I remember Friday Night Videos. In my hometown MTV wasn’t available for several years but we had a show, which I believe was on USA network, called Nightflight. It too was an alternative to MTV. My friends and I used to sit around watching it into the wee hours of the morning.
The video that always comes to mind when I think of that era is Men Without Hats Safety Dance. You know, the guys dancing around at a rennaissance festival and the dwarf in the jester outfit.
It was all about the Violent Femmes. That and Bauhaus’ long version of Bela Lugosi’s Dead playing at deafening decibels while driving down the highway at midnight, alone. And I have to give kudos to U2 for Joshua Tree…Every song on it takes me back to a place or a girl.
I read most of the above with some fondness, but now I feel empty when trying to conjure up meaningful tidbits from my past. I went from 10 to 20 years old during the 80’s, from start to finish I was completely different. Every year was this capsule of time that I mostly wish never to repeat. Except for 1987, that’s when I met my first true friend. Of course I had friends before, but they seem superficial in retrospect. Starting in 1987 I made my true friends, and they are still part of my life to this day I am happy to say. My first one sits 10 feet from me now and is helping me build a business. 16 years and he’s still got my back.
Through most of the 80’s I seemed to coast through, missing the trends and staying on the edges. I listened to the radio mostly because I couldn’t afford the tapes or CD’s (when they came out- remember how they were supposed to be indestructible?), so I unfortunately associate bad music with many memories. I did the genre thing going from heavy metal to new wave to rockabilly (where I got my current moniker, 'natch) and punk, but was never committed enough to any one of them to move beyond wannabe in many eyes.
Hmmm…the 80’s are seeming more like a lost decade to me than anything else these days.
-Tomcat
I was born in 1974, and graduated high school in 1992. I had a set of pretty socially conservative parents who restricted my television viewing and to some degree my social life. I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV, but I do remember my sister and I begging our parents to let us watch 21 Jump Street (they let us). I wasn’t allowed to go out all hours of the night, either. Most weekends out with friends consisted of going to the movies–I saw a lot of movies–and sleeping over at people’s houses.
I remember those technological advances like the top-loading VCR, which my parents still had up until about 5 years ago. My father also had a primitive walkie-talkie size cell phone, which when coupled with the advent of call-waiting on our home phone opened up a whole new world of socializing. Before, when he’d get paged by the hospital or was on-call, we’d be basically banned from the phone. When we first got cable it was a big deal as well. Mom hated the MTV–still does–so I had to sneak it in little doses. The radio was a whole nother story. I listened to the radio a lot–mostly Top 40 and classic rock–and therefore have a pretty good handle on the pop music of the 80s. As soon as I started buying a lot of tapes (after taping the songs I liked on the radio–anyone else remember agonizing over when to lift your finger off the pause button to record something like Scritti Politti’s “Perfect Way”?) I went for things like Thompson Twins, Styx, The Cars, The Hooters, George Michael and Wham!, Journey, Motley Crue, Culture Club, The Smiths, U2 (still my favorite band), INXS, and soundtracks. Boy, did I love soundtracks. John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” still makes me feel funny inside.
I have an incredibly vivid memory of my sister and I doing a puzzle to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, flipping it over again and again and again as we fit little puzzle pieces together. I knew that album by heart.
I also remember succumbing to a series of vicious crushes, which is not so much a symptom of the 1980s but more of puberty and adolescence in general. I find it notable only because I haven’t had one of those in a while, and associate that dizzying nausea with the way I used to feel about a few people in high school and middle school over the years, and Rob Lowe, Michael Hutchence, Ryan Lambert (from The Monster Squad), Johnny Depp, and Eric Heiden (Olympic speed-skater–perhaps my first crush ever!).
I remember nuclear paranoia as well, and not really knowing what the hey was going on in the USSR. In a social studies class in I think 7th or 8th grade we wrote a letter to Gorbavchev asking him to get rid of nuclear weapons or something like that. I also remember the beginning of AIDS, as my father was a doctor specializing in chest diseases. He had a little tote bag he’d take to work when he was doing a procedure on someone with HIV; the bag had a change of clothes in it he’d wear during the procedure, then take off when it was over. When he’d come home, he’d leave the bag outside in the sun to presumably kill off anything on it. It sounds really primitive and phobic, but no one knew a lot back then about transmission, and I suppose he was just being careful.
