So you listened to oldies. A friend put a damper on a party by taking over the turntable and playing a bunch of Black Sabbath instead of letting people hear the good stuff.
Yes, to each his own, of course 
It was much latter when I “discovered” a handful of 80s/90s bands I actually liked. These included Sonic Youth and Soul Asylum. But still, even to this day, 99% of the music I listen to was made before 1975 (when I turned 8 years old). I guess I’m an old stick-in-the-mud. 
A notable positive attribute of the 1980s were the films. They were made just before CGI became commonplace, hence lots of practical effects. And no one had their nose stuck in a cell phone.
Others have mentioned the negative aspects of the 80s. Yep, smoking was very common. Teenage drinking & hell-raising was common. It was the beginning of the crack epidemic. Teen pregnancy was a big problem. STDs and AIDS. Cars were junk and still unsafe. The Moral Majority was very influential, and right-wing religious types had infiltrated politics.
Was it “Rio” by Duran Duran?
It was not.
To be sure, there were some bad bands back then. But Oingo Boingo, Duran Duran, The Bangles, The Go-Gos, Wall Of Voodoo, The Dickies, and others were great.
I agree. Also, movies tended to have stories instead of simply being flash-bang comic books.
In the '80s I drove my hand-me-down '66 MGB, two concurrently-owned '77 MGBs, and a '77½ Porsche 924.
Kind of funny. I was thinking comparing the 70’s-80’s to today while driving into work. Like I’ve got a ‘phone’ on my hip that’s got a few hundred more times the memory and processing power than my first computer.
Yeah. My work was just that. Work. I sort of started on a career towards the late 80’s. But I miss calling a few friends, grabbing a case or two of beer and setting up a volley ball net in a local park.
Or dashing up to the mountains with a friend, a tent and supplies in my 4x truck for camping. Where to camp? Eh, we’ll just explore and find a spot. You don’t do that anymore.
Don’t mention Depeche Mode–you might summon him!
Same. I was discovering Jethro Tull and the Doors during this period.
Captain Chaos?
That’s the way it was with hotels/motels, too. You didn’t make reservations; when you arrived somewhere you simply went to the hotel/motel office and asked for a room.
Speaking of which, you had to know how to read a map in those days.
More random thoughts on the 80s:
Rock bands would play in really big stadiums, and you and all your friends would attend when they came to town. Communication was done by landline phones. (In the beginning of the film Rain Man you will see there are no desktop computers, and the sales people were communicating with Lamborghini buyers on the phone.) Everyone got the newspaper. Homes were getting Cable TV, and you could watch movies on Cinemax and HBO. Cutting coupons from the newspaper was commonplace. There was no Craig’s List, so things were bought and sold via “Trading Post” papers. When you went to a business meeting everyone handed out business cards. Malls were popular. Teachers used overhead projectors. Racquetball was popular. When your TV broke, you still called a “TV repairman” (though that era was close to being over). Malls (including strip malls) had video arcades. Kids built tree forts and collected beer cans. Too many people still didn’t wear seatbelts and drink/drove. Going to the movies was popular. People subscribed to paper magazines. Adults reminisced about the 1950s. You could afford a home, two cars, and small boat while working a factory job. Concealed carry laws were not a thing; no one carried a gun.
In the 80s (into the early 90s, actually) I had a Commodore 64 with - you guessed it - 64 kilobytes of memory. The CPU ran at about 1 MHz.
My phone has 32 gigabytes of memory, and a CPU running at 2.1 MHz. That’s almost half a million times more memory than my C64, running at 2100 times the speed. And it occupies about 1/100th the volume. And includes its own display (which is touch-sensitive) and camera, with resolution 16X what the C64 could handle. And multi-standard wireless communication. And GPS, and 3-axis rate gyros, and 3-axis accelerometers. And a light sensor. And a compass. And a barometer. And a magnetometer.
And they cost about the same.
I have no great love (anymore) of the fluffy corporate brand bands and will not defend them–but you will not lump Siouxsie in with them.
