I don’t know how easily you’re amused, but you certainly resort to insults easily. Which makes me doubt your assertion that you were young in the 70s. You sound fairly young right now.
You will quite often see a suit and tie teenager in a film used to show an ear. That era was the mid sixties and it is typified by the Mod style popularised by The Beatles. That essentially meant suit and tie for young men.
In fact the Mod era was in fact the only era that could be accurately characterised by a suit and tie teenager. That was the only period in the twentieth century when the typical, working class teenager would have actually worn a suit and tie as normal fashion, just to hang out as it were.
No teenagers I ever knew in the 80s ever actually wore suits and ties as part of normal attire or even much when getting dressed up to go out. Suits and tie was really the uniform for the yuppies in the 80s, and yuppies were people in there mid twenties to mid thirties, characterised by the TV series “Thirtysomething”. Sure some yuppies would have been early twenties and by the early 90s this was probably ore common. But never in the 80s was it considered cool for a teenager to wear a suit and tie just to hang out.
Going out to clubs or bars those of us in our late teens would often wear ties and sports coats or more often just vests, but never suits. Maybe in some clubs in some big cities in the US you would have found teens getting dressed up in suits and ties but I can’t recall ever seeing it even in movies. It just wasn’t ever a teen look. The Don Johnson look was pretty cool for a while but that was sports coat and often (eccch) jeans with ties but not suits.
I have to admit that I’ve never seen a teenager in a suit used to portray the 80s. If it does happen then it’s a terribly inaccurate stereotype. While large numbers of 50s teens really did dress like John Travolta in ‘Grease’ and large numbers of 60s teens really did dress Mod and large numbers of 70s teens really did dress hippy that’s not true of 80s teens and suits and ties. Even the infamous Alex Keaton only wore his suit when he went to work or college and even then it was menat to be humorous. Suit and tie wasn’t his ‘normal’ wear and mostly his Alex wore clothes more similar to that portrayed by Fox’s “Back to the Future” character.
Blake and RikWriter.
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I’d like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for my responses to your statements: (I paraphrase somewhat) “Rap is barely worthy of the title of music,” and “There is nothing innovative about rap… rap is crap… or is calling it shit better, old man?” Especially when I just got through talking muuuuuuuUUuuch shit about the current state of rap in another thread on the GD forum, like, six days ago. I suppose it’s a little like if someone else calls your kid a stupid idiot: even when you know it’s true, it’s hard to hear it without bristling.
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Blake, I didn’t insult you. I came back with a snappy rejoinder because I was so disappointed with your narrowminded views – especially when I was around as a kid in the seventies and eighties for much of rap’s growth as an artform and East Coast hip-hop culture in general. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean other people don’t love it passionately as being one of the best things about their teenage years. I have trouble talking anyone seriously after a statement like that. Thought you should know, because you otherwise make lucid statements I agree with.
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RikWriter. Many, many, many are the times on this board when I’ve ignored posters who make the cliched “rap is crap” comments without challenging this view, because, unlike Cecil Adams, I don’t get paid for battling this level of ignorance. I don’t mean the kind of ignore where I type, “I’m ignoring your insults” – I mean I don’t respond at all. Unfortunately, not speaking up tends to embolden you “I hate rap” types. It’s okay by me if you don’t like rap --I don’t care for heavy metal and I don’t play Ludacris around my parents – it’s just that [mean-spirited racial observation alert] a bunch of you white boys around here tend to make some ignit-ass comments to justify your dislike of rap, like dismissing rap’s innovativeness. Rik exacerbated that by calling me old. Son – that’s damn near guaranteed to trigger my “streetdaddy” internet battle persona, where I start calling you “son” and start typing in full-on “Fuck Rick James – I’m Askia, bitch!” mode. This will get me kicked off the boards for all kindsa hateful cracks and thinly veiled homophobic insults if I don’t reign it back. You should have seen the eighteen rewrites I went through before settling on calling you grasshopper. (I put back the “gr”, for one.) See what I mean by easily amused?
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Blake. The 80s were an era of Greed. I’d argue that the instances of charitable altruism you cite were attempts at appeasing the national conscience for the full-on corporate culture of greed and widespread spike in materialism and brand-name consciouness in the 1980s. Look at the pop culture: we had a bunch of nighttime soaps and other unrealistic TV series dealing with the lives and cultures of the mega-rich and for the first time in American history CEOs, financeers and entrepenuers (Iacocca, Milken, DeLorean, Trump and even Famous Amos) were supposedly heroes to common folk. The Ewings, the Carringtons, Grecko and Alex Keaton were the zeitgiest condensed.
