MATTSPLAINED [] MSP129 [] The 80s: The Day-Glo Decade Don’t Quit
The 80s. A great place to visit, a terrible place to live. Why has our obsession with 80s culture lasted for 20 years? It’s time to throw away the neon tees and create something new.
Photo by Unsplash. Glitching by Kulturpop.
Hosts: Matt Armitage & Jeff Sandhu
Produced: Jeff Sandhu for BFM89.9
TRANSCRIPT
On last week’s MSP, Matt Armitage had a brain wave. Generally speaking, these are dangerous things accompanied by considerable suffering for other people. This one, if it works, is likely to be no more than a crime against taste. Yes, today we’re talking about The 80s. The decade that just won’t quit.
So. The 80s?
I don’t know - you tell me.
I was there. For pretty much all of it.
And sometimes I feel like I’m still there.
I walk into stores and they’re selling clothes like the ones that looked terrible on me 30 years ago.
And look worse now?
Well, yeah, we hadn’t added Lycra to everything back then.
Now I just end up looking like one of those neon caricatures you see in sweat suits and head bands in comedies.
I should advise you that your use of the word neon is being strictly monitored for this show…
And rightly so. That’s perhaps one of my favourite things about the decade, the total absence of colour sense that I still display today.
I force myself to wear mostly black and navy clothes because if I’m left to choose the things I want to wear, I’ll end up looking like one of those orphan balls of Play-doh with all the different colours smooshed together.
Probably best that I barely leave the house anymore.
Cultural revivals are nothing new - we recycle fashions and tastes all the time - but those revivals are often short-lived.
A spring and summer fashion collection, a movie remake or two, some song covers or samples.
Normally it’s a Flash in the pan - culture moves on. But the 80s won’t move on.
In what sense?
We were announcing and celebrating the 80s revival in the early noughties and it never really stopped.
I think pretty much every TV show and movie from that era has been remade.
Charlie’s Angels, Dynasty, 21 Jump St, Starsky & Hutch, the A Team, Ghostbusters.
The list of etc etc goes on forever.
This year was supposed to be the year that Top Gun made a high altitude comeback.
Not sure when we’ll see it now.
It’s like there’s no stone of 80s pop culture that hasn’t been given another go around.
Even the games have come back…
Not just the games - even their music.
We had stuff like the 8-Bit chip music scene that emulated the kind of music that you’d get in video games and consoles in the 80s.
Which is weird. Because that music sounded like this:
Play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=18&v=NTa6Xbzfq1U&feature=emb_logo
That was. of course, the Super Mario Bros Main Theme for the NES - Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985.
And it’s the sound of nightmares. Yet chip music was huge for about 30 seconds in probably the mid noughties.
But even that’s back. The remix is being remixed.
The chiptune scene has been profiled for sites like Vice…
The home of the middle aged male…
Exactly. But while we’ve seen 80s nostalgia ebb and flow it’s never really gone away.
It’s 2020 - the 80s lasted 10 years but the revival has lasted 20.
That’s really strange - it makes you wonder, what are we celebrating anyway?
That’s why I mentioned the chiptune scene.
The music - chiptune, synthlwave, darkwave - seems to be looping that revival from the early noughties and adding an extra dollop of 80s day-glo.
And this is where shows like Stranger Things come in?
Yeah. We’ve also seen this wave of culture that’s way beyond pastiche.
Amazon had a show - now cancelled - that was picture perfect 80s.
Red Oaks, set in a country club. And a good chunk of the episodes were directed by Hal Hartley, one of the go to indie filmmakers of the late 80s and 90s.
But Stranger Things does something else. It’s more 80s than the 80s were.
In what way?
Go back and watch something like ET, which ST is an obvious analogue of.
ET looks a bit weird and dated. It looks like a washed out version of the 80s.
ST is the version of the 80s I have in my head.
It’s what I remember movies like Weird Science or Lost Boys looking like.
