounting its accomplishments and feeling proud of how far we have come, let us not forget that we are living in the year of George Orwell’s 1984. The world of 1984 is a world moving toward its own destruction. Obsessed with its own power, it tries to make right wrong and wrong right. Although the oppressed have been struggling for freedom throughout the globe, oppressors have become much more powerful than they were in 1955. In control of the mass media, they now can make lies sound factual and disseminate them further and faster than ever before. The enormous military power of the ruling elites in the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. is staggering, and it keeps on escalating. Multinational corporations have become giants bigger than many nations and accountable to none. The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, dying of hunger and malnutrition in a world that seems not to care.”
Let’s look at the Black and disadvantaged person’s struggle, fearmongering, and the cultural context.
The Black and Disadvantaged Person’s Struggle
Our first consideration on Doctor Cone’s quote is the subject matter: the Black and disadvantaged person’s struggle. Cone’s statement is based on the real people he saw struggling – the disparities of reality. I think Miami Vice’s creators attempted to give a voice to the disadvantaged through fiction based on reality. As we’ll see shortly, their success on that front is debatable. But as a show, Miami Vice changed the cultural landscape: Filled with complex characters (one of which was the city itself), cinematic storytelling (unseen on TV at that time), and legitimacy earned by taking music seriously. I felt so strongly about Vice’s groundbreaking and cinematic style, that while sitting in a taproom with several cinephiles (one being a legitimate director), I bought Vice’s pilot episode on the owner’s Prime account and played it for the surprised patrons.
But the subject at hand is the reality of racism, and the showrunner’s credit a piece of legislation as one impetus for the show. The “Omnibus Crime Bill of 1984” allowed law enforcement to confiscate drug dealers’ assets. The showrunners explored taking the undocumented billions of dollars and confiscated items like Ferraris and Armani’s that were streaming through Miami and giving them to underpaid cops.
And, in a meta move I love, Crockett references the Bill in the first season. So what did Miami actually look like in 1984? As the Gen X Watch article “Miami Vice and 40 Years of Art Transforming!” says: “Police brutality of black people was on the rise [in Miami] and the government’s failing war on drugs was leading to organized crime fighting deadly wars for market share of the mountains of cocaine white middle class people were yearning for.”
But Miami was only one city, right? What did the nation believe? It turns out Miami reflected the U.S.’ greater fears: Too many immigrants were entering the country, stealing jobs, and bringing in illegal drugs, guns, and money. (No, that wasn’t taken from Trump’s 2024 campaign.) These fears led to something called “White Flight.”
As previously mentioned, how Vice handled race is seen in two ways:
The first, that executive producer Michael Mann’s personal, radically conservative views were racist and it showed. For example, Jon Stratton says: “Indeed, [Miami Vice’s] racial politics were very conservative and…in particular, the series played to growing (white) American anxieties in the early 1980s over the increase in the number of Hispanics entering and taking up residence in the United States…[T]he predominant image of Hispanics in the series was of violent gangsters and…the show echoed and reinforced white American concerns about their future loss of dominance, both in numerical terms but also in cultural terms, in the United States.”
The second view is that Mann and other showrunners gave representation, even normalizing multiethnic teams. For example, T.D. Allman explains: “To be sure, Vice could indulge in stereotypes, with drug-dealing Colombians and Jamaicans often at the end of the short stick, and horror-show depictions of Jamaican Rastafarianism and Santeria, the Afro-Cuban religion.
But the good guys were also black and white and Hispanic. It was all presented in matter-of-fact fashion, without apology, simply a new, polyglot American reality. It foretold — as did Miami — the country’s demographic shifts.”
Maybe it’s two sides of the same coin. Maybe Mann portrayed the reality of white anxieties, while imagining how diversity could be the strength of a police department.
In fact, I think Vice’s department was designed to be just that. The show’s Omnibus Crime Bill motivation drove storylines that juxtaposed the products of crime and opulence to actually help the disenfranchised victims.
