Let’s Talk About the Early 80s (1 Viewer)

Mr. Blue Sky

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So, maybe it’s the Covid, i dont know.. but i was thinking, there are a lot of different eras that get a lot of love.. The 60s are revered and studied.. the 70s with it’s gritty movies and disco.. the 80s as a whole, greed, excess, Miami Vice.. the 90s with grunge music.. But i feel like we never hear much about , or discuss much, the early 1980s.. it seems like until Michael Jackson came out with Thriller in 83, and the aforementioned Miami Vice hit the airwaves in 84, nothing too notable happened.. when i think of the early 80s, i think of Reagan getting elected, inaugurated and shot, and the Iranian hostages.. oh, and of course Lennon getting assasinated... Did anything else happen in 1980, 1981 and 1982? besides the premier of Magnum PI??
 
So, maybe it’s the Covid, i dont know.. but i was thinking, there are a lot of different eras that get a lot of love.. The 60s are revered and studied.. the 70s with it’s gritty movies and disco.. the 80s as a whole, greed, excess, Miami Vice.. the 90s with grunge music.. But i feel like we never hear much about , or discuss much, the early 1980s.. it seems like until Michael Jackson came out with Thriller in 83, and the aforementioned Miami Vice hit the airwaves in 84, nothing too notable happened.. when i think of the early 80s, i think of Reagan getting elected, inaugurated and shot, and the Iranian hostages.. oh, and of course Lennon getting assasinated... Did anything else happen in 1980, 1981 and 1982? besides the premier of Magnum PI??

Blondie is about it for me. Olivia Newton John too. I crushed on them when was a kid. Space Shuttle was getting cranked up.
 
The Pope got shot. (and survived)

MTV started up (and played real videos)

Most importantly, I graduated high school!!
 
I remember specifically in the midst of it verbally expressing to someone that the '80s was full of disposable music.
 
Are you kidding me ? Tons of great music culture.from 80 to 82

Personal computing started to take off
Miracle on Ice - February 1980

Rock music
Van Halen some great albums - Women and Children First, Fair Warning, Diver Down
AC DC - Back in Black
Ozzy Osborn - Crazy Train
Rush Moving Pictures

from the Pop / Hip hop front
Michael Jackson - Thriller was 1982
Juice Newton
Pat Benatar
The Pretenders
Dexys Midnight Rinners
Kool and the Gang
 
So, maybe it’s the Covid, i dont know.. but i was thinking, there are a lot of different eras that get a lot of love.. The 60s are revered and studied.. the 70s with it’s gritty movies and disco.. the 80s as a whole, greed, excess, Miami Vice.. the 90s with grunge music.. But i feel like we never hear much about , or discuss much, the early 1980s.. it seems like until Michael Jackson came out with Thriller in 83, and the aforementioned Miami Vice hit the airwaves in 84, nothing too notable happened.. when i think of the early 80s, i think of Reagan getting elected, inaugurated and shot, and the Iranian hostages.. oh, and of course Lennon getting assasinated... Did anything else happen in 1980, 1981 and 1982? besides the premier of Magnum PI??

If there is anything associated with the early 80's where music and culture intertwined (as they usually do), off the top of my head, I'd say there are 3 seminal moments:

The official welcome of the Vietnam vets and the release of Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A.
The official welcome came about in 1982, marked by a parade. And while the Born in the U.S.A. track wasn't released as part of an album until 1984, the song was originally written in 1981, and sang by Bruce in concerts. This, to me, is what started our love affair with everything military.

Music officially comes out of the closet.
Another "official" moment, but following the pioneers of the 70's, like Village People, Sylvester, etc... music came out in the early 80's, with anthems like Diana Ross' I'm Coming Out and Michael Jackson's Why. Gay became mainstream, with acts like Depeche Mode, Erasure, Culture Club, topping the charts. And it wasn't like Village People when most of the U.S. didn't realize they were gay, or didn't want to talk about it or admit it.

Rap became mainstream.
The release of Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight missed the 80's by a few months, and it was considered a disco track, which was dying by then... but then Blondie released Rapture in 1981, which became the first song ever with rap lyrics to reach #1 . This was followed by After The Fire's cover of Der Kommissar in 1982. 4 years later, Madonna takes the Beasty Boys on tour as her opening act, Run DMC covers Aerosmith's Walk This Way, and like they said, the rest is history.
 
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Highschool before AIDS is what I remember most. Girls with big hair and those awful, high-waisted jeans.

If it weren't for hormones, we all looked so silly nobody should have been considered hot.
 
The early 80's were transforming for me in many ways. In 1980 I went away to college at University of Maryland College Park where I experienced the world outside of the small-town to which my dad moved us in 1974. There were many experiences I never would have had back home, and swore I was never going back to to Salisbury. Well, as they say "If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans"

My father was diagnosed with cancer in 1983 and passed in 1984. The me who returned to Salisbury in December 1983 bore very little resemblance to the me who left for College Park in August 1980. I looked, thought, acted and talked differently, and had lost my tolerance for the small-mindedness I felt was so pervasive "back home." It took some time for the bitterness of my forced return to evaporate.

For me, the early 80's was defined by the music to which I was exposed at Maryland. Bands like the Psychedelic Furs, The Damned, Siouoxie and the Banshees as well as Billy Idol and U2 all played on campus before becoming mainstream. We went to almost every concert at the old dump Capitol Centre in Largo Md. I was tripping at the Frank Marino/Robin Trower show, and watched the notes tumble out of the speakers :hihi:

I took many trips of both the road and acid variety, I smoke weed, drank moonshine, and went to happy hours where we slammed $1.25 pitchers. I also had classes with Boomer Esiason and met Ronnie James Dio after a Black Sabbath concert. Boomer was intelligent and fun, Dio was simply the most engaging, down-to-earth celebrity with whom I've ever had any contact.

There were also the events like the taking of the hostages in Tehran and the US defeating the Soviet Union in Olympic Hockey. The hockey game was seen as a huge boost to the national pride after the ignominious loss in Vietnam, and the Iranian hostage situation.

-ABC News Nightline with Ted Koppel
-Mount St Helens--watch a time-lapse of that event and understand the power of Nature
-The launch of the space shuttle Columbia
-Falklands War
-The bombing of the US embassy in Beirut--a buddy of mine was a Marine and survived the blast. His story is harrowing.

Interesting times, and like most of my co-conspirators, I remain grateful to this day that social media and cell phones weren't around to document for posterity all our missteps :hihi:
 
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Video games. And the arcades.

This^

Atari 2600 revolutionized what we thought of as a toy and where children played (indoors vs outdoors) It eventually opened the door for personal computers by changing the way machines were programmed (instead of dedication to particular application they were generally programmed with interchangeable cartridges) Atari 2600 games is what guys like Jobs and Wazniak began working on. That boom took place between 1980 and 84. And it didn't kill the standup arcade systems either, at least not for a long time. Early on they fortified each other.

That along with MTV made this time period revolutionary (even if the medium of the video took a few years to realize its potential)
 
Girls with those awful, high-waisted jeans.

I don’t know if you noticed, but they’re back. We went to an LSU game last season and I noticed all the sorority girls wearing them. Even worse, they’re ridiculously high, worse than the 80’s...
 
Vintage 80s High Waisted Jeans Rustler Straight Leg Jeans Worn | Etsy
20 Best Dressed Cartoons From Our Childhood | The Magnetic Bowtie
 

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