I actually do not remember the Satanic Panic, though I’ve learned since my adulthood that some of the cartoons I watched then were warned against. The eighties were my childhood, not my teens. For me, some of the fashions and music of the late '80s evoke fondness. For me they sort of bleed into the early '90s, though, rather than being a distinct era (where we had to start wearing seatbelts and couldn’t ride in the back of the pickup on short drives). Simply don’t remember the earlier '80s enough.
1981 through '84 were good years for King Crimson fans.
Fashion-wise, I equate the early-'90s with neon fabrics.
The 80s in America was when the hopefulness of the 60s and early 70s was definitively erased.
Once Crest of a Knave won the grammy for hard rock, the heavy metal acts realized they actually had to do art, which was more than most of them could cope with. Somewhere I heard Audioslave described as heavy metal, and I thought, what the hell has happened to the genre, is there any of it left?
I have long thought that these safety features have made drivers worse, since they can skate the edge of being in control with less concern about death or maiming. When I am out on my bike, I often feel as though they should outlaw airbags, seatbelts and windshields, just to make drivers calm down a bit. And these days, an airbag just going off can result in a car a few years old being declared a total.
I have to say that I’ve been repeatedly surprised by how tame my nephew and niece are, relative to the way that even the nerdy crowd was when I was in high school (1987-1991).
Honestly though, other than the normal childhood stuff, I remember the Cold War being a HUGE thing- it seemed to be the only foreign policy concern, and it seemed to be the biggest single political issue as well. If it didn’t dominate the nightly news and newspapers, it (or things surrounding it) were easily in the top 5 topics.
And along with it, the sort of low-grade background hum of knowing that we were all 30 minutes from nuclear destruction at any moment. About the only thing I can think of in recent years that’s similar is that post 9/11 terrorism paranoia that we had for about 5-6 years or so.
In a way I appreciated the terrorism paranoia because it felt so much like the cold war times. It really drove home to me the belief there never really was much of a threat, but it behooved the governments of the USA & USSR to make their populations believe there was. In turn I became far less wary of terrorism than of people who told me I needed to be wary of terrorism. “We got fooled again”
In the town I went to college in, we didn’t have MTV (some people just don’t get it) so we had to scrounge what we could. Night Tracks, Radio 1990, obscure local video programs. Sometimes you could find some real gems.
Some radio stations would have “new wave hours” or similar where the DJs would play the stuff that otherwise never got played. If you were around during that time. Many college radio stations would play new wave, except for ours. Ours dreamed of being a “real” station. They even had a programmed format.
And then I moved to LA! KROQ! and later, 91X (if you could pick it up). The golden age. (Except for Sunday nights. 
)
Prog in general kinda filled a gap between classic rock and hair metal. Prog was big in the 70s, but I think it hit its peak of popularity in the years just before hair metal took over. Yes had their biggest album in 1982 and Rush had some of their most well known work. Phil Collins was taking Genesis in a less proggy, but not yet fully 80s direction yet.
Only for a specific group of people. For most of the country it was when hope was restored. American confidence soared during the 80s and 90s after being crushed by Vietnam and the failure of detente.
Given how much to shit our morals and good sense had gone during that time it’s hard to blame Christians for losing their minds. Things actually were getting worse and worse and it wasn’t just abstract concerns about Biblical morals. People’s lives were actually being destroyed all over by poor decisions. What confuses me is why they are so active today, when things are so much better on almost every front. Less drug use, less teen pregnancy, less violence even the divorce rate is down! so of course gayness is the big threat to our world now.
Wasn’t that what dressing all in black and listening to The Cure all day was for back then?
There is massive income disparity drive by the greed of global megacorporations. We are inundated with intrusive technology and information overload. Terrorism is a constant threat. We are in a perpetual state of war utilizing autonomous robots. We have militarized our police. Donald Trump is our President.
As far as I can tell, we are basically living in 80s dystopian view of the future.
When reagan died, a local newspaper commemorated him with a cartoon showing him standing in a pile of rubble, then printed a correction to show the whole cartoon in which he was standing at the fresh gap in the Berlin Wall. Given the current state of the US, as precipitated by many of his policies, which version of the cartoon is more appropriate may be debatable.
I remember that movie!
Is it Idiocracy, or Robocop?
Freejack, I think.
ETA: Or Brazil
I suspect that a very large part of it is because the fundamentalist crowd that was having some kind of moral panic about all that stuff wasn’t actually experiencing it themselves back then- they were hearing about it on the news. So as soon as some other moral-related issue became news, they jumped on condemning it- gayness is a big one- since a little before the turn of the century it sort of jumped into the public consciousness with shows like “Will and Grace” and then not too much later, the whole gay marriage issue started showing up in state legislatures, with the whole thing culminating at the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges.
I suspect that in not too much longer, as gay people on TV and in the media ceases to be the least bit remarkable, their moral panic will subside as well. That’s not to say they’ll be pro-gay, but it won’t be on their radar, so to speak. They’ll just grumble about it like they do all the other stuff from decades past- premarital sex, teen pregnancy, divorce, etc… but it won’t be their focus.
I predict it’ll be something to do with the internet / social media or something along those lines next.
I mostly listened to what is.now called classic rock, plus a good dose of blues.