(Yet another brain-teaser from Tell-Tale Heart/Town Crier Ray Brandes: Let’s reassess the decade we were too cool to live through the first time!)
Like many idealistic teenagers who had grown up in the ’70s, I looked forward to the dawn of the 1980s. The music of the new decade would be aggressive and forward-looking but rooted in the coolest sounds of the ’50s and ’60s.
The punk revolution would start to bear fruit; the material excesses of the late ’70s would be a thing of the past, and a new era of social justice would see the eradication of poverty and war. It would be my generation’s chance to distance itself from the Boomers and their self-righteous bombast.
Then, beginning with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan on Jan. 20, 1981, reality began to sink in. The future marched to the beat of evangelicalism, nationalism and elitism. It had an MBA and drove a BMW. It wore a mushroom haircut, mom jeans and shoulder pads. “The Final Countdown” played in the distance.
While MTV was marketing its soulless, over-coiffed and overproduced pablum as the New Wave, my crew and I were having nothing to do with it. We rejected the ’80s’ music, pop culture, politics and fashion, instead finding refuge in a past when sounds seemed louder, dirtier, meaner and just plain cooler.
Some of us revived garage punk, modernism and psychedelia; others invented hardcore, and still more were inspired to create new sounds rooted in rock’s history. This was the Ché Underground. We didn’t fit in anywhere, so we created our own reality.
As the decade wore on, I found myself retreating farther into the past. The ’60s-influenced scenes had become too popular for me, and I buried myself in traditional blues and country and western. In retrospect, perhaps I took my near-pathological total rejection of the 1980s a bit too far.
But by the end of the decade — due in part to some deprogramming on the part of a couple of girlfriends — I began to warm to some of the music and pop culture around me. Over the past couple of decades I have begun to grudgingly accept much of what I initially ignored, and at times I even (dare I say it) wax nostalgic. And much of what used to rattle my cage now seems naïve and quaint in comparison to our present age of instant gratification and technological connectedness.
We’ve discussed the ’70s at length — the music we liked, the clothes we wore, even the toys we played with. Now let’s take that next step. What do you remember fondly from the ’80s?
— Ray Brandes