Rather than what the actually look like when I watch them back.
There was a Netflix show that came out last year - Daybreak that recycled every single 80s teen movie cliche.
You had the jocks and the nerds and all the other social groups in a post apocalyptic wasteland.
You had the Red Dawn referencing - kids will save the world motifs.
The Mad Max cannibals in leather fetish wear motifs.
The outsider skater kid hero.
It was a giant Ferris Bueller tribute with a zombie backdrop, with Ferris himself, Mathew Broderick flipping his role, becoming the evil school principal.
It wasn’t always great - but it was always glorious to look at.
And it was sadly cancelled after one season.
Perhaps because teen comedies that appeal to middle aged men are a little…
You don’t have to finish that sentence.
I get where you’re going.
And you’re right, we’ll get to that. But we’re even seeing that 80s aesthetic popping up in other shows.
Look at the neon wasteland of 2011’s Hobo with a shotgun starring Rutger Hauer.
Where everything is monochrome and washed out apart from the day-glo graf on the walls of almost every shot.
Then there are the time travel shows.
Time Travel shows?
They’re set now but everything looks like it was from the 80s.
The End of the [pause] World. It’s not at the neon end of the spectrum, it’s at the beige jumper, dull sitcom end of the 80s rainbow with a heavy dash of Twin Peaks sprinkled into Season 2.
Its anti-heroes are outsiders disconnected from today’s world, so it doesn’t seem weird to them that they inhabit the fringes of society - decaying pubs and cafes and diners with interiors that haevn’t been updated since 1982.
Because those places do exist, especially on the more marginal edges of society.
Then you have shows like Sex Education at the other end of that spectrum.
It’s another high school type show.
It’s firmly rooted in today, smartphones, insecurities.
But visually the references are all 80s.
The kids wear bright neon clothing and the girls have big hair.
They ride around on vintage racing bikes.
Their parents only drive vintage - terrible - 1980s cars.
So you have this odd juxtaposition going on.
So, today is an exercise in 80s pop culture references that you like?
Do you think this show could ever be that self indulgent?
Play: 0m57s to 1m02s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-YTgU1ehJQ
Ok. maybe a little self-indulgent.
Last week when we talked about generations, we talked about them getting stuck.
How everyone below the age of 40 is somehow a Millennial.
And this 80s culture loop seems to mirror that same trend.
Is this where you blame everything on Gen X again?
Probably. We touched on my generation being the first one to avoid growing up.
While I was preparing the notes for this show I was listening to an Apple radio show - the Echo Chamber hosted by former Beastie Boy Mike D.
The guests on that show were his Beastie Boy partner Ad-Rock and Public Enemy frontman Chuck D.
Mike D and Ad Rock are my age. Chuck D is almost 60.
And they were talking about hip hop culture and its origins. And it was fantastic.
But you ask yourself: should it be?
Has my generation, the Xers, done this enormous brainwashing act on Gens Y and Z?
Because you never grew up?
Kinda. The 80s was our decade.
A decade of VHS tapes. Skate videos. Duran Duran and hair metal.
Big hair, bad clothes and cheap hairspray.
Video games, sneakers and comics.
There’s that old saying about your pop culture references stopping at the point where you have kids.
So you have a generation of pop culture nerds who never really survived grunge.
Have we imprinted our tastes so heavily on the next 2 generations that everything is seen through the prism of 80s culture?
Are we only going to see real cultural change with the Gen Alphas and Betas?
You can see it in a sense. When you find your way into the world of Alt Tik Tok, there are no real grounding points.
It feels a bit like punk did in the 1970s. A conscious rejection of the culture that came before it.
Not just a reinvention but a new starting point.
Doesn’t that make you sad?
No. The 80s were awful. Which we’ll talk about after the break.
It wasn’t cool or retro - it was just a time where stuff didn’t really work.
I enjoy all of the modern interpretations of 80s culture way more than the stuff that actually came from that time.