Well spoken, Askia. You mount an eloquent defense. As one of those “old, white dudes” who thinks rap is crap, I salute you!
Now…how do you feel about bagpipes? 
1)My feelings about rap have nothing to do with race. Rap by Eminem and the Beasty Boys is just as terrible as rap by 50Cent or Dr Dre. It’s a no-talent-required form of expression, not music and not art and DEFINITELY not innovative.
2)I called you “old man” in a light-hearted spirit, as you had admitted to being in your prime in the 70s. If you took offense, I apologize.
3)Your response makes me doubt more and more that you were as old as you claim in the 70s.
silenus. Thanks. I prefer to keep myself in check. Regarding bagpipes, I could lie and say I’d rather listen to the Bee Gees but I was kind of digging them watching BRAVEHEART and when the Scotsman plays them in SAMURAI JACK and when James Doohan breaks them out on TREK. But I’m not trying to play them at a house party, y’understand. Keep your Greatest Scottish Funeral Dirges CD, too – I don’t care if Scot La Rock, Scotty Pippen AND Sean Connery joined forces recommending it. Lil’ DA da DEE will do me.
Actually, now that I review the topic, it was SILENIUS who said he liked the 70s because he was in his prime. Therefore, I take back my “old man” statement as I have no idea how old Askia is IRL.
RikWriter. No, no, I agree: I thought I made it clear it was MY hang-up regarding the race of “I-hate-rap” commentators. That said, if you really wish to keep insisting that rap is a no-talent artless form of expression (neat oxymoron there, btw) lacking innovation we really have nothing to say to each other on this matter. I concede your right to dislike rap. We can leave it at that.
As for my age, I’m old enough to know better to denigrate the artists in any artform – how 'bout you?.
Let me attempt to resuscitate this thread before I kill it completely (sorry Scott_Plaid) – I am fully a child of the 80s. I am astonished that there is still lingering 1970s nostalgia around. I’ve been waiting since 2000 for 80s nostalgia to kick in and I’m significantly gobsmacked it aine happened yet.
I wrote an article back in college where I noted that nostalgia seems to run in 20 year cycles. In the 1970s people were nostalgic about the 50s – remember Happy Days? In the 1980s a significant Baby Boomer counterculture sprung up lauding the sixties: hell, they even dug up Woodstock. Even the 1990s people brought back mindboggling bad chunks of the seventies. I mean – Leisure Suit Larry. Meatloaf. John Travolta. Star Wars. Blaxsploitation. That 70s show. (Which is still on!!)
With Trek and Wars both finally on official hiatus, I feel that – FINALLY – 1980s nostalgia is on its way… I look forward to it. Surely you’ve gotten those Fwded: Are you a child of the 80s? e-emails. They’re remaking The Dark Crystal. Pretty soon the General Lee and KITT will be racing each other in some Papa John’s Pizza Commercial . Thundercats will be battling an invasion by the Deceptacons. TV will feature a team up of the A-Team and Miami Vice. J.R. Ewing will be back. Prince will be good again. Old School rap will have a long-overdue and welcome revival: (not that RikWriter will give a shit.) I for one, can’t wait.
Apology accepted. You’re a class act.
Well calling me narrowminded is insulting. Enough that were I to complain to mod I’m sure you’d be reprimanded. But it’s not important enough for me to care much. That’s why I ignored it in the first place. You think I’m narrowminded. I think raps’ shite. Each to their own. Plenty of people agree with both of us.
I have a few problems with that.
First off your assertion that it was greed rather than simply ambition seems unsupported. America and the western world generally have valued ambition and personal success for a long time. In the boom-time of the mid 80s that was very much brought to the fore because so many people were becoming fabulously wealthy and it seemed an achievable dream. So just as TV and movies in the 60s focussed heavily on the apparently achievable wonders of science so in the 80s they focussed on the achievable wonders of wealth. And just as most people in the 60s never had any real ambition or desire to become scientists or astronauts the same was true of the 80s.
