Defend the indefensible: The 1980s

Ten whole years. Yes, you'll offer the odd masterpiece of this or that genre, but really now, admit it: the 80's were fucking awful.

Music- shit. More about fashion (which was shit) than music (which was still shit). Politics was shit, movies looked and sounded shit and were mainly shit made by genuine shits. TV was ok I guess?

How was literature? Was print media already shit by then?

film was especially terrible. on another thread just now, could only think of Akira, Cutter's Way, Local Hero, Blue Velvet and Videodrome as truly excellent works (doubtless more will come with thought, but that was all that came initially)

there was a lot of really brilliant music, though. not going to start to count the names but there's plenty. maybe not quite as many as in the decades on either side but still an awful lot.

books? probably shit. pynchon sat it out then (apparently) ripped it a new fucken asshole with vineland

tv? dunno

Well i think that shit in comparison with all the other decades means it was shit tbh. And the shit music was incredibly shit.

TV- well i mean tinker tailor and macguyver save any decade (or century) p much by themselves.

suppose john irving was a decent writer somewhat concentrated around the 1980s, the hotel new hampshire made for some excellent found-reading on holiday last summer

Hollywood films weren't terrible so much as average or made to match a fading idea of Quality Cinema. Consult the list of Oscar winners. The nineties and 2000s produced worse.

soto I admire and largely share yr movie taste - what's the really excellent stuff I'm missing, if any?

Tbrr literature tends, and imo obv, not to maybe inhabit or represent its decade like music, tv or most movies do (there are exceptions eg movie period pieces, the in the 80s these still maybe tended towards cokey excess regardless of era targeted) but then idk literature i guess

Alfred, this thread comes to you fresh from the bowels of not one but two 80s oscar winner threads. The pickings are slim and the leavings are largely woeful.

'repo man'

'robocop'

'the right stuff'

'raging bull'

'raiders of the lost ark'

any movie not starting with the letter 'r' sucks though

wait nm

'predator'

early 80s music was fun and unique (human league, specials, adam ant). after 1985 it was shit for the most part though

1986 World Cup - hasnt been a better one since

that all seems suspiciously high-grade popcorn trash, call it art if you must but I don't see the big questions being tackled, sorry for my unrepentant movie rockism or s/thng

1980s music just isn't getting dismissed in my presence. cardiacs, foetus, xtc, the cure, talk talk for starters, and that's without thinking

I'll give the 80's sport, it can keep yr three quoted artists tho xps

i have a hard time believing that the worst '80s music is really THAT much worse than the worst '70s music, et al.

but it was pretty much an all-time low point for american television -- can't think of any extended period of time since the '50s, seriously, with so high a concentration of absolute unredeemable shit. bland family sitcoms, badly animated toy commercials disguised as kids' shows. reagan probably was the best thing on television most weeks.

that is clearly untrue when "The Cosby Show" exists.

Im taking notes al btw, i'm hear to be convinced by all means. McTiernan is obv.

decade of mctiernan

ha -- and I'm old enough to remember the wretched state of Hanna-Barbera cartoons from the seventies. Believe me: Transformers and G.I. Joe looked better and boasted much better scripts.

The pickings are slim and the leavings are largely woeful.

have you seen the nineties and 2000s Oscar nominees? At least the eighties edition promised a boring meal with your parents.

it is kind of amazing at how terrible some of the most popular shows were. lots of good comedies and the occasional solid drama but today just try to watch some of the action shows taking up airtime back then. i do blame reagan.

the 80s were peak era for underground horror, sci-fi, punk odysseys, b-movie sleazefests.

I never had a boring meal with my parents, but idg the ref prob

answer my goddamn question xxxp

got the feeling, perhaps erroneously, that digitisation made moviemaking much easier during the 1990s, with the consequent that a lot more movies were made, especially by small studios, some of which were brilliant - an opportunity that wasn't quite so prevalent beforehand

Besides, to taxonomize an album, novel, etc as a product of the decade instead of acknowledging how politics and approaches to technology and modes of discourse helped produce the work of art itself strikes me as weird.

WORST of the Best Picture Oscar Noms (Only The '80s Edition)

Out of those, isnt it only scifi that produced anything other than trash in reasonable quantity tho? xps

i know you had 'cosby' and 'roseanne' and a couple other things, but this is still the decade that gave us 'charles in charge,' 'who's the boss,' 'small wonder,' and 'full house.' and don't get me started on the fuckin 'a team' and any of the other godawful adventure shows.

most '70s tv animation i've seen is pretty terrible too. hanna-barbera should've been closed down by government order in 1963.

Produced the art and the decade itself tbh, rate it all

we're using '80's' as shorthand for '#reaganomics #maggiethatcher #wheredowegofrompunk #GREED #experimentalismhangover' I think

The intersection of punk, New Wave, cheaper technology, and MTV for a few years produced the most thrilling pop music since the sixties. Film boasted Almodovar, Cronenberg, loads of good cheap horror films. Philip Roth wrote his best novels.

Hardly a moribund decade.

Another thing, the buildings

I was only around for 11 months of the 80s and I don't remember anything about it, so they couldn't have been that great.

i know you had 'cosby' and 'roseanne' and a couple other things, but this is still the decade that gave us 'charles in charge,' 'who's the boss,' 'small wonder,' and 'full house.' and don't get me started on the fuckin 'a team' and any of the other godawful adventure shows.