The Canadian show Slasher is a great example. Way more fun than the actual 80s slasher flicks.
Florence and the Machine and The Killers nail kitchen sink 80s pop perfectly without that tinny, lumpen quality a lot of the real 80s pop has.
Admittedly, I’m biased. I don’t spend a lot of time looking back.
I always want to know what comes next.
Was anything better then that it is now?
Sure, some of the snacks but only because we used to pack them with carcinogens.
I always laugh when people say things like it’s a travesty that the formulation of newspaper ink changed because it changed the taste of food that was wrapped in it.
Because they always say things like - well, it never did me any harm.
No. You developed emphysema, diabetes and obesity entirely independently of your teenage lifestyle.
You’re living the 80s dream.
When we come back: the MSP diary of a 1980s survivor.
BREAK
Before the break we were talking about neon jumpsuits and somehow ended up at obesity and diabetes. Matt, is it fair to say you weren’t a fan of the 1980s?
Dear Diary. I do get that reaction. I have had people say to me it must have been so awesome to have experienced that decade.
No, it really wasn’t.
The 90s were a lot more interesting for me - that’s where I really see the bedrock for where we are now starting to coalesce.
But we’ll get to the 90s on another episode.
You know what happened when I turned the TV on early in the morning as a kid?
No idea…
Nothing. You’d turn the TV on and get this weird thing called the Test Card.
This large circle surrounded by multi-coloured squares that was designed to help you get good colour calibration on your TV.
In the centre, the nightmarish vision of a young girl clutching a demonic clown doll, playing noughts and crosses on a blackboard.
You’d wake up on a Saturday morning and put the TV on and that evil creature would inhabit your living room until the kids TV shows finally started at 9.30am or thereabouts.
Wonder why the 80s was full of slasher horror movie flicks like Friday the 13th?
That Test Card picture.
Why has my generation not grown up?
Because we were too terrified to sleep.
Years of insomnia have left us emotionally underdeveloped and infantile.
But surely it must have been exciting to be around at the dawn of the personal computing revolution?
Sure. My brothers and I had a ZX spectrum.
Which, like 99% of kids we used exclusively for playing games.
Some of them were cool. My favorite was JetPac.
You didn’t do much, flew around bursting bubbles.
I guess you might call that a formative experience.
But you didn’t just play a game. You planned to play a game.
Because it could take you half a day to load it up.
Because they were on cassettes?
Yeah. You connected a tape player to the computer and loaded the game in as sound.
Early dial up modems worked the same way. The data was transferred to the computer’s memory as tones.
So, even those very basic games were really slow. My spectrum had 48k RAM.
And if the computer didn’t hear the game properly, it would crash and you’d have to start over,
A good day was 15 to 20 mins.
And, of course, like all cassettes they stretch and get damaged the more times they’re used.
They literally wear out - so cassettes of your favorite games might be subject to drop outs, especially if they were printed onto cheap tapes.
Presumably the same thing happened to music?
Yeah. The Walkman was the first portable music source.
You can go back and listen to MSP85 if you want to hear me waxing lyrical about the Walkman.
But they were huge in the 80s, along with portable boom boxes.
But those cassettes, great as they were, were a weak link.
They broke and they stretched. They got tangled up.
I don’t know anyone of my age who hasn’t spent hours spooling tape with a pencil because some cheap player snarled it up and spilled it all over the place.
When you compare it to what we have now, technology in the 80s was rubbish.
You really just mean smartphones, don’t you?
In a way. I have very few photos of myself as a child.
Partly, because I’m a vampire.
Mostly because when you’re using film, you really have to know what you’re doing with a camera.
If you look at a random sample of digital photos, most people do not know how to use a camera.
Even slightly. When you go to people’s houses and they show you their print photo albums
The photos in those albums represent about 0.3% of the photos that were actually taken.
The ones that were over-exposed, or cut off someone’s head.
