Geoff Carter 17 December 2009 Stories and Appreciations 2,793 views 9 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

You want to know about the 1980s, young America? I’ll tell you. I was there.

The Movies. When the 1980s began we were still seeing so-called “event” movies in dinky mall theaters with cruddy sound. The circumstances under which I first saw “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Blade Runner,” and “E.T.” were actually less ideal than those sparkling cinematic conditions many of us now enjoy in our own homes, with the high-definition and the surround sound and whatnot.

There was no way of telling if a movie was going to be any good or not. There were film critics back in the 1980s – many of the same ones we have today, in fact – but we didn’t listen to them back then, either. There was no Ain’t It Cool News; there was no Twitter. Our sole advance notion of a film’s content was what we gleaned from thirty-second television ads. As a result, my parents once made a split-second judgment call to take my sister and me to “Raiders of the Lost Ark” instead of “Clash of the Titans,” because they thought the latter film “might be too violent.” Minutes later, some guy had a spike driven through his head and another was killed by thousands of poisonous blowing darts.

Speaking of inappropriate content: The MPAA’s intermediate PG-13 rating didn’t exist until 1984 (it was created on the suggestion of Steven Spielberg, whose intense “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” was nearly slapped with an R), and it didn’t come into wide use until the 1990s – which meant that when teenagers sneaked into horror films and sex comedies, they had copious amounts of nudity, profanity and gore to digest. No one in Hollywood could yet imagine a “Die Hard” movie that wasn’t rated “R”; no one had yet thought to sand off those edges to get more butts in the seats. It was a glorious time. And oh yeah, I guess some of the movies were pretty good, as long as you avoided anything with Andrew McCarthy or Kim Cattrall.

The Music. When I was in high school, your musical tastes amounted to roughly half of how your peers defined you as a person. My friends were punks, skas, new romantics, metalheads, death rockers (now “Goths”) and “those guys who like The Smiths.” It’s probably the same for teenaged kids today, right down to “those guys who like The Smiths.” Even now, they stubbornly resist a handy nickname. Smithies? Smoothies?

One of the primary differences between kids now and kids then is that we had less sources for new music back in the day. I heard about the Durutti Column, the Replacements and Colourbox years before I actually heard their music. Sure, there were listening stations at Tower Records (could we ever have imagined a world in which record stores were an endangered species?), but they were loaded with the artists that the major labels wanted you to buy, not the artists that the independent labels desperately wanted you to hear.

There was a tremendous amount of good music made from 1980-1990, and we’ve yet to hear all of it. I never thought I’d say this, but MySpace has proven invaluable to me time and again in that regard: If someone mentions an unfamiliar band or artist to me, I can hear the music for myself within seconds. If only we’d known that the music world was a much, much bigger place, with realms farther than A Flock of Seagulls could fly. If only.

The Phones. Mine was beige and push-button and anchored to the wall of my room with a too-short length of cord. I couldn’t use it to send text messages or make cheap long-distance calls or receive naked pictures of my girlfriend, but I did learn how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Hot Cross Buns” on the buttons.

Communication was more difficult across the board. I wonder if teens still write notes on paper, slip them into a friend’s locker and actually wait for the response. I wonder if being able to say more to your friends is a good thing, or if it makes quick-fuse friendships burn faster.

The Everything Else. It’s not all that different today. We wore funny clothes in the 1980s, but they’re the same funny clothes teens wear now. (Thanks to Hot Topic and the like, they’re even easier to find.) We played games that required one central nerd and a guild of followers. Television shows were either brainless or brilliant, and the latter variety still got canceled more often than the former. We had a telegenic president who many people loved and an equal number of people despised. Our favorite pop divas wore little clothes and couldn’t really sing well. We were addicted to Atari, Intellivision, Nintendo, Commodore. People were discriminated against and wars were fought, and while some of us made up our minds to do something about it, most of us didn’t.

If there’s one thing I miss about the 1980s, something that I wish the teens of today could have, it is only this: We only had the most vague sense that everything we knew had happened before. Our parents told us that their teenage years had been much the same as ours, with the same joys and heartbreaks and pains and revelations, and we sorta believed them. Today, a teenager can get on the web and discover that The Killers really are a Duran Duran ripoff, and that we were just as goofy for “The Lost Boys” as they are for “Twilight.” They can recognize their faces in our own. And though our ignorance was part of what made the 1980s fun, I sort of envy the myriad ways through which today’s teens can retrace their steps.

But that’s all. When my friends get to talking about how freaking wonderful the 1980s were, I don’t get sentimental or sad or even annoyed. I simply say this: Yeah, I had fun then. And I have fun now.

- Geoff Carter

PHOTO BY ELVISSA