And the heroes were hip.
There’s a reason Vice is known as “MTV Cops.”[i] The show set a standard for television and one lever it pulled was to use music’s influence. I highly recommend the elaborately detailed article “Why Was the Miami Vice Pilot So Good?.” In the article, Matt Zoller Seitz says, “Another element in the mix was MTV, which debuted in 1981 and normalized a music-video aesthetic that was more about highlights and moments than literary concepts of conventional storytelling.”
That idea of music-video highlights (and news network’s sound bites, as we’ll see in a minute), was crucial to 1984’s MTV era.
Initially MTV was accused of being racist in their programming, catering to a white audience. As I wrote about regarding 1982’s groundbreaking year of music, Michael Jackson’s Thriller album was so huge, MTV had no choice but to air its videos. Then in 1983, David Bowie criticized MTV for not playing videos by Black artists…on MTV! Singer Rick James did too, but as Elahe Izadi details, “The optics worked differently for Bowie, a famous white musician beloved by the network and who wielded “influence and power.”
So by 1984, as their two explosive singles released, Run-DMC not only cemented Black artists on MTV, they introduced rap and the Black community to the masses. The excellent 2024 documentary Kings from Queens: The Run DMC Story describes this historical moment. About the documentary, The Wrap wrote, “For 1984’s ‘Rock Box,’ the follow-up to ‘It’s Like That,’ [Darryl] McDaniels was inspired by Billy Squier’s 1980 song ‘The Big Beat.’ They didn’t sample the song itself, but created a similar beat on their own…[W]e did it with ‘Rock Box,’ and it changed the world. They got us on MTV, put hip-hop in everybody’s living room,’ he added.”
Today, in 2024, most of us would view Run-DMC’s earned popularity as something interesting and in many ways, a victory. But there are always those scared by the new and different. Fears real or, often, imagined.
Fearmongering of the Unknown
American and Christian mindsets are “significantly fear-based.”[ii] This means we are ripe for fearmongering. As I said in my 1983 vs. 2023 article, these concerns come from ’80s Cold War terror melded with religious fear of the apocalypse, which we’re still feeling today. (Sidenote: Enter Shikari’s song “apøcaholics anonymøus” does a frantic and fantastic job of explaining our addiction to a doomsday mentality.)
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that Cone’s above quote could inspire fear. Although I don’t think I’d call it fearmongering. Not to split hairs, but it’s a message on the problem of racism situated atop some fearful truths. I don’t think Cone was trying to manipulate people, more that he was sharing difficulties that could make someone fearful, but he also provides hope later. He may not have had another way to build his case: frustrated with the terror many Blacks faced while others were shielded and uncaring. But in many ways, Cone stands on the Bible’s tradition of balance in pronouncing truths that may incite fear while providing hope in how to avoid that which causes distress.
Fearmongering, on the other hand, is wrong because it preys on weakness and worry by deceit, in order to manipulate an audience to act as the fearmongerer intends. Over time news media has employed fearmongering with greater ferocity and part of that, as I mentioned in my recent Back to the Future article, was due to how drastically communication has changed since the ’80s.
“…most media—newspapers, radio, mailed letters—was virtually unaltered. But with the advent of faster information sharing, the speed of life increased. Smartphones, the Internet, and social media have brought constant connection and real-time news coverage, but paradoxically created emotional distance and superficial communication.”
The authors of “The World isn’t Nearly as Horrible as We Think (or is it?)” agree and note: “But there’s one thing that news outlets of all ages have in common, namely, their selective nature.” That selectivity, seen in corporations and individuals, has varying motivations. And in the case of the news, major incentives have become profitability and influencing opinions. This leads us back to the sound bites I mentioned earlier. Although the idea of sound bites was around in the ’70s, it wasn’t until 1980 that the term[iii] was seen in print media.
