The 80s, myth and reality?

Just Jim said:

The '80s were also when I was first introduced to the comedy of people like George Carlin and Richard Pryor, and the Dr. Demento Show.

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The Dr. Demento Show was where I first heard Benny Goodman and Weird Al, back when it was just him and his accordion. Radio stations played more novelty songs then. Not constantly, but they threw them in once in a while. But from the 90s on, it was same four-hour loop of 70s hits for Baby Boomers for the next 20 years. I tuned into the alt-rock station just to hear something different.

And we can't forget the epic story of the Hitler Diaries -- for a few weeks in the spring of 1983 you couldn't walk past a newsstand or magazine rack without That Face glaring out at you. The incompetent scribblings of a two-bit Nazi-sympathizing forger, boosted by a delusional German magazine reporter, fooled the most powerful media organizations and renowned academic historians in the world.



Hugh Trevor-Roper never did quite manage to wipe all the egg off his face.

I will often tell you I hate the eighties. That's not strictly true.... I hate eightiesrevivalism. The times you live through are what they are, but choosing to go back to such an unpleasant decade..... eh. No, thanks. As will all nostalgia, it's no surprise that there are only two types of people that run after it: those who didn't have to live through it, and those whose Tom Bucannan Syndrome is firmly rooted in pining for an eighties heyday. Much as I have enjoyed Stranger Things, it does indeed remind me of my hatred for eighties revivalism.

I was lucky enough to be five when the eighties dawned, and fifteen when then finally died out, so I was always to some degree shielded from the worst of them. I do suspect, to be fair, that growing up in a less media-saturated world was simpler on the one hand, but on the other it was much harder to be 'different', to question the establishment and such. My parents rarely took us from the sticks into Belfast; the biggest result of this was that, when the local cinema a couple of villages over closed down, our cinema-going was limited to a couple of trips a year. Folks didn't like taking risks: we were born into the worst era of "The Troubles", in a time when there seemed no end to them in sight. A lot of us had famly who qualified for a deathlist because of the job they did. People got murdered just for being from a particular faith group, others because they delivered fruit to a police station. Not that I ever saw any of it - we lived in an area it never touched, and were sufficiently middle class and had the right upbringing that we were never sucked into the tribal bigotries and worse elements of it.

As with any decade, much will vary with where and who you were - most times are great for some folks, not so much for others.

One of the things I find the hardest with eighties revivalism is to see revival and celebration of the hair metal thing, one of the single most misogynist elements of popular culture I have ever experienced. I saw thorugh it at the age of fourteen, and luckily discovered punk rock. It mystifies me that any young woman in particular could be nostalgic for that, let alone grown adults.

HoosierDaddy said:

'We were pregnant' instead of 'my Wife was pregnant'. Does this really make sense for a man to say..?? I just don't get some of these new terms. Did they come out of the eighties..??

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"Baby on Board" signs. Because, yeah, I'll drive recklessly around you if you don't warn me about the rugrat.


Sent directly from my mind to yours.

It didn't take long for those to be altered to "Baby I'm Bored."

back in the 1980's they called a homeless person a "bag lady" I never hear people say that anymore? because back then being homeless usually was because of mental illness , but these days it's a "Lifestyle" a way of life for many people living off the system, they live off gov handouts and live on the streets and use the extra money for drugs

homeless lifestyle has become an epidemic all across the USA, back in the 1980's it wasnt as bad as it is now, they have so many homeless now that they even camp out on city streets, everywhere I go somebody is asking for spare change, back in the 1980's they only did that in big cities, now it's everywhere you go

Ive been seeing the same lady with kids panhandling every Christmas with her kids with a sign that says need money for a hotel

it's a scam, because Ive seen her do the same thing at other places around the holiday season.

I saw a lot more homelessness in the 80s than I do today, actually. I would look down my office window at the radio station and see the same people every morning digging thru the dumpster behind a pizza joint looking for greasy crusts to eat. Occasionally there'd be a fire started by squatters in an old garage or warehouse trying to stay warm in the winter. There was a large encampment of homeless folk down on the waterfront next to the metal-fabrication plant, a whole Reaganville of tarps, lean-tos, and shacks.

