Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/15/cover-reveal-for-my-friends.html
…
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…and she used to be mine? 
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That’s great, but I’m a sucker for this shit, seeing as I’ve watched Stranger Things through 4 times…
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In reality, the 80s were just another very boring decade with bad fashion, dull music and an aimless youth generation that was terrified to have sex for fear of AIDS. But I love how contemporary folklore is turning this around.
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I wonder what the differences were between Thai and Cambodian pop music in 1986…
Err. Cold War at its coldest for 20 years, with real risk of nuclear war. Soviets in Afghanistan. The Rubik’s Cube. The Iran-Iraq War. Reaganism. Thatcherism. The IBM PC, Apple Macinstosh, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amiga. Murders or attempted murders of John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Anwar Sadat, Marvin Gaye and Indira Gandhi. Mount St Helens. The War on Drugs. The Space Shuttle. The Falklands War. MTV. The VCR. The Sony Walkman. Bhopal. The Brixton, Toxteth and Broadwater Farm riots. Ethiopian famine. The Rainbow Warrior. The UK miners’ strike. Fall of Ferdinand Marcos. The Challenger disaster. Surrogate babies. The first intifada. Chernobyl. USS Vincennes and Iran Air 655. Lockerbie. Exxon Valdez. Hillsborough. Tiananmen Square. The fall of the Berlin Wall.
Bad, but hardly boring. Big hair! Big shoulders! Big make-up! On men and women alike!
Madonna, Michael Jackson, The Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Run-DMC, The Dead Kennedys, REM, The Stone Roses, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Pet Shop Boys, The Smiths, Eurhythmics, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Culture Club, Depeche Mode, New Order, Heaven 17, Ultravox, The Cure, Madness, Sade, George Michael, Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Howard Jones, The Sisters of Mercy, Motorhead, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Kate Bush, Clannad, Men At Work, Men Without Hats, Dexys Midnight Runners, UB40, Musical Youth, Simple Minds, Tears for Fears: nothing there that floated your boat?
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Also the sex thing… we were all having sex, no one I knew was afraid of aids cuz we all had comprehensive sex ed and access to birth control and condoms.
Despite the spectre of aids, I think it was a far more sexually liberated decade that the current youth are living through.
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I wasn’t 
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With apologies to Larkin…
So life was never better than
In nineteen eighty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the troubles with Iran
And the Beatles on CD.
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I’m not saying the 80’s are boring from today’s perspective. But they were extremely boring then because hell, that’s the way most of us felt about it back then. If I went back knowing what I know now, perhaps I’d appreciate it more than I did then. At the time, we felt like the party was over and our parents had smoked all the pot and left us with a TV dinner. Seriously and all that 80’s stuff is not half as cool when it’s the mainstream culture.
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Meanwhile, 150 miles down the road from me:
And that’s just the sort of thing egregious enough for national coverage. Lower-level versions of this shit were happening everywhere in the US. There was a huge panic about AIDS, except from some prominent religious figures who said AIDS was a good thing because it was killing gay men.
We had Reagan, and we had none of those things.
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Yeah, I remember that, our own tainted blood scandal was more about hepatitis C.
I just remember baskets of condoms everywhere. In the nurses office, in the guidance counsellors office, handed out in Health class. Just condoms, everywhere. We all had them.
On the flip side of my rather urban blythe attitude to all of this… my Mom was also cautioning me not to hug or share drinks with the gay man I worked with. To which I’m sure I responded with teenage aplomb. So while the kids weren’t worried I’m sure the adults were.
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But… but… if there are condoms everywhere, then kids will all of a sudden want to have sex! Now that they don’t have access to condoms, they don’t have sex ever! And abstinence is 100% effective!
Don’t mind me, I’m just randomly channeling Readers’ Digest circa 1985.
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I remember that feeling, being a teen in the '80’s. The packaging of nostalgia wasn’t new–as an older friend of mine says “We felt nostalgia for the 50’s while it was still the '50’s” but it seemed like the '80’s cranked it up to eleven (a phrase that, ironically, originated in the '80’s). There was the success of Back To The Future and it felt like at least half the kids I knew wanted to live in their idea of the '60’s–hippies, Woodstock, and The Wonder Years because they felt the present had nothing to offer them. The first person I knew to get a CD player didn’t have anything more recent than Dark Side Of The Moon in his music collection.
I knew at least three who’d been born in the '70’s whose regular ensemble included t-shirts that said “If you remember the '60’s you weren’t there”.
And yet when I look back on it I think for some of us it wasn’t that the present was boring but rather that between AIDS, famines (albeit in remote places), and the threat of nuclear destruction the present was terrifying.
So…yeah. I get a kick out of '80’s nostalgia, mostly because I think it’s a decade best appreciated by people who weren’t there.
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I want to have grown up where you grew up.
And musically, other than NWOBHM, I haaaaated the 80s.
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And musically, other than NWOBHM, I haaaaated the 80s.
Well thats just a challenge then isn’t it?
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Ugh. That’s my sister’s music.
(Slams bedroom door)
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That sums it up better than I could ever have put it.
Here: one of the few things from the 80’s I actually like in the 80’s:
…still gives me shivers to this day!
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Better?
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Nuh-uh.
I did like these guys, though.
You know… as scrawny white saviors go.
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