I'll raise you "Home Improvement" and "Mad About You."

xp moribund was not, iirc, the prevailing criticism.

if the internet had just started existing in 1977 we'd have been spared a lot of bullshit, probably

would I like Almodovar? weird hole in my knowledge. when it comes to flamboyant actors-on-actual-drugs hypersexualised postfranco cinema there's an absolute doozy from 1980 called Arrebato (anyone else seen? it's insane + great)

probably was the last great decade we'll ever have for comic strips -- watterson, breathed, larson all doing their best work.

vice squad, starring wings hauser as a vicious pimp, released in 500+ theaters nationwide. and it's good!

the '80s had near dark, the '00s had underworld and subsequently twilight.

the die hard franchise, handed off to some hack.

rambo >>>>>>>>> expendables

darragh u're so right the 80s were the fucking worst - esp the music, but also the fashion and the movies and the culture

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt internet only a few years late xxxps

Point scored on syndicated comic strips, but hardly a v huge % of what is 'the 80s' had you to define the beast

It is insane to say 80s music was bad. I mean even if you just count HIP HOP, the 80s kick all the other decade's asses combined!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIbhkQlQAsU

GDANSK WAS CRAP
WARSAW WAS CRAP
SOLIDARITY WAS CRAP

lj most of the good music of the 80s was never heard on the radio. It was a shitty decade to grow up in. Fucking evil cunt Thatcher.

Good morning britain

Ive......been expecting u

The 80s had so much amazing music, a lot of it with its origins in the decade too: post-punk, synth pop, electro, industrial, italo, house, techno, loads of metal sub-genres and so much more.

THE CLAES WERE CRAP
THE HAIR WAS CRAP

Otm
Otm

Lots of ad threadinem itt, only sporadic defending (which has been duly noted btw) sez a lot

good decade for comic books

Hollywood was the best that it's ever been.

my defence wd be that decades since have been as crap to more crap

good times nudgewinkheheh

xp but nv that's got to be filtered through yr ageing joints and declining sense of wonder combined with understandable (yet v obvly 'questionable') nostalgia for the days of yr youth. Whereas the 80s were demonstrably and scientifically proven shit.

the 1970s was the last good decade, my age is only tangential to this objective truth

There we can at least park. Now, have you really considered britpop fairly?

i've been more than fair, nobody has died by my hand

now ask yourself, in what ways was Britpop not a celebration of the world born out of the 80s?

You can do that to greats born in any age, but sure why would you? As well claim idk theory of relativity as a work of *googles* 1879

<3 Noodle Vague
<3 Prolapse
however the 80s were just fine by me: italodisco, electro and minimal synth, what more could you want?

(I hear some American bands with guitars may have put out some good records that decade too)

80s the last decade in which the US was not involved in a major shooting land war someplace. What was our biggest boots-on-the-ground military excursion of the decade? Grenada?

Everything colored coral and seafoam and hot pink.

glad to see the US not involved in Nicaragua or Afghanistan or etc during the 80s

i like tons of cultural things made in the 80s btw, but "Deanshanger" is always my first thought when this topic comes up

plus ugggggh nostalgia

except for the 70s and backwards, when the working class was pre-lapsarian

feel like everything was stolen from me before i knew i had it

Oof, I forgot about our Central and South American adventures. Fuck an 80s.

(I mean, I'm 43, I grew up in the 80s, most of my favorite movies and music are from the 80s, but the decade that inflicted Reagan on the world is pretty much the worst.)

hey the UK was still grimly defending the crumbs of empire in the 80s too

Up to 1994 tyvm

up to present day tbh

w/o gettin all frank sinatra on you they were verry good yearz to be single/20smthng

pros: electro R&B, rap, postpunk, musicvideo until thru 85 or so, "young british novelists", young ladies w/angular haircuts & miniskirts...

cons: reagan, thatcher, hair metal, tom cruise movies, precocious american short story writers, coke & dope...

kate bush should be in here somewhere too

I mean, there's loads more amazing, amazing music I haven't mentioned, but she stands out as being specifically of and redemptive of the 80s

I'm the Pied Piper of the 1980's
Got a long hard dick for all of the ladies

give me a single better rhyme about the 60s, 70s, 90s, 00s, or 10s.

It turns out some of those gated-snare mid tempo shoulder pad jacket wearing pop bands were pretty good. I can't believe I came around to a few of them. Just a few.

hill street blues was p good iirc

Old people: suck it

(aimless eagerly grabs a drinking straw, looks around for a treat)

Countdown to snoball

stranger things turned me around on this, now the 80s were good fyi

But of course that show couldn't have existed in the 80s

Decades are cobblers really, eras are where it's at

to defend the 80s, I'd point out that the people living then were mostly doing the best they knew how to do. like now.

thatcher and reagan weren't

I'm of the opinion that the illusions that Thatcher and Reagan peddled to society were usually illusions they had already bought into and believed in, and the lies that they knew to be lies but told us anyway they rationalized as necessary lies, required to achieve ends they embraced as the best alternatives they thought could be achieved. That quagmire of willful blindness, ignorance, rationalizations and lies is a quintessentially human failing, and what makes Thatcher and Reagan so much worse than average humans is they held vastly more power over social outcomes than the average human.

80s one of the best movie decades - action cinema reaching its zenith with Die Hard, Carpenter creating genre masterpieces with They Live, The Thing
Cronenberg and Scorsese doing some of their best work
Teen movies even transcending their limitations with Heathers

and willow

Mishima tbh