By 1983, Time explained: “TV’s formula these days is perhaps 100 words from the reporter, and a ‘sound bite’ of 15 or 20 words from the speaker.” As Phrase Finder details: “Ronald Reagan, who won the nomination as Republican candidate for US President in 1980, was adapt at coining these media-friendly, ‘direct to the people’ phrases; for example [in 1987]: ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’”
It wasn’t long (the mid-eighties) before manipulators, known as spin doctors, spun the sound bites and news to fit their narrative. Knowing that our American society is predisposed to act out of fear, how can we in 2024 defend ourselves? Well, I’ll give you some helpful applications in the Conclusion of this article, but in the meantime, a few thoughts.
First, we do have some critical thinking skills. One example comes from audience reactions to the music of Miami Vice. Having described Vice’s willingness to pay top dollar for top songs, ONC Wang explains:
“Compare Miami Vice with its short-lived ABC imitator, The Insiders, where the latter choreographed a car scene to a recording that was obviously a studio attempt at "new wave" music. The lack of a real recording artist immediately pegged The Insiders as a cultural production outside of the culture it wished to address. In contrast, the authentic songs which Miami Vice uses have become the footnotes of its cultural authority, the signature of itself as a cultural spokesperson for a culture that grew up listening to rock & roll in the sixties and seventies, and now has become one of the most prominent audiences for consumer advertising.”
We’ll look at the weight behind Wang’s analysis in a minute, but regarding society’s B.S. meter, it’s obvious audiences caught and sidelined The Insiders’ inauthenticity.
Another example comes from comedian Ronny Chieng’s 2024 explanation on why Boomers can’t tell when something is AI, but Millennials and younger generations can. [Warning: The video has strong language and may seem offensive to some Boomers.] I should pump the brakes here and add: As individuals, we often believe we’re better at things than we really are. Psychology Today puts it succinctly: “The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area.” This realization should humbly be applied to our entire life, but for our purposes, suffice it to say that we should attempt to work at the discernment of fearmongering.
Fearmongering doesn’t only originate with corporations and organizations, but can come from anyone with an audience. This includes pastors, individual influencers, parents, employees with co-workers, the list goes on. So, for those of you who want to continue to disseminate fear, I can’t change your mind. If you believe it’s your duty to regularly inform the masses of how horrifying everything is, just stop reading. Yes, yes, you’re the lions, we’re the sheep.
But for those tired of having perpetual anxiety from a news system that is built to only report the worst events, structured to inflate the gravity of that bad news, to overwhelmingly flood all avenues, and to do so constantly, there is hope.
Back to the “The World isn’t Nearly as Horrible…” article I mentioned. The authors say: “Although time seems to pass by linearly, it also moves in cyclical patterns…A clear vision of the world aligns with reality, at least as much as possible. Someone with a clear vision doesn’t necessarily deny the validity of the information stream, but remains skeptical, puts it in perspective, and knows that the vast majority of the circulating information isn’t a big deal. The input of disturbing news is not proportionate to what’s going on at large. It’s just a tiny pixel in the vastness of reality, selected, magnified, and presented engagingly.”
Sometimes we need that “disturbing news is not proportionate to what’s going on at large” reminder. I’ll admit, even as I read the aforementioned article, I questioned it simply for being published in 2022. Like, oh you thought it was bad back then, you couldn’t fathom how bad 2024 was. (And as you read this in 2025 [and 2026 and 2027…] you’ll probably make the same incorrect assumption about this very article!). But the “The World isn’t Nearly as Horrible…” article is solid and was written after the pandemic, so it is “aware” of modern concerns. I needed my own medicine! As always, context is a major factor in our perception of reality.
Cultural Context: A Culture of Pop
I’ve already rooted this article in cultural context: we’ve discussed the “Omnibus Crime Bill of 1984,” police brutality, MTV, Run-DMC, sound bites, Reagan, fearmongering, and of course, Miami Vice. But now it’s time to dive deeper.
When I first read Cone’s thoughts around freedom for the disadvantaged, I was surprised by his list, although I shouldn’t have been. I had written about each of his concerns: “mass media” here,[iv] “military might” here, powerful nations here and here, and “unaccountable corporations” recently in my Severance Season 1 article.