I don’t remember much about the 80s as a time period, although I was in and out of high school & college during that time. I was not a substance user, just really mentally ill and not a very good person, and I think I’ve blacked out most of my memories of that time as part of becoming better.
It was a blessed, simpler time before the 24 hour news cycle needed to be fed with endless blather, repeated over and over until something new happens. My TV still only had 12 channels. I watched about an hour of news a day. And while CNN started in 1980, it was mostly a straight news novelty. It didn’t take off really until the first Gulf War and had little competition. Newspapers were still a thing as were weekly news magazines, like Time and Newsweek. Now all news outlets have a slant, a flavor and even after you read several opposing sites you really don’t know if it is the actual story or just clickbait to gain eyeballs and get you enraged about trivial things you otherwise would not know.
Cars where mostly crap. Dodge even tried to resurrect the Challenger but it had it built by Mitsubishi as a small car. You never see one anymore, and I doubt that anyone has restored one. If you showed up today at a car show with a 1982 Dodge Challenger you wouldn’t get your ass kicked because no one would be able to stop laughing.
Since KROQ has come up a few times in this thread, it seems like a good place to mention they just launched a KROQ-HD2 station a few days ago which is all 80s all the time. They’ve even got Freddy Snakeskin as their DJ.
You can get it over the air (HD format) or on radio.com.
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There was incredible new music coming out, but access to the music and discovering it were near impossible if you didn’t live in a major market. I grew up in the small town burbs, finding anything like a Devo or Oingo Boingo album in the department store record/tape rack was near impossible. There were no such things as listening stations either. If you were lucky, Night Flight (if you had cable) would play a weird video that you’d be lucky to see, and even luckier to find stocked in podunk department record racks. It was an insufferable Top-40 wasteland for me for the most part, until a friend of mine moved into town from LA with a huge new wave / alternative tape collection copied from various harder-to-find sources.
Much of the 90s/00s were spent retroactively discovering the hidden gems of the 80s.
I was aged 13-22 during the decade, so these were my formative years. My teenage daughter was asking me about “my” music a while back. I told her the music she listens to now she will enjoy the rest of her life. Yes, still gravitate toward that 80’s music! I went thru high school and college, met my future wife, and moved-out of my parents’ home. For me it was a time of innocence and growth, but it was the 90s where I became me.
You should watch a movie from the late '60s called They Might Be Giants, wherein you will see people pushing a shopping cart through the grocery store with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. By the '80s, the majority of stores did not allow smoking inside, restaurants and airplanes were steadily reigning in their smoking sections, and cigarette machines were disappearing.
However, workplace rules were still mostly pretty lax until the '90s. I remember a 600-mile January work trip in a van full of people of whom it seemed like a quarter of them were smoking in their sleep. When we stopped for a rest area, I stepped out of the van and the cold fresh air felt like the equivalent of breathing a sweet, sweet ice cream cone.
Ah, the 80s. AKA “That decade I spent in college.”
Oh Man! I LOVED Coke!
New Coke, not so much…
Biggest upside to the '80s: W**-M*rt. We here had never even heard of them until the late '90s.
Thought of a few more:
Tattoos weren’t a thing for everyday folks.
Heavy metal music was huge in the 1980s. IIRC it started when Quiet Riot released Cum On Feel the Noize in 1983. Teen boys would grow their hair long and adopt a “heavy metal” lifestyle. Being 16 at the time, I also succumbed to it. I didn’t realize until much later that most of the 80s metal music was garbage; I now realize most of it was just formula, “4/4” stuff with little talent behind it. Heavy metal went into decline when Grunge became mainstream in the early 90s.
Parents, politicians, and religious groups thought the youth were “out of control.” Morals were “on the decline.” And dagnabbit something needs to be done about it!! The evil culprit? Rock music, of course!
As mentioned by others, cars sucked for the most part. I swear some of them started rusting while still in the showroom. Not only were they ugly and unreliable, but they didn’t have ABS or airbags. The emission controls in the engine compartment made them difficult to work on.