Or the photographer forgot to wind the film on and ended up taking multiple shots on the same frame.
People love film cameras!
I love film cameras. But only as a wild card.
Your smartphone is a much better back up because you get to do it over.
What about the people who say that it’s too immediate, that you end up taking pictures of things that are irrelevant?
The problem with memories is that they’re not curated in advance.
You don’t get 2 weeks warning that you’re going to experience a precious moment.
At the very least you want the image to approximate the scene it’s capturing.
If the blurring is so bad you can’t tell your Aunt Carol from a crow, you’ve wasted your time.
And as for sharing saucy shots - good luck.
try anything like that with a film camera in the 80s and you were likely to get arrested when you picked up the prints from the photo shop.
Do you want to talk about 80s food?
I grew up in the UK in the 1980s.
It has taken me years of therapy to forget the food.
It mostly came in bright colors and being highly processed was a badge of honor.
If it had any nutritional value, it was probably a state secret.
In the UK, you didn’t eat your food until it had surrendered to you.
I remember going on a school exchange to France in my teens and being astonished by baguettes and pate.
Do you know how deprived your palate has to be to be impressed by pate?
People in the 80s did not take photos of their meals.
They wanted to forget not record them.
For the sake of our younger listeners, how did people without smartphones make plans?
You did a ton of waiting.
If it was for a night out you’d call around on the landline - you might get someone’s answer phone if they were particularly wealthy and tech savvy - and make plans to meet at a certain place at a certain time.
If you moved on from there before everyone else arrived, you might leave a message with the bar staff or cafe owner
if they were particularly helpful or knew you and they would tell your friends were you were headed to next.
You could spend half your night tracking your friends down, popping into all the places you thought they might go.
You made plans and you simply trusted that people would turn up, and if they didn’t, you carried on without them.
None of this ‘text me when you get home, so i know you’re safe’.
You’d meet a friend the following Friday night and find out they were mugged on the way home and lay in an alley all night and the rest of the weekend at the ER.
No hashtag thoughts and prayers.
Just a, well, you look alright now, what do you want to drink?
You make it sound like the Stone Age?
It wasn’t that it seemed difficult or backwards at the time.
That was reality. That was how we did things.
It’s not like there was an alternative.
But it’s very different from the rosy image of the 80s we see reflected back in pop culture today.
That’s why I say I enjoy this remix of 80s culture a lot more than the reality.
I get to enjoy music, movies and TV on demand.
I have pretty close to all the world’s information in my hands at an instant, not just the 3 books I was allowed to borrow at any one go from the public library.
I get to look at information from multiple angles and perspectives and make up my own mind about it.
Is it perfect? No, of course not. Which is why I’m looking forward to what comes next.
Is it better? Millions of times in millions of ways.
We’re not even in a studio together. We talk over the phone and I send my recording to you over the Internet in a few seconds.
How can you not be impressed by that?
Do you really want the 80s to end?
I really do. When you get to the remix of the remix of the remix…
Yes, it’s really meta but it’s also a little bit dull.
My mum keeps telling me how much she hates the phrase the new normal.
She can’t wait for things to go back to the old normal.
I never want the old normal.
I hope that something else comes out of this.
Not a new normal but a different reality.
Sure, it can borrow elements of the 80s and the 90s.
The 1730s for all I care. But I think we need some different touchpoints.
A new way of looking at creativity and art and content creation.
Will you be able to understand it?
Hopefully not. If I can’t, it probably means it’s working.
I’m totally lost when I look at TikTok, which is fun.
It forces me to change my thinking, to try and understand.
Cultural progression may be weird, but generally, it’s a healthy thing.
There’s a fine line between continuity and stagnation.
I look forward to becoming completely irrelevant.
Pop culture will march on and I’ll still be wearing shocking green prints and patterned board shorts.
So you don’t have to.
Episode Sources:
https://www.vulture.com/2016/10/2016-why-are-we-obsessed-with-the-80s.html