Frontier

You get talking about one music video and next thing you know you've wandered into a different one:

 A quick summary of the video for Donald Fagen's 1982 single, New Frontier: In the 1950s a guy takes a girl into the most private place he has access to: The family bomb shelter. They make use of the available entertainments - records and a television, cigarettes and alcohol - before using the privacy for what was planned.  When the guy falls asleep afterwards, the girl leaves, giving him one of her white gloves as a memento. He awakes alone to a new day - and an unexpected visitor in a radiation suit.

To start, it's crazy to be watching this more than 30 years after it was created, when it was critiquing a world twenty to thirty years old at the time. Presumably the world has changed an equivalent amount in each intervening period of multiple decades. The optimism of the 1950s was overtaken by the cynicism of the early 1980s, while what would have been called cynicism has been rendered obsolete by the reality of the new century.

And have no misapprehensions: The video is a critique overall, even if it is referencing some items - Picasso, say, and Dave Brubeck - positively.

In 1982, Ronald Reagan had been President for over a year, and there were still those who thought he would instigate war to rid the world of the Communist Soviet Union. The documentary The Atomic Cafe came out that same year, suggesting the futility of the Reagan administration's attempt to survive a nuclear war, and comparing it to the embrace of the Bomb in the 1950s. (As previously noted, though, this excitement about nukes was not universal: there was some concern over the reality of nuclear weapons as early as 1946, years before the Soviet Union had successfully tested their own.)  The nuclear freeze movement was becoming stronger, with a core belief that nuclear war was not winnable. The existence of a shelter implied the possibility of "winning,"which made a connection between the naiveté of the 1950s and of (GI Generation) Reagan.

Which doesn't mean that the song itself isn't a remembrance of a happier more carefree time. While the video takes place entirely in a shelter, the lyrics only refer to it at the start, and not with that name ("a dugout that my dad built").  The remainder of the song is optimistic on the surface, if cynical about that previous hopefulness. Perhaps it was written, like Blaze of Glory, as a document of those times by someone who had lived through them. One might consider the song alone that way - as a remembrance of a younger self and an earlier time - but the video seems very much a part of the late Awakening.