Men wearing short shorts. Women with big hair and shoulder pads. Sappy songs like "I just called to say I love you" topping the charts. Boring movies like E.T being crucially acclaimed.
Everything about that decade is off.
No wonder bands like Smashing Pumpkins did so well in the 90s, people wanted something edgy and dark after a decade of fluff.
No way! 80s were awesome, especially the music.
shareYes. Yes, we did. But I was getting laid in the 80s, so there's that.
shareSpeaking as an old person who experienced the 80, YES!!!! A THOUSAND TIMES YES!!!!!!!!
Everything about this look was the height of fashion back then.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/86/38/36/863836c09babeca18b04cd3bba69c05e.jpg
The 80s were magical, glad to have lived through that decade
shareYes, the 80s were magical, what with nuclear war around the corner, the AIDs crisis, homeless crisis, rise in gun violence, trash television, Iran/Contra, teen pregnancies, etc. Simply an amazing decade...
shareYou can pickup negative aspects on every decade, doesn't mean that is what you experienced. My 80s memories really are golden
shareYou're missing the point.
A lot of nice things happened in the 1930s, but no no one would call it magical, because there was The Great Depression, Fascism and The Dust Bowl that formed a dark cloud over that period.
Ditto, the 1950s with The Red Scare, segregation, the Cold War.
It's just a very strange description. I can see someone calling the 1980s fun and exciting, because of all the fads, trends and new technology that came out, just not magical.
You are the one missing the point, on porpuse it seems, to me
Me.
A child of the 80s
It was a magical time. I can speak of a lot of friends that share the same sentiment
And in 40 years people will look back at this decade and ridicule the fashions and I certainly hope they have the good sense to shake their heads at what some now consider to be music.
sharePlenty of good music made these days but harder for newer acts to get attention due to the fragmentation of media consumption.
Like what?
shareTurn in some indie radio stations.
shareThere's absolutely nothing good or original coming out these days. This generation doesn't believe in creativity--that's the problem. I remember how everything went south with The Verve and other acts. The Verve didn't write Bittersweet Symphony. All they did was take an old record and dress it up in post-production. When The Rolling Stones sued, all the millennials started raging about how unfair it was and how evil copyright was. Afterwards, you used to see so many videos on YouTube posting dissertations about how originality in music was a myth as a defense for plagiarism and unoriginality, because according to them, "there's nothing new under the sun" and all music is just the same set of chord progressions, so it's okay if every band sounds exactly like some other band.
shareThere's way more to modern music than you think. The mainstream radio is only 0.1% of all modern music.
shareNo, there isn't.
I actually remember when we had good music. For entire stretches at a time, there would be songs that blew everyone away to such an extent that it seemed as if everyone on the planet was playing it. I remember when Another One Bites the Dust came out. That entire summer, you heard that song everywhere--cranked up on people's car radios, at parties and receptions, at stores, at sporting events, in TV ads, etc. There's nothing remotely like that happening today.
You honestly think radio music comprises the majority of modern music?
And there's "nothing like that" happening today because people have an entirely different relationship with music now. There's way more music, and it's much easier to find music on your own now. People don't need to listen to popular music to discover new music. They can branch out on their own. There's much more individual variancy in what people listen to.
The influential bands you refer to produced music in a time when popular music in the west was in a state of development. People in the 60's and 70's did not have many options available to them. Everyone mostly huddled around a radio and listened to what was played to them by record labels. People's tastes were homogenised in a way that they simply aren't now. This gave promoted bands major cultural capital, power and lasting resonance in a way that is impossible now.
If you wanted to get into music exploration yourself, you had to have money and connections and a local record store to do so. That's all gone now. The internet blew the gates wide open and allowed for counter-culture (in music) to take a major seat at the table. This led to an explosion of music variety as geography became no boundary and bands and projects, no matter where they were could just share their music anywhere.
What chance would you have given an Estonian Shoegaze band in the 1980's? Or a Filipino Post-Hardcore project then? How would I have found them? The concept of an era being defined by a dozen "legendary" (and apparently exclusively rock artists ) bands is simply antiquated and regressive. People are far more eclectic and varied in their listening interests now, and what we have is a much larger pool of respected artists and bands within a large pool of subcultures and subgenres. This all being easily accessible, freely streamable on services like Spotify is what is eroding the potential prominence of new acts. People's tastes are way more diffused.
People in the 60's and 70's did not have many options available to them. Everyone mostly huddled around a radio and listened to what was played to them by record labels.
The concept of an era being defined by a dozen "legendary" (and apparently exclusively rock artists ) bands is simply antiquated and regressive.
New acts and bands was discovered by everyone through nightclubs, concert events, movies and television shows, not just radio. The scenario you paint, of people huddled around radios, is FALSE.
There were hundreds of bands and acts you could've listened to each decade that weren't the "top" acts at the time. These bands were known as "one hit wonders," which were acts that weren't as big as, say, The Beatles, Stones, Michael Jackson or Madonna but were still listened to and had presence.
I was being somewhat hyperbolic, but it was genuinely harder to discover esoteric music in the 1960s and 70s than it is now
I can jump on Spotify right now and find folk metal from India, or witch-house music from Norway.
On top of all the things I mentioned (concerts, clubs, TV shows, movies), we had RECORD stores. We had actual stores where you could go and they'd play albums for customers to discover new music, with listening booths and everything!
Wow, isn't that great? See what I said above about record stores. Most record stores had a "world music" section that stocked stuff like this, after Americans became obsessed with Latin and Polynesian-themed music (called exotica) and later Asian mysticism because of George Harrison, who introduced American and the UK to Ravi Shankar.
I'd continue this debate, but to me it's just futile. The entire basis of your argument is based on a myth what the past was like compared to today. You want to argue with someone a false history of their own cultural history and past, based on conjecture, when you're hearing straight from the horse's mouth what it was like. It doesn't make any sense.
I'm sure some people did, while others had spectacular taste. But as a whole, it wasn't an off decade, it's just vastly different from now, and measuring it by today's standards is pointless because fashion is fast, it's like the tide, always going out and coming back in. I think the fashion of the 90s, which is coming back in today, is way worse, but that's just personal taste. A lot of good came out of the 80s though, and a lot of great stuff we have today is heavily influenced by the 80s.
shareYes, movie and cartoon franchises like Turtles, Ghostbusters, Transformers, Indiana Jones.
shareUm, yes.
shareNo, the 80s were awesome. Things come and go out of style so they may look strange when you look at it from 30 years in the future. People have bad tastes now as they are buried in their accessory cell phone and walk into walls, doors, or telephone poles. Tik tok videos have replaced reading a book. The MCU, while mostly entertaining, is considered high art.
The 80's had amazing metal and rock songs. Nothing wrong with big hair and men wore short shorts well before the 80's. The 80's were very colorful too, people wearing an array of bright colors. Compared to today's mostly black and white modern look it was vastly different. Interestingly, spandex was in style in the 80's then went out of style and came back around mid 2000's and still very much in style today.
Books are hard to get into with the instant gratification videos provide.
share