1980s

Period in which Reagan was president, big hair and no brains were the staple of Top-40 music, and alternative music was actually something alternative, instead of overmarketed mall-ternative garbage.
Contrast with The Nineties, where an endless succession of retro movements provides ample testimony to the lack of creativity of the average Gen-Y-er. A decade before AOL, when The Internet was light on cluelessness, and it was possible to read Usenet in a day.

The 1980s were a time of big hair, Ronald Reagan, Cold War, 8-bit computers yielding to 16-bit, the rise of the IBM-PC, the introduction of GUIs to the retail marketplace, the introduction of 32-bit systems, widespread penetration of personal computers into homes and offices, the George Bush presidency, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, American bombings or invasions of Grenada, Libya, Panama, and others.

If the 80's come back every friggin' year we will never make any progress. According to my television, the 80’s are back again and they brought their music with them. I have been watching this happen since 95 and I am seemingly powerless to do anything about it. It’s known that if one doesn’t know their past, they are doomed to repeat it… What the hell are we doing? Let the 80’s go and stop screwing around. Lets get on with this whole 2000 thing and start making rocket cars.

If some youngster were to ask me what living in the Eighties was like, I would think for a moment (doubtless stroking my long white beard) and give one of three answers:

The first is this: that living in America during the 1980s was like suddenly finding that your country's public life had turned into a giant frat party. Whether you were the kind of person who found a frat party delightful or terrifying largely determined your reactions to the events around you.

The second is this: that at the decade's height, the three most prominent pop culture icons were a beer-selling dog surrounded by simpering women in bikinis, a Coke-selling computerized talking head, and a singing and dancing Black man whose features were surgically altered to make him look whiter.

And the third is this: that a friend of mine in high school once confessed to me that he was often unable to sleep through the night; he would awaken sometime around two in the morning and lie there in his bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking over and over to himself, the missiles could be on their way now.