The next problem I’m having is your characterisation that all or even the majority of 80s popular culture dealt with the rich. I honestly doubt that thus was more true for the 80s than any other period and I’d be interested if you could provide anything hard or objective to support it. Yes some of the soaps centred around the wealthy, but that’s nothing new. I’m no soap fan but American soaps always seem to have been people with the wealthy. Soaps are pure escapism and people don’t generally want to escape into drudgery. Pre-80s soapies including General Hospital and Days of Our Lives also focussed primarily on the wealthy as did post-80s soaps like “Beverly Hills 90210”. Sure the Carringtons may have been even more openly wealthy than the millionaires from Bold and the Beautiful but it’s entirely a difference of degrees, not kind. Both are multi-millionaires who live in mansions. The 80s didn’t change anything WRT soaps.
But look at the non-soaps of 80s TV. Cheers? Dukes of Hazard? Rosanne? Alf? Knight Rider? Moonlighting? Miami Vice? I’m having hard time thinking of any of the big 80s TV shows aside from soaps that were focussed on the lives and cultures of the mega-rich. Oh yes, one, that psuedo-detective show, what was it, Hart to Hart? That’s about it. Aside from that none of the big 80s shows focussed on people that could be described as of above average affluence. Sure Magnum and Knight Rider had a millionaire sponsor somewhere off-screen, but so did Charlies Angels. Hardly novel to the 80s is it?
Yet you also say that TV shows focussing on the rich was new to the 80s. We already know that wasn’t remotely true for soapies but was it true for other shows? I think not. As I’ve said I have a hard time thinking of non-soap 80’s shows that focussed on the wealthy. But what about non-80s shows? For the 90s we need to include “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and “The Nanny”. For the 70s we have “Diff’rent Strokes” and for the 60s “Bonanza” and “Beverly Hillbillies”. Hardly seems like non soaps shows focussing on the rich is primarily or exclusively an 80s phenomenon.
Well first off I don’t believe that Iacocca, Milken, DeLorean or Trump were supposedly heroes to common folk in the 80s. They were held forth as examples of what American free-enterprise and ambition could do just as Ford and Rockefeller and Carnegie and the Kennedies had been before them. Americans have always been obsessed with their wealthy and idolised them and that was no certainly not happening for the first time in the 80s. What had perhaps changed in the 80s was that the ability for the average man to make a million in 2 years on the stock market made the lifestyles of these people more accessible just as Lincoln’s log cabin to Whitehouse background had been a century earlier.
And if The Ewings, the Carringtons, Grecko and Alex Keaton were the zeitgiest condensed then where does that leave the Dukes or the Barrs or the Simpsons or the Bundies or the Cosbies or the dozens of other ‘ordinary’ Americans that dominated TV screens in the 80s? Nah, the Carringtons and Gecko et al weren’t a condensation of anything. They were a wealth wish fulfilment just as the Clampetts and the Cartwrights and the Drumonds were before them. TV series about the wealthy weren’t new to the 80s. They’re as old as TV itself.
Interesting pint about that 20 year cycle. There was certainly a big 50s revival in the 70s with “Grease”, “American Graffiti”, “Happy Days” etc. The 80s saw “Wonder Years” along with the resurrection of Star Trek along with the career revivals of Cher and Dylan and Orbison and an “Addams Family” movie. The 90s saw movie versions of just about every 70s show from “Charlies Angels” to “The Brady Bunch”.
As far as 80s nostalgia, they’ve already started on a “Dukes of Hazzard” movie. “Knight Rider 2000” came and went with scarcely a blip. The Batman movie series has been resurrected. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” have been resurrected. I think it’s started.
Of course the previous nostalgia resurrections are making it kind of messy. ST:TNG was so much a part of 80s po culture that it almost needs to be revived itself, despite having barely ended.
I’m old enough to be more discriminating in how I apply the label “art.”
Blake. Hooo, boy. I am not a class act. I thank you for the compliment but… nah. I don’t think you’re narrow-minded, just your views on rap. A useful distinction.
