The SEVENTIES??? Jesus Christ on a pimped-up Harley, WHY??? The seventies sucked ass in every way imaginable…Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate, Carter, the Oil Crisis, the Hostage Crisis, horrible clothes, horrible hair, horrible music…
The Seventies I lived in didn’t suck too horribly, until the decade began to run out. The Eighties, though, I wish I had brain bleach for that decade. My Les Paul Custom and Rickenbacker bass were stolen, parts of my record collection numbering in the thousands were stolen FIVE times. I spent some of that decade homeless. That’s just me, but I had a rotten time in the '80s and if I could do it again, I’d skip those years entirely.
Vietnam - a war we finally saw the end of.
Nixon - see above 
Wonderful music…at least for the first part of the decade. The second half was just “Intro. to the 80s,” as as such sucked hard-core. The 80s had nothing to contribute to society.
Besides…in the 70s, I was young!
Anyway, there were some good things about the eighties (and I don’t think it’s just because I graduated high school in 1985). Music was fun and poppy and it felt refreshing after the slodginess of the seventies.
IIRC, we were actually in the middle of a big 50’s revival in the eighties and many of the fashions reflected that. Pointy toed shoes (yay!), pencil skirts, skinny legged jeans, converse all-stars, cinolines, etc. All those things are coming back in now.
Is this a typo? I definitely remember this as beginning in the eighties.
Actually, I seem to recall it being widespread among yuppies, and business men.
However, the feeling begain to spread to 20-somethings in the 90s. “I must have every cd, every new kind of sports equipment, and indulge in every extreme sport in existance.”
Thanks for the thought, tremorviolet, but those are $35, and $45. Not inexpensive. As I recall, when I was a child, it was pratically impossible to get a pair of jeans that didn’t look straight-legged.
OH, and while I recall oddness, and futurism being mixed into fashons, but yoou are right, skinny ties and suits were around at the time, but I attribute it to the “upper class looking ska fans” vs. “working class looking, undershirt wearing (violent sounding) ska fans” of england.
Alex Keaton. Man, I’d recognise him anywhere.
I finished school in 88 and finished my undergrad degree in 92. I was still very active in the club scene until I was into my late 20s and am still an occasional though rapidly getting less involved. I guess that puts me in a pretty good position to judge both the 80s and 90s since I was ‘young’ during both decades and heavily into fashion, music and so on so could have been considered at least marginally cool during both decades.
My opinion? The 80s were pretty good but they weren’t the epitome of human existence by a long shot.
The good points of the 80’s? Well the OP got it right music wise. 80s music was generally more ‘listenable’. The pop was poppier without the total dominance of pre-fabricated plastic boy-bands and teen-queens of 90s pop. I’m not saying the 80s didn’t have plenty of pre-fab pop acts, but they also had mature pop artists. Acts over the age of 26 who had genuinely risen from obscurity, albeit usually with the help of record labels. Typified I guess by Michael Jackson or The Bangles or Belinda Carlisle, these acts weren’t out to change the world or anything, they just produced light pop music that wasn’t simply manufactured pap. Commercial for sure but not simply mass-produced muzak. I guess what I’m saying is that someone in their 20s could have actually listened to light pop music in the 80s without feeling slightly like a paedophile and greatly like a cretin. In the 90s that was damn hard.
80s non-pop also tended to be more listenable IMO. I’m using a pretty broad definition of non-pop here but it basically includes any act that isn’t primarily a zillion themes on ‘Oh baby I love you’. An 80s act like Genesis or The Police could be listened to casually on a Saturday afternoon or while driving without being simply muzak. In contrast the very introspective and personal style of 90s acts like Smashing Pumpkins or even Pearl Jam make sit hard to listen to most of them without either getting solely into the beat or becoming somewhat depressed. That to me makes them far less listenable. Not worse music necessarily but far less listenable music.
80s popular non-pop was generally more ‘relevant’ and less self- obsessed and whiny than 90s stuff. I’ve always found this kind of jarring with the image of the 80s as the ‘greed is good’ decade. 80s non-pop acts like the Police, Dire Straits, U2 or Springsteen managed to do non- love-songs on topics that weren’t entirely self-obsessed, introspective whining and even had genuine social relevance. And of course there was the whole Band-Aid thing going on. You could get a very good impression of the social issues, politics, society etc of the 80s by listening to popular 80s music. In comparison most popular non-pop of the 90s tended to be very much self-obsessed with little reflection of the broader world outside or what was happening. In that respect 90s music was very shallow.