In the latter part of the 80s I was living in one of the ritziest tourist towns on the Maine coast. In the alley beside my apartment building, a homeless teenage couple was living on scraps tossed to them by the owners of a restaurant. In the parking lot out back people would break into cars -- not to rob you, but just for a place to sleep. Young women, some of them teenagers who had probably been driven from their homes by their parents, would gather in that lot after the drug store closed to sell themselves to skeevy-looking men, none of whom appeared to be homeless.

There are still plenty of homeless kids around here now, but it isn't as chronic as it was in the 80s. Give it a few years, though, and we'll see.

green papaya said:

back in the 1980's they called a homeless person a "bag lady" I never hear people say that anymore? because back then being homeless usually was because of mental illness , but these days it's a "Lifestyle" a way of life for many people living off the system, they live off gov handouts and live on the streets and use the extra money for drugs

homeless lifestyle has become an epidemic all across the USA, back in the 1980's it wasnt as bad as it is now, they have so many homeless now that they even camp out on city streets, everywhere I go somebody is asking for spare change, back in the 1980's they only did that in big cities, now it's everywhere you go

Ive been seeing the same lady with kids panhandling every Christmas with her kids with a sign that says need money for a hotel

it's a scam, because Ive seen her do the same thing at other places around the holiday season.

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You're not serious, are you?

BlueTrain said:

You're not serious, are you?

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it's really bad in California, homeless people actually come to CA for the benefits, weather, I heard lots of people from out of state go to Ca.

probably depends what state you live in? it's pretty bad in CA, lots of "tweakers"

plain old dave said:

Well, as a child of the 80s, I have a few comments; graduated high school in 1989.

-Firstly, so much of what's in the media is honestly cartoonish. Sure, all the girls at Knoxville Central had big hair, and I remember the strong odor of Ultra Net outside the girls' bathrooms. All told, though, there was very little of the garish neon that so characterizes period pieces in the media. Pegged pants and stonewashed jeans, sure, but neon and stuff like in The Breakfast Club was mainly just in the movies. I was a more or less hardcore greaser; Ducktail haircut and sideburns, T-shirts and Levis 501s almost every day.

-Working. Having a part time job in high school was normal back then.

-Cars. I drove a 1980 Plymouth Volare in school (with fuzzy dice, remember I was a greaser), and it was on the newer end of the median. 60s and 70s classics were the cheap beaters back then, things like Monte Carlos, Cutlasses, and the occasional Camaro, and I well remember shoehorning seven people into a '75 Capri going to school, and weekends at Norris Lake in one of the gang's dad's '77 Dodge D-100 we called Sept-Sept. We all took French, see.

-A lot of things people did back then would get you UNDER the jail now; rolling yards and all sorts of deviltry on Friday and Saturday nights.

-Music. Sure, a lot of people were into the hair bands, but 60s-70s music had its devotees. We wore out a cassette of Centerfield on Saturday nights up at the lake. Creedence, the Allman Brothers, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash... It was JUST starting to be faddish to listen to 60s music when I was in school.

-Technology. A lot of places in East TN didn't have 911 service, and having a touch tone phone was slightly toney if you'll pardon the pun. As were answering machines. On TV, you had four channels, ABC (WATE), CBS (WBIR), NBC (WTVK on UHF) and PBS (WSJK out of Sneedville, how I discovered Doctor Who) and if the President was on, you were missing whatever show you wanted to see. Except if the local affiliate decided to either play The Cosby Show late or on another night. I remember a couple times the local news wasn't on til 11:45 in the evening.

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That's where I grew up! I'm from Oak Ridge, but we moved to Morgan County in 1989 (I was born in 1982.) WSJK-TV, or more likely WKOP-TV, six of one just a different channel, was the only thing my mother would allow on TV up until I was 8 or 9, barring a few Saturday morning cartoons. I remember when our part of Morgan Co. got 911 service, sometime in 1994.

