The 80's

After a blog on the 70s, I suppose this is appropriate.

 I will note, though, that there seems to be a 2-3 year lag on transitions.  The first few years of the 60s looked like the 50s, the first few years of the 70s looked like the 60s, the first few years of the 80s looked like the 70s, and so forth.  I spent the first 6 years of the 80s in Paris, which included high school for me.  I was able to enjoy the US 9 months out of 12 for the remainder, and I graduated from college in August 1990.

 Style.  If there is anything so vague I could refer to as the style of the 80’s, I’d associate it with bright colors, flashy outfits, and lots of mousse – the hair went UP instead of down, and way out as well.  Guys have the skinny ties, or frequently a t-shirt under a light sport jacket.  Madonna and Cyndi Lauper were primary sources of female style, plus Kim Basinger in “9½ Weeks”.  By now there are quite a few 80’s nostalgia films, most recently “The Wedding Singer” and “Hot Tub Time Machine”.

 MTV.  It’s hard to find a more appropriate logo or image so closely associated with this decade than MTV.  MTV really came into being in the 80s, and at this time it actually showed music videos!  And to get MTV, you needed to get cable.  Growing up in the 70s, we were unaware that cable even existed, and knew no one who had it.  Now it was essential.  Moreover, with cable we suddenly had programming 24/7, instead of bizarre test patterns from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m.  Now we take that for granted, but back then it was a dramatic departure.  Since Fox only came by in the late 80s, if you didn’t have cable your options were the big 3 (NBC, ABC and CBS) and a variety of unimpressive UHF channels and PBS.  For most of America, MTV heralded the irrevocable arrival of cable TV to our homes.

 Pop Music.  These clearly dominant bands of the 80s were Madonna, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Boy George, Huey Lewis and the News, Prince and The Police.  Naturally they featured heavily on MTV.  I tended to ignore them as much as possible, but it was impossible not to notice them.  Of these Michael Jackson was by far the most obnoxious, but at least back then he had a normal nose and black complexion; the rumors of his private life were decades to come, so we just knew of him as pop megastar.

 Heavy Metal.  For us, metal was the real deal.  We were a bit young to absorb the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, though I remember when Number of the Beast came out, got Pyromania when it came out, and we saw Saxon at the Zenith in Paris in 1985.  Our first concert (as mentioned much earlier) was AC/DC at Bercy in Paris on the Flick of the Switch Tour in October 1984, followed by Foreigner, Deep Purple, Saxon, Twisted Sister, Accept & Dokken, Motley Crue, and Dio.  

            While metal didn’t rise to the level of Michael Jackson or Madonna in popularity, it was certainly borderline mainstream:  top acts like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest were headlining the Cap Center by the mid to late 80s.  Even MTV had “Headbanger’s Ball”, tucked safely away late at night with the brain-dead moron Rikki Rachtman as a live action Beavis & Butt-head.  After awhile I zoned out on Headbanger’s Ball; 1/3 of the programming was commercials anyway, and of the 2/3rds which was actual music videos, we had to wade through mostly Warrant, Poison, Motley Crue and other hair metal bands to get to the rare Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden or Judas Priest gems buried in the mix.  What we think of as “classic heavy metal” peaked in the 2^nd half of the 80s, soon replaced by grunge in the early 90s.

 Computers.  In the 70s, almost no one had computers.  The Apple II+ was around in 1979, but the IBM PC made its debut in the early 80s, followed by the Mac in 1985.  By the late 80s practically everyone had a PC at home, and were being taught basic programming at school.   Video games were falling out of favor – the Intellivision and Atari 2600 met their demise in the early 80s – and computer games, though considerably cruder and less sophisticated than the dazzling eye candy we take for granted now, were considerably more advanced and more sophisticated than anything Mattel or Atari could hope to give us on video game consoles.  Nintendo began to reverse the tide with its first NES system in 1986.  But it wouldn’t be until the 90s that video game systems began to assert any dominance relative to computer games.

