Ok I have to be totally honest.  These days when you say that you are an eighties child it’s hard to tell whether or not someone is suggesting that they were coming of age in the eighties or born in the eighties.  This much I do know, for me the eighties were a great time to be a teenager.  These days everything is about teenagers, there is a huge business in selling the youth culture to adolescents.  But in the eighties there wasn’t that much and you were forced to be more creative as there wasn’t much else being marketed your way.  There were no cookie cutter looks, few stores if anything as fashion was something of an afterthought and it was a weird place between being a tween or a twenty something.

In the eighties you didn’t have a whole lot to work with and you figured out the best way to make due with what you little you had.  Back then computers didn’t have fancy graphics and there weren’t many choices of video games to choose from.  Computing has advanced since then of course, but on the backs of Apple and Microsoft which made computing a lot more accessible than it otherwise would have been.  These days you hear a lot from Linux enthusiasts and fanboys about how much cleaner their OS runs than Windows.  Yet without Microsoft or Apple I often wonder if Linux would have ever existed quite as it does today. 

Of course the GUI and WYSIWYG are natural extensions of the computing interface and quite honestly, wherever both Windows and Mac OS have derived from, some other company would have done it otherwise.  But back to the eighties, back then you actually learned how to write a computer program, delved into assembly language a bit, and learned how computers connected to each other through BBS.  Computers played games, but it wasn’t about buying a graphics card as expensive as the computer was.  Programmers had a lot more imagination, and the gameplay back then was entirely different than the scripted variety that often exists now on high-end next generation systems.

Musicians had a lot more imagination then as well.  Synthesizers were an evolution of the natural song writing process, not a replacement for it.  It was very competitive; the downside is that the eighties had perhaps more one hit wonders than any other decade as these days even the worst of acts can manage to release a few records.  Clothing sort of sucked though; the color scheme was cool but the actual designs of the clothes themselves weren’t anything to loose sleep over.

Of course today teenagers and now even tweens are wearing those same bright colors, which is pretty cool.  The designs themselves are a whole lot better and more sophisticated than anything anyone was doing back then.  On the other hand couture was a lot more interesting in the eighties, if you had the money to spend for that type of thing. 

For a while there I was obsessed with the eighties, what I’ve found is that if you want material of television, video and cinema from that time you won’t get that far on the Internet.  I don’t want to stockpile footage from that time I want to download it and enjoy it for a short period of time and then return it, sort of like books from a library.  But you won’t find a whole lot on YouTube or Google video.

Is it just me, or did thousands of individuals just leave their VCRs running back then, becuase that is where the overwhelming majority of the television footage seems to come from, particularly commercials.  What is missing is high-quality content from that time; granted there isn’t anything from that time that could benefit from high-defitinion but at least DVD or SDV would do the trick. 

During the eighties I was between the ages of 8 and 18, but I tend to think about it in terms of actually having been all-grown up by then.  What is cool about that time is that there was little progression in anything during that time.  Clothing wasn’t that much different by the end of the eighties than they were at the beginning, computers hadn’t evolved a whole lot, automobile technology brought very little, except anti-lock brakes.  Music had changed very little as well; at that time I was obsessed with rap, but by the end of the eighties people were still sampling rather simple beats, as they were at the beginning of the decade.  Rock may have evolved from it’s art stage towards heavy metal; grunge existed but it wasn’t really that well known until about 91 or 92 when it was more mainstream.

It seems like it was a simpler time.  The worst you had to worry about was nuclear war and HIV, the latter of which wasn’t really on people’s radar until the later half of the decade.  People still think that AIDS was created by the American government, but I’m hard pressed to think that it wasn’t a natural evolution of what had been occuring with STDs for quite some time.  Could be that we actually know what it is now, and hadn’t up until then.

There were a lot of deaths in the eighties; disco was by far one of the biggest and most dramatic declines into obscurity, but there were others.  The blaxploitation film, which resurfaced in the nineties a lot more intelligent and sophisticated than it had ever been.  The Philadelphia Sound, as synthesizers sort of killed of strings, though violins and other strings did make a return in the nineties, though rather short lived.  Soul was decimated, though it returned strong in the late nineties as Neo-Soul.  Rap and Hip-Hop buried Funk, which at the time was about the most controversial way that Blacks could express themselves in music. 

The eighties destoyed that earthy, utilitarian look in fashion; a plaid shirt, khakis and brown shoes.  That look resurfaced in the nineties as well, though with a lot better fabrics and a looser cut.  One thing that didn’t change much was denim; jeans were of an awful quality then and still were until the 21st century.  Innocence, for what it was worth, was expressed in interesting ways, but it went out slowly.  About the only thing that did survive was the supremacy of the United States culturally, something that wasn’t really challenged until the 21st century, when British and Japanese culture took a serious root in America artistically.

It’s hard to remember a time when you didn’t look outside of America for something cool.  Only anime there was back then was Robotech and perhaps Speed Racer, some of the more memorable shows.  Both fit well into the context of America animation because the heavy themes suggested in anime now do not seem to have existed at that time. 

You could do movies like Ghostbusters, 10, Mommie I Shrinked the Kids, 9 to 5, Tootsie, Aliens and a host of other films in the eighties because they fit in well with the absurd nature of pop culture in the eighties at that time.  You could also do television shows like Quantum Leap and Night Rider then as well.  These days we’re talking about the latest Indiana Jones movie, or Rambo or any other movie from that time that has been dreged up for lack of creativity.

I’m still holding my breath until a remake of Robocop comes along, and it will probably suck if anyone was to actually take that own.  Other remakes, like Transformers (there was an animated movie) or Halloween, stand on their own artistically but are easily forgotten.  Halloween benefits from having taken a different approach; I have to watch both Transformers movies to get a feel for how, if anything, has changed. 

Our admiration from the eighties is nothing of the way that it could have been, or even should be.  The eighties will never get the respect that the seventies had, which is odd because looking back on it the seventies just seems to have been a dead and spiritually and emotionally bankrupt time in American society.  I would have had to be there to really know; it looks good in some movies though but it just doesn’t seem as if there was that much going on though.   The nineties may get even less love than the eighties did; for one it took until 2005 to really get into the spirit of the eighties, I wonder if the nineties won’t die a short death in about a short time span of a year or so.  The days of remembering the past are truly behind us.