ChiTownScion said:

Graduated law school and admitted to the bar: June and November, 1981.
Got my toe in the door in what became my dream job- after the worst bout of unemployment in my life: October 1982.
So, for me, it was a pretty eventful decade, and for the most part good times... so many other plates were spinning that I couldn't keep track.

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I interviewed at Kirkland & Ellis and can recall the partners' conference room with a table bar; turning down a drink at 2.00pm; later declining the offer....
Sure surprised the hell out of myself.
That was the milestone moment of the 80s for me...

The 1980s. I am with Angus Forbes on this one. I entered the 1980s at 14 and was 24 by the time they were over. Personally, it was the most extraordinary time in my life and I loved it—YMMV.

It was an end to an era—there was no internet, no cell phones, everything wasn’t made in China. In fact, I never had touched a computer until I went to college in 1985; we still typed our papers on IBM Selectrics because there were really no widely available word processing programs on the DOS based systems. I would argue that the 1980s has more in common with the 1950s, than 2017 has in common with the 1980s.

People can harp on the neon colors and leg warmers (“Linda, that girls looks just like Pat Benetar.” “I know. Wait. There are three girls at Ridgemont who have cultivated the Pat Benetar look!” Linda and Stacey from Fast Times at Ridgemont High), but considering that it was bell bottoms, wide collars, and leisure suits before that, and sagging pants and the rapper/gangster look after that, the preppie style doesn’t look so bad, does it?

It was the last era of personal responsibility and true interaction between people. After the 1980s, we got zero tolerance, political correctness, e-mail, the internet and a host of laws that protected us from ourselves. Early in the decade a minor with alcohol might get an “Minor in Possession” ticket of $45 or just may be asked to pour it out, now, you automatically lose your driver license for a year even though it had nothing to do with driving. The amount of restriction on personal freedom taken for granted then is unheard of today and there are so many things that will land you in jail today that were just living life then.

For me, there are a few movies that capture the era and its evolution well; The first would be Dazed and Confused, the next would be Fast Times at Ridgemont High, then any of the Brat Pack movies with Molly Ringwald, St. Elmo’s Fire…

Harp said:

I interviewed at Kirkland & Ellis and can recall the partners' conference room with a table bar; turning down a drink at 2.00pm; later declining the offer....
Sure surprised the hell out of myself.
That was the milestone moment of the 80s for me...

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Justly so. Heard it was a sweatshop.

Juanito said:

For me, there are a few movies that capture the era and its evolution well; The first would be Dazed and Confused, the next would be Fast Times at Ridgemont High, then any of the Brat Pack movies with Molly Ringwald, St. Elmo’s Fire…

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Dazed and Confused was the 70s. Well, as it was remembered in the 90s.

On reflecting a bit, I think I've come up with the one event that captures the very epitome of the '80s in the USA, and I can't believe it hasn't already been mentioned.

Where were you in 1985 when they came out with New Coke?

It's impossible to overstate the impact this had, not just on soda drinkers, but on the world of big-time marketing itself. It sent The Coca-Cola Company into a tailspin that it took years to recover from, it was the first crack in Bill Cosby's facade of public trustworthiness, it made a best-selling author out of a corporate hack named Roger Enrico, it led to Michael Jackson setting himself on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial, and it gave a great many people their first real exposure to the levels of craven manipulation that went on behind the scenes in the marketing racket.

New Coke was everything that was wrong with the eighties as a decade. It was sickeningly sweet and cloying, it used goodwill amassed by a better product to falsely promote itself, it fizzed a lot when you opened the bottle but it went dead flat ten minutes later, and it used a ridiculous "computer generated" fad character as its public spokesman that wasn't even actually computer generated. It was in every way a towering example of the utter mendacity at the very heart of the American eighties.

I had an awful time with New Coke. Like a lot of people I stockpiled "Old Coke" for as long as I could, driving to out of the way country stores and gas stations all over the county. When my supply ran out I tried one sip of New Coke, spit it out on the ground with disgust, and switched to Orange Crush until the real stuff came back.

I was in a hotel room in Montreal when the CBC broke into regular programming to announce that real Coke was returning -- it was a major story all over the western world, and it was hilariously gratifying to watch the Coke executives groveling and trying to explain themselves, but they never recovered their credibility.