It’s also interesting that Cone tied back to 1955 (before this quote he explained that it had been 29 years since Rosa Park started the civil rights movement), considering Reagan shaped the ’80s from the ’50s and Trump has recycled both decade’s nostalgias. But primarily Cone was frustrated. It was the fact of an “explosion in Black poverty,” coupled with the ignorance and misinformation and willful refusal to acknowledge the disparity that angered so many Persons of Color (POC) including Doctor Cone. For example, I learned from Cone that the term “negro” had a historical connotation of desiring integration, but as the rules of integration were found to be controlled by whites, organizations with “negro” in their title began substituting the term “Black.” So when I watched The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024) premise of Blacks making white people’s lives easier, I understood exactly why the filmmakers used the term “negroes.”
The ignorance and misinformation was seen in the previously mentioned “White Flight.” Interestingly, like 1982’s Blade Runner, “…Miami Vice was a key influence in helping make cities cool again among young Americans whose parents had decamped for the suburbs. Like those films, Miami Vice did so in part by embracing the city’s multiethnic demographic, a cause of much of the anxiety surrounding the city’s future. Vice just turned it into a virtue.”[v]
So some young people, who we now call Boomers and ONC Wang earlier called the generation “that grew up listening to rock & roll in the sixties and seventies,” weren’t afraid of multiethnic communities. This begs the question: how does that generation vote now in 2024?
Certainly political votes are a huge part of this, but as we’ll see in a second, we all vote via what we watch and listen to. First, the politics. I spent a significant amount of the original 1984 vs. 2024 article painstakingly explaining the two year’s political interconnectedness, so I won’t exactly rehash that here. But, in a section influenced by music, I would be remiss in not mentioning the effect songs had on 2024 campaign rallies.
As Kevin Dolak detailed in a Hollywood Reporter article:
“It’s easy to look at the campaign soundtracks heard at Harris and Trump rallies and see a contrast (as well as the curated innovative set of songs played during the delegate roll call on the second night of the DNC).
On one side [RNC], voters are presented with classic American [rock] music, with tracks from past decades that are battle-tested to evoke strong emotions and harness nostalgia’s hopeful sense of a return to when listeners were younger and happier. On the other, voters are hearing some of today’s popular artists come together in a multicultural mix that at times veers into lyrical and thematic content that might have made Tipper Gore blush, but is reflective of America in 2024.”[vi]
On the rock side, 1984 boasted Kenny Loggins’ “Footloose,” Queen’s “Radio Ga-Ga,” Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” and Van Halen’s “Jump.” And if you were looking for what is considered the best concert ever, the Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense was released that year. For many the Talking Heads were a bridge for the quintessential sound of the eighties: new wave synth.
Many examples exist, but a few fun ones include: Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days,” Romeo Void’s “A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing),” or even Basil Poledouris’ Red Dawn soundtrack which is solely comprised of instrumentals but uses synthesizers. (Sidenote: On June 19, 1984, The Motion Picture Association of America instituted the PG-13 rating, with Red Dawn being the first film bestowed with the new rating.) It’s hard to overemphasize how impactful 1984’s music has been, maybe Michaelangelo Mato’s book title Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year will convince you. But one of Vice’s greatest strengths was knowing exactly how to plug into that modern musical moment.
Author Matt Zoller Seitz says Michael Mann’s contribution to the series was huge, one important move was hiring “Jan Hammer, a Czech fusion-jazz keyboardist, to compose all-new synth-driven instrumental music for each episode.” But the show also used popular music. In what is probably the pilot’s best sequence, the newly founded duo drive to confront the main antagonist with Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” playing at length.[vii] As the pilot’s director says, “‘In the Air Tonight’ would become inextricably linked to Miami Vice, even though it had been released as a single in 1981…The show had immediately taken ownership of the song.”
