Not to sound like Rodney Bingenheimer’s song I Miss The '80s, but…
Earlier today a Duran Duran song popped up on my iPod, and I saw Patrick Nagel’s painting on the album cover. Coincidentally, I recently received a copy of Nagel: The Art of Patrick Nagel in the mail (because I couldn’t be bothered to look for the copy I bought ‘back in the day’). I have to say that I actually do miss the '80s.
Of course I was young then. I liked, and still like, Nagel’s paintings. I liked Duran Duran and other '80s bands. I liked the styles. OK, maybe not the big hair and the shoulder pads (except for Geena Davis in Beetlejuice), or the ‘mallwear’ of many films of that era, but the ‘dressier’ styles like… well, in the Nagel paintings. And Blade Runner. Back to the music, it seemed to have more energy than music does nowadays. Lots of great social and political commentary. (I know. But I’m not a fan of Rap. Sorry.) Nothing like a happy-sounding song about nuclear annihilation or a song about a mentally-ill person with the nuclear button!
And the neon. Remember neon decorations? And the stark/Industrial colour schemes? In my world, the '80s were ‘Neo-Noir’.
Overall, and the potential for nuclear war aside, the '80s seem in retrospect to have been an optimistic and forward-looking time. Or maybe it was just all of the coke…
Well, I didn’t do any coke, so that’s not it. I loved the 80s.
But Rodney! Gah!I thought we were talking about the good things in the 80s. Rodney on the ROQ was horrible. It was like letting your dopey kid brother tag along, except they actually gave him a radio show.
I thought I was happy with (what eventually became known as classic but was them AOR) rock, but 80s alternative (which was first known as “new wave” (not punk. totally different head. totally) but which eventually became “old fogey music”) was like manna from heaven. I didn’t know I’d been missing it, but when I found it, life was complete.
Big hair. Miami Vice. I want my MTV. Sigh. it’s all gone, now. Even classic VH1 is too young to remember those days.
Probably had more to do with you being young at that time, yah?
Of course, it didn’t hurt to be in LA, where you could hang out at KROQ in that brick building on Los Robles in Pasadena, or run into Rodney at Canter’s. Good times!
I actually got that reference. Now, I may have to pull my Square Pegs DVDs out, and watch the series again. Nice glimpse of the 80s. Thanks for reminding me about it.
For me the 80s will always be special because as previously mentioned I was young and attending college away from home for the first time. I started in 1984 and at that time coming off of the 84 Olympics and having the recession behind us (for those parents/students getting school loans - was happy for my 7% loan) it was a grand time to be alive.
I have never felt better physically and the experience of meeting all of those new hopeful young people left a good impression on me.
Of course we didn’t have the technology we have now for both good and bad.
I had to go out to the library to get access to my sources for papers and even …gasp … had to go to other colleges sometimes. Typing your papers on an old typewriter with whiteout kind of sucked too. But not having social media was a godsend. I did some stupid/goofy stuff that will probably never be remembered accurately by me or others who were there when it happened. But today every dumb/embarrassing thing you do can and will be preserved for life.
That would suck.
It wasn’t all great though as many of the women I went to school with can testify to the glass ceiling that existed then.
The 80s to me was like having a fantastic song that you initially kind of like stuck on a tape loop or repeat-ad-nauseum setting on a CD. It started out great, but by the end of the decade I was ready to claw my eyes out.
I was 15 when they began, 26 when they ended. It was, without a doubt, the worst decade of my life. I was probably clinically depressed over 90 percent of the time. I hated a lot of the music. Most of the girls\women I met wouldn’t give me the time of day. The only good thing about this decade is that it reminds me of how good I have it now, even though I’m having to watch my older son have a decade just as bad. Did I mention that I hated the eighties?
I was married for the first half of the eighties and that included some very happy times. Got divorced in '85. That hurt a lot but I got over it and the last years of the eighties were pretty great for me. I still like some of the women’s fashion from that era. Big hair can be done well and look great. Some of the music has stood the test of time. The cars sucked for the most part. I was driving an '85 Honda Prelude, one of the funnest cars I’ve owned. I was working full time plus and going to school part time and that was pretty cool for a while.
All in all, a good time for me.
The good:
Music
Kids movies were better and kids talked and acted more like real kids, whereas today all kids are portrayed as angels
Tech-80s kids really got to enjoy some cool tech as it was coming out. We were at that point where we had the freedom to play outside and get into all kinds of trouble without parental supervision from a young age, but could also stay inside and play video games if that’s what we wanted to do. Kids before the 80s had no choice(go outside or watch one of three channels that probably don’t have anything on that you like), and after the 90s kids also had no choice(you can’t go outside, there are strangers out there! Here, play Nintendo!)
The bad:
Crime.
Craziness- crackheads, nihilistic teenagers who committed random violent acts for no reason and laughed about it, an extreme obsession with being “cool”, which often involved doing things which were not cool at all.
Smoking was still ubiquitous. The 80s were the last decade where you just couldn’t escape cigarette smoke without just getting away from people entirely. People smoked in malls, grocery stores, restaurants, on planes, and more people smoked, about twice as many as do today.
Hair
Makeup
Old people-WWII veterans were in their 60s at the time and were fine people, but the generation that came before them, that grew up during the Roarings 20s, man those people were annoying and a pain in the ass. Complained about everything, hated everything kids liked and refused to learn anything new, ever. Today’s elderly have their issues, as all of us do when we get old, but you can at least get most of them to enjoy a smartphone or a tablet and at least most of them grew up on rock n’ roll.
I remember some really, really good quality acid in the '80s. It added some depth to an otherwise bland and desolate decade. It was the time that I discovered Iron Maiden (first seeing their first album cover while, yes, on acid) Brian Eno and that pile of rocks being dragged around by Nick Lowe. There were bright spots (Brazil, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, of course Blade Runner – of course on acid), but it seemed and still seems mostly featureless to me.
Interesting and speaks well of the 80s. Although the 80s didn’t really become the 80s right away. The 80s music scene actually lasted from about 1983-1992. Then alternative, hip hop, R&B, and country temporarily displaced pop and traditional rock in the culture.
For me it was the lost cultural decade. All the TV and trends described above exist only as stories or stuff I find on Netflix. I missed most of it.
I’ve stated here before that I started 1980 broke, evicted, and with a crummy part time night job. I ended the eighties as a one-percenter. In between was a decade of the most grueling work I’ve ever experienced. I missed almost all the culture of the time because I was working. For several years, I was so far out in the boonies there was no television, no radio, no phone, no contact at all other than mail for six months at a time. I spent one entire year working a 7 days per week 2nd shift and saw (literally) no prime time TV.
I’m surprised more people don’t remember this part of it. I got an up close and personal introduction to those violent subhumans that still affects me today.
It’s frick’n amazing the songs The Spirit of Radio and Freewill were recorded in 1979. They sound like they were recorded yesterday.
I was a teenager in the 80s and hated most of the music. While all my friends were into [del]shit like[/del] The Go-Go’s, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, I was into early Black Sabbath and The Mothers of Invention. I didn’t fit in, to say the least.
