Let’s take say the years 1975, and 1982 in isolation and view:
-The music that was popular (on the radio and in the clubs)
-The fashion (clothes, hair) for both men and women
-The social vibe (Were there remnants of the Hippie era in 1975? In 1982)
I don’t want it to get into politics or economics. I just wanna hear from people who experienced both years.
Let’s say the year was 1975 right now, and someone allowed you to time travel to say, October 1982. What differences would that person notice?
I ask because 1982 seems to exist in that fuzzy area of time before the 70s truly "ended " and the 80s became “THE 80S” (Miami Vice, Temple of Doom, etc) that we remember.
Fashion - lots of stripes, plaids, no running shoes, sansbelt slacks. Look at old shows like Kojak, or Match Game
Music: Disco was starting to take over, but what came to be know as “classic rock” was in full swing. The Beatles were gone, but the Stones, Zep, BOC Heart were all at their prime.
Social: I was in grade school
1982:
Fashion. Miami Vice, huge shoulder pads, pastels, Big Hair, Nagel prints everywhere
Music: a lot of the what would become classic rock bands were losing their status. heart had a big hair album, John Bonham died, Queen was making dance and pop albums, Phil Collins was taking over the medium. New Wave was king. Alternative was beginning to take off.
Social: free swinging party life, “everybody” was doing coke
I’m too young to remember, but 1982 was the year Michael Jackson’s album Thriller was released, which I suspect must have been a pretty big part of the music scene at the time.
1975 was the year my parents got married. In their wedding photo my dad was wearing plaid pants and a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Yeah that’s right, plaid pants. (It was not a very formal ceremony).
Miami Vice didn’t come out til September 84 though. That’s why I’m askin’ about 82, really I’m asking about 80-82. Because before 1983, 1984 there’s an era of the 80s as wildly different from what pop culture remembers as the 80s that’s as forgotten as the pre-Beatles 60s are.
We have a wedding photo from 72. All the guys are wearing powder blue tuxes with frill front shirts except for my grandpa, whose wearing a traditional black and white tux (albeit with a fashionably large bow tie). Every guy in the photo has sideburns either halfway down or at the bottom of their earlobe. My mom’s boyfriend has mutton chops, but he’s wearing a brown suit with flares.
'75 had, for guys, platform shoes and huge bell bottoms. Wide ties and lapels were in. By '82, bell bottoms and flares were waning fast, athletic shoes were everyday fare, and ties were skinny.
1975 to 1982 involved me going from age 4 to age 11 so my view may be a bit skewed, but 1982 was near the height of the golden age of the video game. Video arcades were a thing, both the Atari 2600 and the movie Tron came out that year. Back in 1975 video games were just barely getting started.
I was in high school from ~1980-1983, It was (as can be expected) IIRC somewhat of a smooth transition from the late 1970s till the early 1980s fashion and life style wise. 'Course, we all kind of wore t-shirts & jeans (or equivalent) in high school as regular wear (no sports jacketed teens like in later John Hughes movies). Many girls still had knock-offs of Farrah Fawcett or Dorothy Hamill hair styles (or the most common, long straight hair), the big perm/poofy hairstyles for ladies would come later in the mid-late 1980s on Long Island. Guys…year, we mostly had blah hair on the moderate/longish size, making for cringly pictures decades later). Club scene (such as the teen scene at the time was - hey, 18 year olds could legally drink) featured Disco, other dance music, and maybe some of the early 1970s stuff as well. Being more Rock minded, beyond the usual corporate Rock favorites of the 1970s we were hearing some ‘new’ bands like REM, the Police, and U2 (new to us - they had been out for years by then). Many autos where still boxy and square/angular.
Actually, to think of it, in general the view of average 1978 life would be similar to 1981… Oh, except Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980 (and Margaret Thatcher a year earlier), so we wondered if that would change things much…
I think a major change in that period was the rise of the blockbuster movie. Jaws was released in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977 and they changed the way studios made movies.
Back in 1975 a movie would have been considered a huge hit if it had a $100,000,000 gross. Nowadays, a fairly average movie can have a $100,000,000 budget.
One thing that people overlook is that a lot of trends were much more local, and things took longer to spread from big cities to smaller towns. If you went to a smaller town, you might well find that all of the clubs were populated by people in more of a ‘cowboy’ style and listening to country music instead of anything you’d associate strongly with the 70s or 80s. Also a lot of the more androgynous fashion that really took off in the 80s was something you’d see way more of on MTV than on people outside of big city clubs (and I think that was more late 80s than '82).
Also while rich people would redecorate fairly often, lower middle class and poorer people were not going to be on top of trends. A lot of the earth tones, oranges, wood, and shag carpet that you’d see in magazines from the 1970s weren’t ripped out in the 80s for the trends of fancier looks or lighter colors. Growing up in the 80s, I remember a lot of friends houses that looked like what you’d distinctly consider ‘70s’ because parents weren’t going to spend a lot of money to renovate for a trend, especially if you were hanging out in a basement or attic room instead of the main living room.