I sincerely believe the 80s had a manifestly higher incidence of at least framing national economic gains and class mobility in the language of rampant consumerism, overt materialism, personal ambition and corporate greed compared to the decades prior. If the 80s don’t seem particularly greedy to you because of the corresponding acts of charity in AIDS relief, Homelessness, Hunger Relief… I’d agree. But the existence of one thing only mitigates the other – it doesn’t disprove it. If you think the 80’s has been eclipsed by even more astonishing excesses in the Greed, Part II business outrages of the 1990’s, I’d agree. But the 80s spawned a whole socioeconomic subculture of Preppies, Yuppies, Yummies, Guppies, Dinks, Sloanes and Nerds, not to mention the African-American phenomenons of Buppies, BAPs and Bohos first explored by The Cosby Show. It gave Michael Moore a career.
The nighttime soap thing is operatic and symptomatic of this national interest in the good life. You had Dallas, Falcon Crest, Dynasty, Knot’s Landing.and Flamingo Road. You had working class schmoes like Magnum PI living on opulent estates and Eddie Murphy hanging out in Beverly Hills. You had tons of movies that both encouraged the dream and worked as cautionary tales against unmitigated greed: *Wall Street, Working Girl, The Secret of My Success, The American Success Story, Tucker: A Man And His Dream, Rain Man, Baby Boom. * Sixties rockers started going commerical and even started becoming less political, lyricial and autobiographical and more and more about getting paid.
Gee, – why do I remember that decade so fondly? I’ve typed myself int a corner again…
Oh, yeah. It’s my youth.
Well, you seemed to have a good time, and so did every one else. I don’t think your argueing on these points killed the thread, rather, people ran out of on-topic things to say, or I would assume they would post.
I can only hope. However, I can not help but think of how many brands have been revived, only to die half a yead later.
P.S. Any other 80s fans around here? I hope you don’t mind me hi-jacking my own thread, but I have seen the words “reminds me of new wave” in more then one music review. Any idea who these bands are? P.S. I find this claim made mostly in the Washington Post weekend magazine. Maybe it’s just the wishful thinking of the reviewer. 
For a somewhat New Wave sound, check out: The Bravery, Franz Ferdinand, or The Killers. There’s lots more out there I am sure but these three are in heavy rotation on KROQ and what I hear the most. Not New Wave per se, but there’s a lot of that element there: ambient guitar work, electronic sound, etc. Very reminiscent. And there’s some band that I swear is Oingo Boingo when it comes on but it isn’t.
I don’t know how I left off the words “rap music” before.
I just got back from watching THE LONGEST YARD and REVENGE OF THE SITH. It’s a remake of a seventies movie and the final acr of a seventies movie franchise. I saw a trailer for BEWITCHED. It’s a movie version of a sixties TV show. I saw another trailer for WAR OF THE WORLDS. It’s a 19th century novel.
What. The. Hell.
WHERE ARE MY EIGHTIES MOVIES??? I get sooooo tired of Hollywood pandering to the Baby Boomer demographic for Baby Boomer nostalgia for stuff in the Baby Boomer era. Give it a freaking REST. There’s a reasn why the cancelled ’ AMERICAN DREAMS.’ No one cares.
I’m 35, almost. Where’s the stuff that speaks to me? Where’s my kickass THE A-TEAM movie? Where’s my THE HUXTABLES movie starring Eddie Murphy as The Cos? Where’s the Smurf revival? And I really really want to see Thundercats versus the Transformers. I want to see a new KNIGHT RIDER.
At least they’re jump starting the BATMAN franchise again, but daaaaaamn. There’s a hella lot of good 1980s TV shows and movies they can remake. What’s the freaking hold up?
Good question. However, there is a Transformer’s Movie on the way, but I do not hold very high hopes for it., since it will be live action. Oh, and it will be directed by Michael Bay.
Ughhh.
Why isn’t jms writing Jayce & The Wheeled Warriors, the Next Generation? My Secret Identity would be so much better then Nobody Like Raymond" and of course, why no Beetlejuice 2? There is already a script!:mad:
It’s in development, as is the Miami Vice movie. No shit, I am serious.
Did not RTFT.
Having lived through the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s I have to say that in my experience there was damn little good created from a cultural or political perspective in the '80s.
If you were under 13 in 1980 and somehow you’ve created an idealized picture of the 80s, well, you’re just wrong, that’s all. Reagan was an idiot. Huey Lewis sucked. Greed is not good and neither is cocaine.
Hell, at least the 90’s gave us the internet.
I was 14 in 1980 and I have a realistic picture of the decade and I believe I am right and you are wrong. The politics and culture of the 80s were far superior to that of the 90s. The 2000s are turning out to be nearly as good as the 80s, though.