Music of the 80s: what did it mean to you?

A couple of years ago, forum member phish started a thread about the merits of 80s music. Well, he didn't title it very well, and the seven or eight responses it generated weren't constructive, and the thread was suddenly locked. What phish really wanted was a constructive debate on the music of the eighties.

Now, I bought music like crazy in the 80s, especially because of the compact disc craze. But, in later years, I started to dis the music of that era, mainly because it wasn't a good time in my life. Also, whenever I thought of the decade, I thought of bad hair bands, bland pop ballads, white-bread, overwrought power ballads ala Journey, soulless teen and Brit-pop, and bad bar bands. I thought of cheesy videos. I wasn't too crazy about the blues revival, in that everything sounded, well, digital, and it seemed every rock album had to sound like it was recorded in an huge arena, like "Born In the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen. But, after a while, once I came to terms with the decade I love to hate, there was a lot of great stuff. After all, I bought tons of it!

I don't want to talk just about the sound aesthetics of that era. Talk about the 80s music and what it meant to you. Talk about some of the songs you liked or hated.

 

I loved the music of the 80's. At the time, it was fun dance oriented music. Lots of great songs.

 

It meant the world to me. Because the music was more real and yet it had a fun factor too.

 

My god you nailed it.

 

80s metal was and is fantastic.

 

People trash the 80's here bad. In the 80's, it covered the years of 3 to 12 years old for me. The 80's was the soundtrack of my childhood so it made a huge impact in my life in terms of memories and growing up into a teenager. I loved every note of the music in that decade, good and bad, and I wouldn't have chosen to grow up in any other era during my age then. For the age frame I was at then, it was big, glitzy, and happy- like a Disney movie.
I would also say the 90's was the perfect soundtrack for me being 13-23 years old. Full of angst, rebellion, and change.

 

Same here. The 80s covered the years of 8 to 17 for me. I hated the 90s
for the most part. Although, '91 and '92 were pretty cool.

 

I'm a child of the 60s who grew up with the Stones/Beatles/Kinks/Yardbirds, the British Invasion music was everything to me.

I hated the music of the 70s, then and now.

The 80s were different musically, I was an adult, but it was the last decade of pop/rock music that I really enjoyed. I'm not ashamed that I've created an 80s playlist on my iPod filled with fantastic music from Prince, Bangles, Til Tuesday, Go-Gos, Sheila E., Michael Jackson, Sting's early solo work, and so many more, they still knock me out.

 

But, you know, I kind of feel like playing my two Valley Girl Soundtrack CDs now.

 

I'm so glad I wasn't a little kid in the early part of the 90's. Grunge and angst music isn't what a innocent little kid who has the whole world ahead of them wants to hear. Too negative. I ate it up when I was a teenager though.

 

Like every decade, there was both good and bad music being made in the 80's. Some of it has held up quite well, much of it hasn't. But what stands out for me more than anything else, is that it marked the final triumph of a production-oriented, homogenized "sound" over the personal vision and uniqueness of the artist. Which is why 80's music for the most part now sounds more dated than the music of just about any other era.

 

I liked and still like a good bulk of the 80's music. I was aged 10 through 19 during the decade, so this was a prime listening period for me.

My problem was the decade "turned" in 1987 and started resembling something I wanted to disown very quickly. I started hating the music, the movies, television, the fashions, the politics, almost everything. So my opinion of music post December 1986 is very, very colored. My radio listening and music purchases tended to focus on "classic rock" from 1968 to 1974 during this period as a response and were also new listening experiences for me at the time. I was also very influenced by a Rolling Stone issue that came out during their 20th Year Anniversary celebration in 1987 that listed the Top 100 albums of the last 20 years and I went through and bought most of what I didn't already have. Needless to say, Jimi Hendrix's "Electric Ladyland" had a more profound effect on me in 1988 than say George Michael's "Faith".

 

OK OK....

