Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/04/this-tribute-to-80s-entertainm.html
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a lot of this stuff was pretty great. I’m always cautious making arguments like this because I don’t want to sound old (even though I am old)
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I dunno, that video was pretty bad ass. Stereotypically awesome 80s song to go along with it, too.
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I was born in '81 and my family was Mennonite and we didn’t have a television until I was 1990, so my pop culture exposure was listening to the radio and occasional television shows or movies when visiting friends houses.
This montage makes me aware of how much of the 80’s culture I consumed in the 90’s and since as “classics.” Overall I think this approach has the benefit that all the really bad stuff was filtered out.
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The sheer amount of John Candy in that video was worth it.
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You do NOT dis Toni Basil…
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The 80’s also gave us:
Run DMC and the birth of rap; the Beastie Boys; U2; Metallica; R.E.M.; Public Enemy; Blade Runner; Die Hard; Do the Right Thing; The Color Purple; The Princess Bride; Breaker Morant; Gallipoli; Chariots of Fire; and I could go on, but I think all decades have plenty of good and plenty of bad.
That said, this tribute was insipid and terrible, so you have a point.
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I dunno. The music on this video was so awful I could only tolerate about a minute of it. In that time I saw about a 50:50 mix of crap and good.
( I probably wouldn’t have argued at all, but I saw a clip of The Princess Bride in there, and if you dis that movie again, I’ll challenge you To The Pain. )
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Ah, pick a decade. Remember: 90% of everything is crap
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You’re a gem.
Nitpick: Hip hop was born in the late 70’s, via prolific innovative DJ’s like Grand Master Flash, DJ Kool Herc, and Afrika BamBatta. Run DMC just increased its acceptance and exposure on Mtv.
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I think the 80’s represent the era when the majority of mainstream popular entertainment truly began to stink (whereas plenty of hit movies and top 40 hits of the 70’s are still legitimately good and stand up today.) While there are some 80’s pop hits and blockbuster films I still like, most of it was crap, and I recognized so even back then.
But then 80’s also brought us Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, Husker Du, John Zorn, Pixies, Run DMC, Kronos Quartet, “They Live”, “Heathers”, “Paris, Texas”, “Brazil”, the Cohen Brothers, Jim Jarmusch, etc etc etc.
[ETA: there is always a lot more “culture” going on than what is ultra-popular and being promoted by huge entertainment conglomerates. The underground is always the place to be for some of us.]
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For those hating on the song, let it be known that good music =/= popular music in the 80s. This is just the kind of stuff Westwood One would push on the public in its quest for global domination.
So many good radio stations were lost in the radio wars of the era.
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probably getting too off-topic here, but hot take alert, The Princess Bride is one of the most overrated movies of all time.
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Obligatory as hell:
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I know it’s from the ‘80s, but as an outgrowth of Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive felt out of place to me.
There’s a hell of a lot of this I probably would still enjoy, but in this concentrated form it was kind of a turnoff.
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Sturgeon’s Law!
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Nah, there were plenty of rappers in the 70s… white people just discovered it in the 80s…
To be fair, I think that Dj Kool Herc started his parties in 69, when he and his sister were teens… It just built from there and you start to see people getting record deals in the mid-to late 70s…
Nope. You’re wrong. It’s just perfect…
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You seem to have misspelled “underrated”.
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I usually mark about 1983 as the good/bad inflection point. The early 80s gave us an amazing body of work, much of which still holds up today in movies and music (not so much TV, but then, up until Buffy and The Sopranos, TV has always been shit, barring one or two outliers). Post '83, though, the decline was precipitous, especially in music. By the mid-to-late 80s EVERYTHING sucked.
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