I’ve spent a fair chunk of the past 20 years telling people “there was a lot more to the 1980s than Flock of Seagulls hair and Members Only jackets and kitsch”.

“Cobra Kai“, the Karate Kid sequel, has been pretty brilliant at showing how those of us who grew up in the ’80s feel like fish out of water today – comically, often brilliantly.

But there was more to it than watching yesterday’s background noise turn into today’s “microaggressions”.

I could work at it for years more, and never nail it as well as this article, by Mark “Not Mike” Judge.

Its observations about how people were, and how kids grew up back then, puts a serious spin on “Cobra Kai’s” comic take. But it wasn’t all laughs. The whole thing is worth a read.

I could have pullquoted most of the article – but this bit here stuck out for me (with some bits and pieces of emphasis added):

“There were novels and short stories that were more literature than pulp fiction—The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Lonesome Dove, Love in the Time of Cholera, Neuromancer, the stories of Ann Beattie. There were films like “Wings of Desire,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “A Room with a View,” “Babette’s Feast,” and “Round Midnight.” Better known but no less intoxicating was the music: New Order, the Replacements, the Pixies, Public Enemy, the Smiths, U2, Suede, Talking Heads. Talk Talk began the decade as a synth-pop group and ended it with two art rock masterpieces, 1988’s “Spirit of Eden” and 1991’s “Laughing Stock.””

“In his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Simon Reynolds notes that to be alive and young and culturally aware in those years was to have a bracing antipathy to nostalgia. We didn’t care about the hippies of the 1960s. The 1970s were there to make jokes about bad clothes and tacky disco. The idea of going back 20 or even 30 years to ape the styles of earlier generations would have been considered demented and embarrassing. We had our own thing. When director Spike Lee was about to release a film or the Blue Nile a new record, nobody had any interest in the big pot cloud that had hovered over Woodstock.”

The whole article is worth a read.

See, Millennials and Zeeps? You *weren’t* the first ones to get annoyed by Baby Boomers.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, March 2nd, 2023 at 11:00 am and is filed under Culture, History And Its Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.