 Carter, Reagan, and Gorbachev.  The 80s started with Carter still in office and the hostages still in Iran.  Come November, no one was impressed with Carter (or Anderson) and Reagan won in 1980 in a landslide.  He won again – also in a landslide – against the hopelessly outmatched Mondale-Ferraro ticket, yet another Democratic ticket which only hardcore Berkeley leftists could ever love.  Reagan left office on January 20, 1989, 8 years after his arrival, leaving the Oval Office to his VP, George Bush Sr., Dubya’s father.  For 99% of Americans, the 80s were about Reagan.

            What was so special about him?  After Vietnam, America had a hangover and inferiority complex.  We were lost in the woods, confused and embarrassed by some punks in black pajamas overseas and their lefty allies at home.  With Reagan, America was BACK, kicking ass and taking names.  First we “liberated” Grenada from a bunch of “skinny, tequila-crazed Marxist Cubans” – somewhat of a hollow victory, but a necessary first step in asserting some military muscle and self-confidence which was badly lost in Vietnam.  We bombed Libya in 1986, telling Kaddafi (Gaddafi? Qaddafi?  Well, he’s running out of time anyway) to stick it where the sun don’t shine.  Then he bumped ugly with the Soviets.  After a series of decrepit Soviet Al Davises dropped like flies in rapid succession – Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko – the new kid, Mikhail Gorbachev, with the funny mark on his head tried to save communism with glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), with the net result that Eastern Europe came unglued and eventually the Soviet Union itself collapsed.  Whether this was really caused by deficit defense spending by us which the Soviets couldn’t hope to match, or due to internal problems which could no longer be crutched, and were actually exacerbated by Gorbachev’s policies, is a difficult question to answer, but mostly plausibly the real answer is simply a combination of the two.

 Yuppies.   BMWs, stockbrokers, etc.  “Wall Street”, the original 1985 movie with Charlie “2.5 Men” Sheen and Michael Douglas, pretty much shows the scene.  Coming in with Reagan’s new America was a blacklash against the leftist malaise of the 70s and a new appreciation for laissez-faire capitalism.  To be rich, wealthy, and arrogant was back in style, and ostentatious displays of wealth in the form of BMWs and Rolexes were not only acceptable but expected.  Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley emerged from the wilderness to take up the ideological crusade which Ayn Rand (RIP 1982) left them, however obliquely.  As with the incessant pop music, not everyone loved yuppies, but they were impossible to ignore.

 TV.  On one hand, there were the tame family-friendly sit-coms: “Family Ties” (1982 to 1989) which gave us Michael J. Fox (also starring in 1985’s “Back to the Future”); “Full House” (1986-1995), where the Olsen Twins began as babies; and “Growing Pains” (1984 to 1992) with Kirk Cameron and Alan Thicke, just to name the most popular.   They seemed to echo the new conservatism with dull plots and predictable morals.  Reagan’s rep was epitomized by Alex Keaton (Michael J. Fox) whose character had an on-screen romance with a pre-“Friends” Courtney Cox; Keaton would have had a Reagan tattoo had he believed in tattoos, but he preferred Porsches to BMW.

            “M*A*S*H” finally ended in 1984, so to replace it as more edgier entertainment were “Knight Rider” (1982-86), “The A-Team” (1983-1986), “ALF” (1986-90), “Cheers” (1982-1993), and “Moonlighting” (Bruce Willis with some hair).  “The Simpsons” and “Seinfeld” made their debuts towards the end of the 80s and are really more 90s shows.  Saturday Night Live started the 80s with Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but ended the 80s with familiar faces such as Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, and Kevin Nealon.  And for style, nothing beat establishing the 80’s like “Miami Vice” (which I never watched).  Finally, after almost 20 years off the small screen, Star Trek was back with a new generation and a new captain, Jean-Luc Picard, boldly going where no ONE (!!) had gone before.

 Movies.  “Beverly Hills Cop”, “E.T.”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi”…Steven Spielberg started his Hollywood dominance in the 1980s.  Competing with Lucas' efforts were the Star Trek films, of which the agreed best, "Wrath of Khan", came out in 1982, followed by "Voyage Home" in 1986.  And Eddie Murphy was at his peak at the time, in live action movies and not playing an animated donkey.