The 80s was also more musically eclectic than the 90s. Yeah, I know that there have always been and always will be minor labels etc that produce a broad range of musical styles etc, but in terms of the mainstream and what is in the Top 40 the 80s exposed far more people, especially young people, to a wider variety. You could be ‘hip’ and still play and be regularly exposed to a greater breadth of music in the 80s. There were of course the endemic 80s styles like PUNK, New Wave, Hair Metal etc but the 80s also saw the popular revival of a bunch of decades old acts like Cher, Roy Orbison, Tom Jones and Rod Stewart as well as numerous top 40 team ups with acts like Tammy Wynette or Dusty Springfield . It’s hard to imagine any act from the 70s seriously making it into the top 40 in the 90s.
On the downside the 80s produced a lot of fluff. An awful lot of style-over-substance dreck that can be largely blamed on the rise of the music video. Perhaps not as pretentious as the 90s counterparts but worse simply because it had so little effort put into the music. A flashy video was considered enough. Much 80s music was not so much bad as simply banal. It was, if not muzak, then certainly aural wallpaper. The trend got worse as the decade progressed and in the Commonwealth countries where I spent my later university years the decade culminated with the rise of the Stock Aitken and Waterman sausage factory that churned out banal acts and music on a production-line basis. This is a big strike against the 80s musically.
After the end of punk early in the decade the 80s also largely killed rock as a popular genre and replaced it with hair bands that I cringe at calling rock. As a child of the 80s I really never we what rock was. The 90s saw a revival of what I consider to be real rock as a popular music form.
The 80s also saw the rise of Rap, and IMO rap is barely worthy of the title of music. That alone is a massive strike against the 80s.
So musically the 80s was alright. There was more breadth of popular music of all types making it easier to pick and choose than was the case in the 90s. There was also far less pessimistic or introspective whining. A person could more readily find popular music in the 80s that fit on with any mood. On the downside the amount of mush was far higher and the availability of non-popular stuff was far harder outside the major cities.
You may be right for USA, I was in UK at the time and the Yuppie get ritch quick mentality didn’t really catch on until the nineties there though I guess its origins must have been in the late eighties. Or maybe I just didn’t really notice because I was in School and College throughout the Eighties.
Likewise, this dismissal of the most innovative music form of the last 20 years is a massive strike against taking your opinions seriously.
Pshhhh. Public Enemy, De La Soul and Run-DMC weren’t music? Rakim could move a crowd, son. MC Lyte could rock a party. Whachoo got?
Sorry, but there is nothing innovative about rap. It is, for the most part, nothing but crap.
Ooo. He rhymed “Crap” with “rap”. MAN. That’s never been done before. Whoooo-wheeee — I am silenced by your keeness of your laserlike wit and wordplay. Man, you sho’ dissed me. I’m gonna toss my Common and Outkast and go get me a tie dye T-shirt and listen to some Bee Gees.
Rikwriter./ ** You ill rhyme biter./ Grew a pair / like I care/ You’re no kinda fighter./ Well, your lyrical flow/ Needs skill to grow/ Uniquely weak / so un-chic / so freaked and bleak/ it clearly reeks./ Step up to the keyboard if you desire to speak./ STOP./ NO. Step away. / No time today/ Askia’**s here to school you in a brand new way. / HEY!
Okay. That’s not innovative. But that’s my point – rapping is incredibly hard to do well. The innovation is in the skills and technique, not the content.
And “Crap” is just a flaky opinion on content, which I’m not here to defend or debate. The techniques in rap are innovative – rap as a spoken freestyle music form is most certainly innovative by any measure – a mix of vocalizations, singing, spoken word performance, freeflow poetry, stylized call and response and in the old days battling – all set to a combination of electronic music, loops, hooks, beats, live bands, turntabling or even a capella and made to harmoniously rhyme. It started in New York and took over the globe, B. It’s a hip-hop world, baby. Bleee dat.
“Crap”. Yeah, that’s real cute.