I read somewhere that New Coke did better in taste tests than old Coke. But life isn't like a taste test. Memories and expectations and packaging all affect perceptions. Besides, if you wanted sweeter, flatter cola, there was Pepsi.

For me, the show Freaks and Geeks pretty well captures the early 80s from a teenager's point of view, even though it was made later. Shows about fabulously wealthy people (or just the trappings of wealth), like Dynasty, Dallas, Magnum PI, and Hart to Hart might have been entertaining, but didn't show the sort of lifestyles regular people aspired to any more than Thin Man movies depicted an aspirational lifestyle of the 30s. Shows like One Day at a Time and Family Ties showed more normal lifestyles, and even the Huxtables (a doctor and lawyer mom and dad) on The Cosby Show lived pretty modestly for a couple of professionals.

Nobert said:

Dazed and Confused was the 70s. Well, as it was remembered in the 90s.

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You are right as it was set in 1976, however where I lived, which admittedly was a little behind, was the summer of 1980 for me and was the kickoff for the 1980s. I was going into high school and the same exact events happened with the same characters and cars that summer before entering high school.

Paisley said:

I read somewhere that New Coke did better in taste tests than old Coke. But life isn't like a taste test. Memories and expectations and packaging all affect perceptions. Besides, if you wanted sweeter, flatter cola, there was Pepsi.

For me, the show Freaks and Geeks pretty well captures the early 80s from a teenager's point of view, even though it was made later.

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I have never been able to sit through an episode of Freaks and Geeks. Not because it wasn't good, but because, as an Eighties nerd, it hit close enough to home that it made me squirm. "Oh God, I was that kid attempting the Captain Kirk impersonation. For the love of God, turn it off!" So that's probably a pretty good testament to its being on the mark.

I remember well the New Coke debacle, though it didn't affect me, as I never cultivated the taste for a carbonated, sweetened battery acid. I chose not to opt for Pepsi based on the fact that the two taste exactly the same. The "Cola Wars" is another facet of the paste gem of commercial absurdity that I remember the period to be.

LizzieMaine said:

And don't forget the ultimate fake news event, at least until our own time, the opening of Al Capone's Vault by that paragon of tabloid TV, Geraldo Rivera. I watched this live, having nothing better to do that night, and don't think I've ever laughed harder than I did at poor Geraldo muttering something like "I wonder if I can get a deposit back on a sixty year old bottle."

I was trying to explain this show to one of the kids the other day, and being born in 1988, she had never heard of it. How very quickly the world forgets.

The 80s were a hive of such nonsense. There was the remarkable Morton Downey Junior, who was, following on from Joe Pyne in the 60s, the modern template for the aggressively, flamboyantly hateful talk-show host. He was doing a flat-footed Bizarro World parody of the touchy-feely Phil Donahue type of talk show, but too many people didn't get the gag and took him dead seriously -- leading to bellowing hack after bellowing hack, many of whom are still with us today on cable "news" channels and on radio.

Mainstream journalism moved into the bizarre and incompetent during the '80s as well. These were the days when you couldn't look at a media column without reading some new weird story about Dan Rather. "What is the frequency, Kenneth?" And these were the days when Americans got well acquainted with Rupert Murdoch, and his talent for turning everything he touches into effluent. High-level reporters, fearing for their jobs in this strange environment, were afraid to ask too many probing questions, and just took whatever processed "facts" the Michael Deavers of the day handed them.

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And unfortunately much of the Dan Rather weirdness turned out to be true!

LizzieMaine said:

And we can't forget the epic story of the Hitler Diaries -- for a few weeks in the spring of 1983 you couldn't walk past a newsstand or magazine rack without That Face glaring out at you. The incompetent scribblings of a two-bit Nazi-sympathizing forger, boosted by a delusional German magazine reporter, fooled the most powerful media organizations and renowned academic historians in the world.

Hugh Trevor-Roper never did quite manage to wipe all the egg off his face.

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It is interesting to look back on this and realize that major news orgs being duped/printing fake news/wrong late breaking reports etc is not a new phenom.