The pilot also featured two brand new songs: Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” (assisted by Michael Jackson’s backing vocals). A popular perspective was built around Rockwell and Michael Jackson and The Cosby Show and other Black artists that their success was indicative of success for all POC.
Not to discount the effects of these cultural moments. In fact, regarding the impact of Michael Jackson Thriller album (mentioned in 1982 vs. 2022 and here), Reuters says,
“…‘Thriller’ redefined the expectations for blockbuster releases. Starting in 1984, Columbia released seven singles from Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ all of which landed in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. Around the same time, Warner Bros. sent to radio five singles from Prince’s ‘Purple Rain.’ Mercury found seven singles on Def Leppard’s ‘Hysteria,’ all of which went to the pop chart. All three albums eventually sold more than 10 million copies each in the United States alone.”
Indeed, a standard in the music industry was set. This was Cone’s cultural moment. But this success wasn’t representative of the vast majority of POC experience.
Facing our Fear(mongering)
And that POC experience coupled with abuse of power and the poor getting poorer can feel hopeless. Doctor Cone said the world was moving toward its own destruction. Things may feel worse than the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, but much of it is within our perspective. One thing we can control is how we behave with our audiences and how we cast our viewer vote (I told you I’d bring back the vote idea!).
Fearmongering can be stopped. We the audience can limit it by not clicking on click-bait links, not searching for those types of videos and articles, and unfollowing or unsubscribing from those who use these tactics. All of this presupposes that creators are intentionally fearmongering. And many are. But there are those who unintentionally do this too. So, firstly, if you are someone addressing the public, take an honest look at your content and message. Are you driving fear consciously or subconsciously into your audience? Are you posting a video or speaking in front of your prayer group or giving a presentation at work telling people “How bad it is”?
And second, for us consumers, since we are all members of an audience, where are we placing our votes? Our attendance, our watches and views and subscriptions and rentals, where we spend our time, these are monitored and collated and become “votes.” if you watch fearmongering news programs or attend a fearmongering Bible study or repost fearmongering videos, you are casting your vote.
Applying these suggestions should reduce the acceptance of fearmongering, it might even continue Doctor Cone’s good work of standing against racism. The more informed we are of our past (let’s say 1984), the more we can serve and support those in need. And hey, you don’t even have to wear Armani jackets and aviators doing it…but you’d look pretty cool.
Thanks, in Him,
-Chris (the Bearded Wonder) Fogle
[i] Credited to Brandon Tartikoff, President of NBC
[ii] For more on this see my article “1983 vs. 2023: When Is Revival Right for America?”; Kaitlyn Schiess’ The Ballot and the Bible; Dr. Charlene Sinclair and Dr. Obery Hendricks Momentum podcast episode “Pushing Back Against the Rise of Christian Nationalism;” and Terry Gross’ interview of Tim Alberta for his book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.
[iii] The term was published as “sound bite,” although it’s also been seen as “sound-bite” and “soundbite.”
[iv] In an unpublished article draft from 2020, I wrote: “In 1980 people still trusted the news, and with the advent of an unprecedented fourth news network, CNN made news by making news available 24 hours a day. But the problem of selective coverage existed then too.”
[v] T.D. Allman, quoted by Andres Viglucci in: “The Vice Effect: 30 Years After the Show that Changed Miami.”
[vi] I also realized President Reagan had Lee Greenwood sing his 1984 song “God bless the U.S.A” at the RNC, used the song as his official campaign theme, and praised Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 “Born in the U.S.A.” Reagan, “and many of Springsteen’s fans, cheerfully ignored the antigovernment rage of the song, and Springsteen rejected Reagan’s attempt to appropriate him and his song for the conservative cause” (Victor Bondi, American Decades, 1994, p. 47).
[vii] NBC’s official Miami Vice YouTube channel says: “The ‘In the Air Tonight’ Scene is arguably the most memorable and famous scene from the Miami Vice television series, and is regularly cited as one of the greatest, most influential moments in the history of television.”