I realize it sounds like I grew up in The Town That Couldn’t Dance from Footloose, but it really wasn’t that bad.
Born in 1972 here -
Late 80’s - rolling up the legs of your jeans and jeans that tapered at the ankle instead of flaring. Wearing two pairs of socks and folding the outside one over so they would both show (had to coordinate with your outfit precisely).
A topic I haven’t seen discussed yet is the difference in food marketing from then to now. Very few food items varied much - there were no 22 varieties of Doritos. Nacho cheese was about it. There was no “Ranch” flavored anything, except Hidden Valley Ranch packets to make your own dressing. There were no mango or kiwi flavored anything back then. I remember the Bubble gum flavored pop as the first thing flavored something other than cherry, orange, or grape. All my older relatives loved the Diet Fudge pop, I forget who made it. It seems to me that it might have been the early 90s when offering variety really started taking off.
Ya know chrisk72… I just stopped rolling my jeans that way about 2 years or so ago… and I used to do the socks too 
(At least I stopped that in college
Born in '66, graduated in '84. What I remember:
Bono from U2 making the front page of my local newspaper for spray painting a local landmark
Michael Douglas saying “Greed is good…”
Iran/Contra hearings
really great sex
block parties
nobody really thinking all that much apart from realizing that we were young, it wouldn’t last long, and make the most of it while you can.
Oh, yeah. And Journey’s “Escape” album.
addendum to the above:
an “album,” sometimes called “record” was a round vinyl disk played on a “record player,” at least until your stupid little brother left the blasted things out in the sun and they melted.
Phi Slamma Jamma
Hurricane Alicia
My football coach getting busted for pushing us speed.
“What Time Is It?! Time to just walk, shake my head. I’m cool til I’m dead. Enough has been said, come on baby let’s go to bed.”
Egyptian Lover.
“I meant to do that!”
My god Tanookie, your school sounds like something from a bad movie. Gun toting dealers, every second girl pregnant… Everyone having sex even in junior. I wouldn’t think most schools today are that 9ahem) progressive. I can see why you wanted to get out.
Now that you mention ‘If you played D&D they looked at you like you were some kind of satanist.’ It kind of brings back some funny memories. There was a 5 minute burst of hype about D&D being satanic and leading to suicides in the early 80s sometime. Got quit a bit of publicity. Turned out to be a complete beat up of course.
D&D was always looked at as less than entirely ‘normal’, but not necessarily uncool or evil, just odd. The “Fighting Fantasy” books were really huge for a while in 84 or 85 sometime and everyone (or at least everyone male) was playing them, but somehow we could never quite make the link between that and D&D where there was no book. That was just too strange for most of us.
Holy crap, how could I have forgotten Flashdance? My girl friends and I used to watch it just about every weekend on videotape - we all wanted to be Jennifer Beals, we all tried to dress like her, and I still want to live in a converted warehouse. (Any of this sound familiar, Maureen? Shirley Ujest? Any sweatshirts with the neckline cut realllllll wide hanging in your closet?)
I’m finding it really interesting to learn that kids growing up in the US were having all kinds of nuclear war fears, but us kids growing up in Canada really weren’t. Sure, we all knew about the threat, but it didn’t mean much to us.
okay…guilty.
Born 1967, graduated HS 1985, small town in Ohio. Some treasured memories:
The greatest Atari 2600 game of them all: Adventure
Electronic Games magazine
When I was 16, I went to a party whose occasion was the premiere of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video on MTV.
The 1983 Grammy awards seemed very gender-bending to us: Boy George, Annie Lennox in Elvis sideburns, La Cage Aux Folles. Wynton Marsalis won 2 awards, 1 for classical and 1 for jazz.
