Out of Touch

And that's OK

I was zipping through episodes of The Masked Singer the other night (don’t judge me) when I came to a sudden yet inarguable conclusion: I am out of touch.

For those of you with lives who’ve never seen The Masked Singer, it’s a singing competition where celebrities wear costumes and perform anonymously for a panel of braindead judges. At the end of each show, a singer is eliminated and dramatically unmasked.

Except when the celebrity’s identity is revealed – a singer, an actress, an influencer, an athlete - I don’t have a clue who they are. I’ve never seen these people, I’ve never heard of these people, I have no idea why the crowd is losing their shit.

It wasn’t always this way, you know.

Remember this ditty from 1984? Of course you do. As if you could forget Hall and freakin’ Oates. (Trust me, I’ve tried. It’s impossible.)

Out of Touch was the first single off Big Bam Boom. It was the dynamic duo’s fourteenth straight Top 40 hit, and marked their final #1 single.

You couldn’t escape the song in 1984 because there weren’t many channels or stations to choose from. You were stuck with Hall and Oates and by god you liked it. And if you weren’t careful, if you listened for too long, you were inevitably exposed to Night Ranger.

You also heard Out of Touch everywhere you went: at the mall and the record shop and the roller rink, at the video store and the local arcade, before these palaces of our youth went the way of the Dodo.

It was easier to stay in touch with popular culture because we were still living in the Land of Shared Experiences, where everybody heard the exact same songs and watched the same shows and movies.

In 1984, everybody knew the Ewings and the Carringtons. Everybody knew Webster and Remington Steele. And if you ever felt lonely, if you felt out of touch, all you had to do was head to that bar in downtown Boston where everybody knows your name.

The Land of Shared Experiences continued into the 90’s. These were the years of ‘water cooler culture’, where students and colleagues gathered the morning after to quote The Simpsons and act out Seinfeld, to debate whether Ross and Rachel were on a break. Even if you didn’t care about Roseanne or Twin Peaks, or whether the truth was really out there, you knew what the people around you were talking about. You felt plugged in, even if you weren’t.

It used to bug me when I failed to recognize a singer or an actor. I prided myself on being in touch, in my ability to recognize a personality, no matter how obscure or inane.

Who sang Two of Hearts? Why Stacey Q, of course!

What do you mean ‘Who played Cindy on The Facts of Life?’ Obviously it was the inimitable Julie Ann Haddock!

I realized while watching The Masked Singer, however, that not only do I not recognize today’s celebrities, I also could not care less. Not anymore. Not with a million channels and streams available, and a million other choices I know nothing about. There’s simply too much crap to keep track of.

Here are Neilsen’s top 10 shows for the week of Nov. 4:

Outer Banks
The Diplomat
The Lincoln Lawyer
The Great British Baking Show
Tulsa King
Lioness
Beauty in Black
Love is Blind
Only Murders in the Building
Agatha All Along

I have seen exactly NONE of these shows. And that’s not counting Shogun or Slow Horses or Hacks or Silo or Evil or The Penguin or whatever the fuck else.

That’s OK, though.

Because I no longer feel the need to be plugged in. Not to popular culture, anyway. It’s far too fractured for me to follow.

But if you’d like to discuss whether you’re the master of your domain, if you’d like to examine who shot JR or debate who exactly is the boss, then you can count on me.

And by the way, it seems perfectly clear that Ross and Rachel were on a break.