When I think back I did have a lot of 80's music, probably because I was in my 20's, and trying to stay 'current' with music for the sake of my girlfriends and later, wife, as well as my musically indifferent friends. The overwhelming glee-glee-glee / dance dance dance - and relentless faux 'bad ***' posing - not to mention the wardrobe styles - amongst so many artists was just hard to take. Yeah, I did spin the B-52s, Altered Images, Bow-Wow-Wow. I admit it - fun stuff. But just fun - there was no substance to it (to me). Then there was the sound technology. Monstrous drums that echoed long after the hit. The sheer gloss & slickness of it all. It wasn't so much the time or period - for me personally it was a fun decade in almost all aspects, except for having to weather the music that was being pumped out. There was hardly a shred of warmth or rural-ness or tradition to music. It was almost exclusively urban in its sound and image....the ever growing boring suburbs; tiny new plastic Japanese cars parked in well designed driveways, bright sulphur-lit sidewalks curving off into nowhere, and the newer, glitzier areas of cities. I even blame the decade for the death of real Americana and the rise of the new American cold warrior and all around conservative: WWF, t-shirt with air-brushed eagles a-soaring and tight designer jeans, pastel colored cowboy boots, 'the hat' and caterpillar mustache. Thanks 80's! There were some good major acts like U2, John Mellencamp, & Smashing Pumpkins, and there was a growing hard rock scene in the wake of punk such as Motorhead & Black Flag. At home, privately, I spun music from the 50's (Sinatra, jazz, vocalists) plus the usual 60's to 70's stuff (psych, folk & country rock, philly soul, etc.). When I wanted to go out and see live music, it was to a club with maybe a couple hundred capacity to see a punk or thrash band. By the end of the 80's we had, locally, the so-called grunge thing.... which to me was simply a return to the Zep/Sabbath hard rock sound of the early 70's. So the decade closed out OK. The 1990's were vastly vastly better overall for popular music.... but thats another story isn't it?

 

Like any decade, the 80's contributed a considerable amount of dreck along with some brilliant music as well. I can appreciate more from that decade these days - certain things I was down on when popular, but there was a lot of music to be excited about - some I'm still excited about come to think of it. Some artists managed to flow with the times - Santana had some radio-friendly hits in the early 80's that I liked (I'm Winnin'), Heart changed their image and had a renewed popularity that I enjoyed. Other artists seemed to struggle - Bob Dylan and Neil Young had some rough years in the 80's, artistically speaking. I have a good friend who hipped me to Peter Gabriel about a year before the "So" album came out. I remember going to the record store with him to get the album when it was first released, taking it back to his house and listening for the first time. We just looked at each other and said "This is going to be HUGE" and it was! We saw that tour as well. That was fun. So there were some good things happening in the mainstream music scene.
In addition, the underground scene was really exciting as well. Fishbone came out of that (I regret never having seen them when they played locally). I discovered college radio in the 80's and with it lots of great music of the times: Camper Van Beethoven, Husker Du, the Dead Millkmen, Scruffy the Cat, Hoodoo Gurus, the Cramps, fIREHOSE, Mojo Nixon, the Flaming Lips.....the list goes on.
I guess the change in technology - digital recording, digital echo, etc..... didn't suit everybody (plenty of casualties for sure), but then again not everybody was a slave to the new technology either. There was still enough diversity in the music for it to be interesting. And it was the last decade when vinyl was still found in abundance.
Lots of great 80's memories here!
--------- Chris

 

Soundtrack of my childhood and into high school. My favorite decade for variety, plenty of pop hits that I burned myself out on though the '90s and early '00s, but now I'm discovering all the "classic alternative" stuff that I missed as a kid. Deep catalog stuff from The Smiths, The Replacements, Joy Divison, Pixies, etc.

 

There was a lot of crap, for sure. I hated hair metal and synth pop. But my high school and college were entirely in the 80's and there was some good stuff. I hate "80's production" style but there was plenty of non-mainstream stuff that didn't suffer from that.