Best, most representative movie: Back to the Future
Runner-up: St. Elmo’s Fire
Clothing:
Pinstriped jeans
Izods with upturned collars
Brightly colored shoelaces on white sneakers (colors varied to match the outfit)
Jazz oxfords
Thanks to whoever mentioned Phi Slamma Jamma…I’d forgotten!
Music fondly remembered but maybe better forgotten:
Cum on Feel the Noize
I Want A New Drug
Down Under
Sister Christian AND You Can Still Rock in America!
That song from Flashdance (What a Feeling)
The entire St. Elmo’s Fire soundtrack
The entire Supertramp album Famous Last Words
Thanks for starting this thread! Love to my mostly long-lost crowd: Rich, Cindy, Shannon, Noel, Eric, Tom, Martha, Tammy, Jeffrey, Melissa M, Jennifer V, Awesome Rob, and more…
Some of my most vivid memories (I was born in 1974, bTW):
The Challenger explosion. In the years to come, we’d learn of the astonishing flark-ups and boneheaded decisions that led to these seven fine people virtually rushed to their deaths. At the time, though, all I knew was that good people were dead, our space program had just been dealt a crippling blow, and we’d be feeling the effects for years.
Going to four separate schools, running into the most vile, repulsive, sickening, disgusting, inhuman sociopaths I’ve met in my life. Seeking justice. And learning that teachers aren’t paid enough to give a crap, principals are too swamped with their own problems to help students, the counselors are frikkin’ worthless bums, and the printed codes of behavior are just meaningless bluster.
Beat It, the Michael Jackson megahit. Taught me the true secret to a blockbuster pop song…invent a catchy, easily remembered phrase and repeat it about 200 times.
Anti-drug propaganda. Hoo boy. One of my schools practically wallowed in it. And they didn’t even teach much other than drugs were dangerous and you shouldn’t use them. The great unanswered question from this was, why did they even bother, since none of us are ever going to have ACCESS to anything that good anyway?
Getting psychotherapy. This being before it was turned into a cheap sitcom joke. Didn’t really help, BTW.
A “game room” in nearly every shopping center. Which ran on quarters, of course. And two quarters a game was a ripoff.
A screaming, whining, bellowing, grandstanding, smoke-blowing jerk turning into the #1 star of American professional tennis. Setting the stage for a plethora of pathetic imitators.
Begging my dad for an NES, anticipating it for weeks, and being unbelievably thrilled when I finally got to play the two games that came with the system.
The demise of Castle Park, a breathtaking entertainment complex that was a nonstop fun ride every time I went. (There’s never been anything like it in Hawaii since. 
)
Bill Elliott, the INVINCIBLE GOD of stock car racing. If he didn’t win by at least 20 lengths, he must’ve been drugged.
The approximately 500,000 unbelievably lame Taekwondo jokes during and after the '88 Olympics.
Watching Moonlighting, never being able to understand what was funny about it about 95% of the time, and actually forcing myself to laugh because I was just so bored. (I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my first actual taste of “adult humor”. Bleah, blech, yuck.)
Our family getting its first ever computer, a PCjr. Me thinking that computers were the coolest thing ever. And spending untold hours on it…
Well, I guess some things never change.
Hey, I’m from Canada. In the 80’s there were huge “End the Arms Race” marches in Vancouver… which is saying something considering we’re a generally apathetic and sheltered city.
Well, in this as in all things, I guess your mileage varied. Growing up in Saskatchewan in the 80’s, the people I knew just weren’t that worried about nuclear war. There were other outrages to protest (Crow Rate and NEP, anyone?)
I had teenagers in the '80s. Does that count?
One of the greatest things about being a teenager and college student in the 1980’s was that the drinking age at the time was only 18!!
Experimental music in the mainstream.
Fashion so outlandish (and actually interesting for the most part) priced and marketed at mid-level comsumers
Saturday morning cartoons that weren’t just extended commercials
The “Hair height rating system”. One of my friends had a system to predict the sluttiness of girls: The higher the hair, the bigger the hole. It worked.
Armani replacing Brooks Brothers as the de rigeur label
All my friends still being alive.