In magazine articles and news magazine type TV shows (USA), the 80s have long been referred to as the Me Decade. I seem to recall it being called that even near the beginning of the decade itself. Reganomics, trickle down theory, fight inflation with taxation, etc… all contributed to that mentality, imo.
Nothing cute about it. I just didn’t feel like saying “shit” at the time. If you like, I can restate it: Rap is, for the most part, nothing but utter shit. Better for you now, old man?
Fortunately, Rik, that’s the kind of kneejerk defensiveness to an astonishingly ignorant opinion I’d expect from a kid of your limited experiences: “Rap is shitty crap 'cuz I say so!” Good thing I’m easily amused, eh, grasshopper?
I hate it when Mommy and Daddy fight… 
There, there. It’s all cool, baby. RikMommy just likes to talk that yang and AskiaDaddy had to lay a smackdown a lil’ bit.
I thought the 70s was the “Me” decade and the 80s was the era of Greed…?
Well, pointedly ignoring your earlier insults.
I always found it interesting that the 80’s is labelled the decade of greed and self-advancement. It’s interesting because so much of what defined the 80s was so altruistic.
The big issues of the 80s were AIDS, nuclear disarmament, apartheid, Ethiopian famine relief, the ‘War on Drugs’, the economic effects of globalisation and homelessness. There were certainly plenty of other stories that dominated news in the decade but in terms of issues that dominated the op-ed pages of newspapers and the issues that mobilised public action those were the issues that defined the decade. Now AIDS was primarily an issue of enlightened self-interest at best and not really altruistic. However the rest of those issues and certainly the social actions they engendered were altruistic. Even the massive campaigns for nuclear disarmament were in large part prompted by altruism as much as self-interest.
Compare that to the 90s or the new millennium. The genuinely public issues that have existed have been primarily self-interest issues. There’s been much made of global warming for example but the issue has been more divisive than anything else and the motivations behind any support either way has been driven as much by self- interest as anything. While at the same time the world ignored genocide in Rwanda or the Balkans.
That is seen equally well reflected in the popular culture of the times. 80s popular music had a liberal sprinkling headline acts that were more than willing to publicise their political views in palatable ways. Springsteen or U2 or Genesis were making genuinely meaningful music on meaningful social issues and people were listening to it for that reason. Similarly movies and TV were more than willing to focus on those issues. Even ‘light’ entertainment like the ‘Lethal Weapon’ movies or ‘Miami Vice’ had social issues interwoven into them because that’s what the audience wanted. In contrast the music and entertainment since the 80s has been primarily self-obsessed and introspective. That’s not to say that their haven’t been musical acts or movies or that have had the same social relevance but they haven’t been genuinely popular.
All that seems to contradict the idea that the 80s was the decade of greed and self-advancement.
IMO that idea was a product of the misconceptions of the original baby boomers who were leaving their glory days behind in the 80s and us Gen Xers who left school and university straight into a severe recession. The world was changing in the eighties. Prosperity was such that people could be ‘greedy’ in the sense of wanting more than they needed to simply live comfortably and they could do so with a clear conscience. Money was no longer so tight that it was wasteful to spend big money on clothes and cars. And that very prosperity gave people more time and energy to devote to wider social issues. That was very hard for the early baby boomers who had grown up in the 60s and 70s to understand. It was even harder for us early Gen Xers to understand because we moved into a world where things were so incredibly tight financially. For those without an economics background it seemed somehow that the 80s had been unsustainable and the behaviour was being punished. In hindsight of course it was perfectly acceptable behaviour for good economic times. The 80s wasn’t particularly greedy or self-centered. It was a decade characterised by a desire for material gain for sure, but that’s not the same as greed, that simply ambition. And while people were ambitious they were also in many ways far more socially aware and active than the generations of the 70s or the generations since.
It always seems odd that a decade that had Live Aid as the defining pop-cultural event was also the decade that has been characterised as greedy and self-obsessed. That’s so incongruous.
That may be it. Flared pants, hippy-type string vests, Bruce Springsteen-style T-shirts and gansta-style clothes have all been worn in movies by teenagers, in films. However, you aren’t going to see a suit and tie teenager in a film anytime soon, used to show an era.
Rik: "This looks like a good thread…
For me to poop on!