Skateaway: That's All

I first saw this video quite a while after the song had soared to the top of my own list of best rock songs ever. I was at Savage House Pizza on Monroe street where Northwest Blvd intersects. Maureen, one of my very brightest students at Whitworth College, was working at Savage House. MTV was on the television.

This must have been the summer of '83. MTV was in a golden age. Videos all day long. No reality television. It was about six months before "Thriller", so about six months before the tide of MTV began to turn. It was still the simpler days of MTV.

But it's not really the video that has left an impression on me. It's the song. For the last twenty-six years, since the release of "Making Movies", the album "Skateaway" appears on, this one song has lived with me.

When I first listened closely to "Skateaway", I realized that it travelled down a road similar to "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" or "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" or "Death of a Salesman", even though it is a Scottish song. It seems very American to me. So much of the American theater is centered on characters living in a world of their own making and as they act as if that world is actual, they are undone or at least disoriented when the actual world intrudes upon their illusions. The world of illusion has no substance. It's make believe.

How does "Skateaway" fit with this American tradition? First off, it's a song about alienation and loneliness. The girl in the song is trying to be someone to offset how she is the "lonely one" the "only one". In roller skating, she's found her power, at least in her imagination. In her imagination, she creates a world of illusion where she controls traffic, has power over big trucks, and plays matador to taxis. This is where she takes chances. Not with other people. No. On rollerskates. In traffic. This is her world. It's make believe.

But the deeper level of the song is in her headphones. Here, she escapes. She listens to the radio and every song is a movie: "the movie makes her want to be a story and the story was whatever was the song (what it was). Rollergirl, don't worry, dj play the movies, all night long, all night long." She moves entirely into the world of these songs, entirely into her movies, her illusions.

This is her skate away. This is her way of skating away from loneliness and her way of alienating herself from the troubles of her world. She skates. She listens to songs. They become movies. She skates and makes movies all night long. As Mark Knopfler sings on her behalf: "Skateaway, that's all."

That's all. It's so simple. Take your feet off the ground and put on wings, the rollerskates. Shut out the world with a walkman. Move out of the world of what's actual and into the world of movies made by radio songs. Skate away. Shala shalay hey hey skateaway
Shes singing shala shalay hey hey.

We listen to this song fade out. It never really ends because the girl's pretend world never ends --well, not until she takes off the skates and the walkman, but that part of her life is not in the song. It's for us to wonder about. What happens when the movies are over? What happens when her feet hit the ground and she cannot glide? What happens when she comes into the actual world of loneliness and alienation?

What happens when she can no longer skate away?