Waxing Nostalgic: Robert Hazard, “Escalator Of Life”

By Jeffery X Martin

As a writer, I am in love with the English language. It’s my tool, it’s my crutch, it is my weapon. While I hate to see the language abused and used poorly, I enjoy it when other creative people grab hold of it and whip it around, make it snap and do things it normally wouldn’t. This usually happens in the area of analogies, similes, and metaphors. And I must admit: I love ’em when they’re bad. If you can take a bad comparison and make it work on your behalf, make it seem credible and acceptable, then you’ve accomplished something. It’s a dubious and weird thing, but a thing, nonetheless.

Let us ponder, then, the most excellent badness of Robert Hazard’s “Escalator of Life.”

The song is a reflection on the shallow nature of consumerism, which was glorified and deified in the Eighties. And really, it’s best summed up in the chorus, music which has literally haunted my dreams for years:

We’re riding on the escalator of life
We’re shopping in the human mall
We’re dancing on the escalator of life
Won’t be happy ’til we have it all
We want it all
Escalator of life— up and down
Escalator of life—round and round

Oh my goodness. That’s bad. That’s just wretched writing. That’s what would happen if you could get Robert Frost and Patrick Bateman together in the same room, watching midget porn and drinking absinthe with no sugar. Still, the more you listen to it, the more concepts like “the human mall” make surrealistic sense. I’m pretty sure no one is actually shopping for humans, but maybe we’re all for sale and the things we buy can buy us right back. Fuck. I don’t know. My mind downshifts a couple of gears and says, “Wow, that’s vaguely dystopian and science-fictiony! Okay!”

Also: escalators don’t go round and round except in cartoons. Just a thought.

Other images in the song that stick in my craw are the “rock and roll supermarket” and his invocation of the Zulu Nation.

First, in the Eighties, if you gave a shit about real rock and roll, you didn’t go to the fucking mall. You went to seedy little record stores in the basements of falling down buildings and you bought Iron Maiden or King Diamond or anything you could find on the SST label. Hell, maybe you just stayed home and listened to your parents’ Frampton albums, maybe some Foreigner for those light flow days. But you sure as hell weren’t at the local shopping complex.

Secondly, the only thing Caucasian Americans really know about the Zulu Nation was that we saw a movie called Zulu one time. Michael Caine was in it. It was pretty good, we guess. We’re not sure if we would watch it again.

So if “Escalator of Life” is such a crap tune, why do I love it so? Let me put it this way.

Remember the first time you put corn chips on a bologna sandwich with mustard on a hot dog bun, bit into it, and proclaimed it good? Or how about the first time you saw something lying about the house just vaguely cylindrical, like a bottle of deodorant or the handle of a hairbrush, and you thought, “I bet I could put that in my vagina and like it?” That’s what “Escalator of Life” is. It’s a bad idea that turns out okay in the end. You may not be able to explain it. You may not even want to try. It may not be something you tell your friends about. You don’t have to.

And as you watch the video, which is supremely ’80s, look for something you just don’t see in videos as much as you used to: interpretive smoking. You’ll know it when you see it, and it is truly a lost art.