In Britain, 1982 was very post-punk (and I think post-punk was much, much bigger than punk ever was). Everything was black and shiny, or black and colourful like the computer games of the time. You also had acts and fashions that were just colourful, like the Culture Club, but they were nothing like anything from before punk. It was the start of the time when you absolutely had to wear drainpipe trousers with white socks. You were also absolutely barred from having sideburns, until the baggy movement restored flares and sideburns in 1987-8.
That is exactly right. There is no solid early 80s style, it was the end of the transition era that was quite noticeable at the end of the 70s. But disco died quickly and MTV popped up and changed everything. There really wasn’t just one style of music anymore, classic rock, new wave, techno, all sorts of alternatives were available, and the media was changing also as CD-ROMs showed up. People were starting to dress more conservatively in some ways because polyester and vivid colors were always a little goofy looking, but people were also dressing more creatively, though mainly women I think. It was all over the place though, difficult to pick out anything particularly iconic in the popular personal culture. Even the movies had taken their cues from 70s successes and failures at that time.
With popular music, I think that there was a major turning-of-the-page with punk and post-punk. Punk was basically the very edge of the page (where you could get a paper cut ) and post punk, new wave, MTV fare, etc. were the entire surface area of the page after it was flipped.
Might be taking a metaphor too far, but there you go
I’ve got most of my mp3 collection on my phone and found that I had a little over 2,000 songs that have never been played on it, so the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing the unplayed songs in the order of the year of release.
It was interesting to hear how popular music evolved over time, and I’d say that (at least music-wise), what people consider the definitive 80’s sound is from a relatively short window; I’d say about '86-'88. In '75 you have disco evolving out of funk/R&B before suddenly disappearing in '79. From 80-82 you get new wave really taking off and influencing mainstream pop.
Good call. Video games, both in the home and out in arcades, were a huge social phenomenon.
I’m about Buck Godot’s age. Maybe if I were several years older like SirRay, I’d have a different impression from the one I’m about to share.
From the point of view of elementary-school me, it seemed like the door was shut on the 1970s rather suddenly. Academically, that can’t be true – people didn’t just throw their clothes out en masse, loads of 70s TV shows kept chugging along into the 80s, cars stayed pretty similar, and so on.
But impressionistically, to a kid:
[ul]
[li]Disco and disco-tinged pop/rock just vanished. Even comparing albums from the same artist … Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall was a totally different flavor from Thriller and well reflected the times even though they were released a mere three years apart.[/li][li]Colorful jeans (remember Toughskins?) for kids gave way universally to good ol’ blue Levi’s and to more chic designer brands (e.g. Jordache).[/li][li]Clothes stopped fitting skin tight! I don’t mean adult clothes meant to get adult attention – see the boys shirt in that link. I had a ton of uncomfortable shirts that fit like that … but us kids were used to it at the time.[/li][li]The aforementioned Video Game Invasion.[/li][li]Toys improved exponentially – the 1977-78 Star Wars stuff was really the raw prototypes of the glut of cool stuff that was to come with The Empire Strikes Back, the G.I. Joe reboot, Masters of the Universe, etc. I was less hip to the girls’ stuff, but I do know that Cabbage Patch Kids were around the corner.[/li][/ul]
I remember in spring 1982, one of my teachers put up a caricature poster titled ‘The 70s’ on her wall. I think it came in Dynamite magazine or something similar. Kind of a “Where’s Waldo” piece of work, it featured a crowd of caricatures of a whole slew of prior-decade icons: John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, the Osmonds, Reggie Jackson, the Welcome Back Cotter crew, and so on.
I used to look at that poster and feel some kind of weird “kid nostalgia” for stuff from 3-5 years prior! At the same time, it seemed like a glimpse into a completely alien era – those way-back 1970s
To me 1975 was about the end of the hippy era where you could be lower income and basically feel good about it. By 1982 and the whole “me” thing even being counter-culture took a fair amount of cash.
Sure, but the value of a dollar hasn’t remained constant. A hundred-million dollar movie gross today is the equivalent of a 25-30 million dollar gross in 1975.
I’d think the ratio of budget to gross would be the telling statistic…
As I’ve already suggested with regard to socks, 1982 was the second part of the Two Tone ska era in Britain - Madness were massive. But Adam and the Ants had been even bigger in 1980-1; they broke up in early 1982. The New Romantics, like Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran, went from being hip post-punkers to massively commercial pop stars around this time.
My dad joined the Army in September 1976 and was sent immediately down to Colorado, from NYC. Back home, Disco was everywhere and long hair was on its way out except for hardcore rockers. In Colorado my dad was amazed to see all these long haired, pot smoking Hippie type kids who had really little idea or only the vaguest idea of what Disco was - it was like they were still in 1972 or 1973.
) and post punk, new wave, MTV fare, etc. were the entire surface area of the page after it was flipped.