Good 80's music (some of which I discovered after the 80's):

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
The Kinks
The Replacements
Husker Du
The Fall
Psychedelic Furs
Pixies
London Calling album (1980 I believe)
Dinosaur Jr.
XTC
Hoodoo Gurus
The Alarm
U2
Screaming Blue Messiahs (severely under-known, can't believe that first album is impossible to find)
Mission of Burma, Gang of Four and other quality "post-punk"
Peter Gabriel (III was 1980)

 

Interesting, because the end of 1986 was also my turning point, in that I really became disconnected to the music. It was my dark period. I still bought music, and liked some of it, but for two years, I got no real passion from it. It had nothing to do with politics, but I did have women troubles. I guess that would mess with anyone's mind! I was really miserable with my job, and saw no future. I was more depressed in the late 80s than at any other time in that decade. Things only got better in the fall of 1988. Coincidentally, that's when my interest in music picked back up, and the women I had issues with were gone out of my life! 1989 was great!

I turned 18 in 1980.

 

in the early 80's many kids started bands and there was a huge punk, hardcore, thrash metal thing going on all over... so many bands, many got sucessful and by the end of the 80's it was declning, only to be born again and even bigger... I really appreciate a lot of the popular stuff from then now, more than I did then... There's also much I still dislike... I was 13 in 1980, so I am a child of the 80's all the way... I can't even begin to mention bands, it's just to many! and that is good!

 

People can say what they want about the 80's. But I don't think they can dispute that music was very diverse in that period. There were various genres to suit people's preferences - American pop, British pop, power pop, rock, hard rock, prog rock, punk rock, dance, electronic, R&B, soul, and even early commercial rap. There were also a lot of great albums and great artists. In fact, what I'm hearing on the radio these days owes a lot to that decade.

 

The decade of one hit wonders.

Tim

 

As Pdog notes, the '80s was an incredible decade for punk and metal music. Most of the good stuff never charted or got played on the radio/MTV. It was a great time for the underground and indie labels.

 

The story I remember is the 90s being the death of popular music, as the Nevermind explosion represented the final co-opting of "alternative" rock by megacorporations, the subsequent legion of grunge bands saw the destruction of any notion of tunefulness and melody in popular music, The Chronic saw hip-hop turn from an intelligent genre of music into gangsta nonsense, etc.

The 80s totally ruled, from the last great era of indie/alternative music - R.E.M., the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Echo & the Bunnymen, U2, Big Country, Depeche Mode, New Order, the Cure, the Smiths, Aztec Camera, etc. to the megastars of the day - Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Born in the U.S.A.-era Springsteen, Mellencamp.

 

I think the genres were diverse back then and very segregated. Now the genres blur together a lot. If it was a metal song you knew it back then. Now you would call a song that sounds like metal probably a handful of genres.

 

Alright - two more reasons to give the 80's some respect:

1. Kate Bush - I remember hearing "Running Up That Hill" on the rock radio station in my area (soon to be known as the Classic Rock station) and it blew my mind!

2. Tears for Fears - Songs from the Big Chair. It was 80's, it was popular, it was on the radio and it was (and is) a pretty fabulous record.

---------- Chris

 

Interesting...I agree a lot of what's heard on the radio now owes some debt to the 80's. But of all the genres you mentioned - none are really roots based!

When one thinks of the 80's - what is termed roots music like folk, blues, soul, or country don't really come up - nor are they very 'apparent' in the 80's - roots is music of a predominantly rural pre-modern era America. And I think part of the reason is because those genres were pretty heavily explored /exploited / interpreted in the 60's and 70's. Woodstock, for example, and many popular and influential artists several years before and after - theres a big undercurrent of roots based music going on. The 70's saw a lot of the coming change: glitter, prog, electronic, punk. By the 80's its all pretty new. I guess that is a good thing..... but it left people like me feeling like a lot of the human soul was left behind somewhere. Empty... fun, but ultimately empty. I guess I'm revealing that I love rootsy music more than any other styles.