If, as Tom Wolfe does, you believe that it takes a decade about five years to get started, you must be expecting the �80s to begin any day now. There are those, though, who�ll tell you that the �80s began in earnest the day Ronald Reagan was first elected president, by a positively terrifyingly huge margin, and that, with American college kids lusting unashamedly after wealth and power, nationalism and piety being rampant, and You Know Who�s running the country, the smart money�s on the �80s eventually coming to be recognized as the �50s, Jr.

Let�s say, just for the sake of filling part of a column inch and giving the ad salespeople something they can show manufacturers of beauty supplies, that 1986 really will be 1956 all over again, but with mousse in its hair this time, rather than lard. Is the appropriate response to thjs to begin suffering the symptoms of irritable colon syndrome, or to* furrow one�s brow and mutter obscenely? It is not, for just as three decades ago, there�ll be lots of wonderful popular art perpetrated in 1986, along with the expected infinity of worthless crap that aspires to nothing more than to turn a handsome profit. It�ll just be a case of knowing where to look for it.

You�ll find less than you�d hope to coming from what�s still known as �Hollywood,� as film producers will continue to raise enormous amounts of money to pay Chevy Chase and Tom Hanks to star in and John Hughes to write and direct movies, each of which will be even more astonishingly horrendous than the one before. Dozens of horny teen slob movies, many of them with Roman numerals in their titles, most of them co-written by Neal Israel, will be released in time for summer. While Francis Coppola�s Peggy Sue Got Married will remind many of the previous summer�s biggest, uh, grosser, Back To The Future, a great many more 1986 movies are certain to star monosyllabic musclemen in the mold of Schwarzenegger and the unspeakable Stallone as hyperpatriotic mayhemmongers. Rambo, or whatever its actual title was, will be shown on network television, and mindless jingoism will continue to flourish on the American college campus, once the bastion of the infinitely preferable mindless pacifism. But as more and more real cinemas are replaced by more and more mall multiplexes with Honda-windshield-sized screens, more and more American moviegoers will rent videocassettes instead.

At the same time, cable television will continue to lose subscribers left and right, as it keeps trying to forcefeed them unspeakably unfunny comedy specials, horny teen slob fare, and ludicrous theatrical features that no theaters could be persuaded to exhibit. Look for a Neal Israel Festival on Showtime, Cinemax, or The Movie Channel.

Having taken one of the biggest baths in broadcasting history on them, NBC will yank Steven Spielberg�s Amazing Stories, which are as notable for their abrasive cartoonishness in general and their insufferable overacting in particular as they are for their patent expensiveness. Miami Vice, which is also uniformly dreadfully acted and written, will come to be seen as the television equivalent of Valley girl talk and fluorescent clothing.

Some of the year�s best news is that young people will cease thinking it terribly droll to imitate Billy Crystal imitating Fernando Lamas, and that both Crystal and Jamie Lee Curtis, the homeliest sex goddess in American film history, will cease to be profiled by every magazine in America except this one.

Meanwhile, in letters, Stephen King and Jackie Collins, two of the worst writers writing in English today, will remain two of the language�s most popular novelists.

Countless tens of thousands of teenaged boys with severe complexion problems, no car, no girlfriend, infinitesimal prospects of getting one, and hormonal imbalances that make it painful for them not to get laid will continue to eargerly fork over money they had to slave in fast food joints or—-worse—for the privilege of listening to unspeakable idiots in studded leather outfits and more make-up than even the gaudiest streetwalker would consider wearing sing how treacherous women are and how evil and sinister they themselves are.

Speaking of unspeakable idiots, self-styled rock �n� roll bad boy Vince Neil of Motley Crue will spend 30 days behind bars, in the company of real bad boys—who�ll�ve seen photographs of him trying to look bitchin� in his see-through trousers and gaudy streetwalker make-up. The smart money�s on his having a pretty hectic 30 days.

America will get over its inexplicable fascination with Madonna�s affected wantonness in 1986, after having acted through the previous 18 months as though she were the first female pop star to play the slut.

Several million more copies of Julian Lenrion�s, Sade�s, and Cyndi Lauper�s second albums will be shipped than actually sold, and they�ll still be clogging up the nation�s K-Marts� cut out bins When John Lennon�s grandson cuts his first album.

MTV will remain appalling.

Punk still won�t be dead. But in 10 years� time, all of the group�s legatees combined won�t have accounted for as much outrageousness as the Sex Pistols packed into the first line of their first single, wherein Johnny Rotten declared himself nothing short of the antichrist. The controversies regarding whether the sleeves in which records containing sexually explicit lyrics ought to be marked in some way and whether or not such marking would constitute censorship will continue to rage, and a lot of heavy metal and other idiots who�d otherwise have disappeared without a trace will parlay the publicity surrounding their lyrics into appreciable bucks. Intellectually impaired teenagers will flock to the W.A.S.P. cause. Which, of course, is to provide W.A.S.P with sufficient capital to buy shopping malls.

Rock�s graying will continue unabated. Only a decade ago, an over-30 rock star was scarcely imaginableNow there are lots more oyer 30 than under it, and several over 40. And they aren�t all perennial favorites, either—in 1984, we began to see the emergence of the rookie recording artist in his or her mid-30s, as witness Lone Justice. Depending on which source you believe, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones will either turn 50 in 1986 or get sufficiently close to it to be able to count the little hairs in its nostrils. More and more male superstars will get balder and balder, with Phil Collins, Ronnie Dio, and Klaus Meine of the Scorpions leading the way, and Sting hot on their heels. Tina Turner, who�s only a couple of years younger than Bill Wyman, will win some more awards for �What�s Love Got to Do With It.� Bruce Springsteen will continue to ignore her telling every journalist who ventures to within shouting distance of her how much she wants to collaborate with him.

That a couple of 1986�s most appalling multiple murderers own the complete catalogues of Air Supply and Lionel Richie won�t even be mentioned. But just let some maniac who happens to own a couple of Iron Maiden cassettes perform a few ritual disembowelments and all anyone will hear about for the next month is how he or she got the idea from a particular album cut. Whose title the media will invariably get wrong.

Bruce Springsteen will finally end his Endless Tour and will release no recordings. To the infinite disappointment of hundreds of thousands, no one will have filmed several of his 1985 concerts for a feature film along the lines of the Heads� Stop Making Sense. But he will remain the standard against which all other rock �n� roll artists are judged, for he is the greatest ever.

For the first time in my five weeks in rock journalism, I�m not being sarcastic. On record, a lot of his music might leave you fairly cold, as it does me. But his concerts are everything rock �n� roll concerts ought to be—by turns thrilling, touching and hilarious, and no star of his stature has ever had nobler ideals, nor remained a tenth as close to them for a tenth as long. He makes you proud to love rock �n� roll, and as long as he�s around, it�ll be possible to hold one�s chin up even if there are 12 Motley Crue albums in the Top 10.