Yup. The ‘80s often gets credited with the first rap LP (Sugarhill Gang), but the Last Poets and Melvin Van Peebles might differ.
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More than fair; point conceded.
That was 1975 1979, and SHG was concocted by Sylvia Robinson (of Mickey and Sylvia.)
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I know about Sylvia Robinson, what was the 1975 release?
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My bad, '79 not '75:
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Oh yeah, I knew “Rapper’s Delight” was ‘79. That’s why I mentioned LP above. A lot of discographies/critics/reviewers can ignore singles and 12 inches, so rap will seem to have started in the ‘80s to some.
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Fair correction, thanks.
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Right on.
But that was just when it started making money.
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I think the music is what ruins the video. There are a lot better 80s songs that would provide better nostalgic association and could make the video more upbeat.
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Yep. WTOS in northern Maine was an all alternative rock station in the 70’s and early 80’s, and an absolute gem. Their lunch hours were different every day: blues on Monday; reggae on Tuesday; etc. When they sold out to a top 40 format, we held a funeral for them, led by all their former DJ’s, who left and took their music with them to other places.
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Indeed… however, I’m going to argue (for others, not you, as I know we agree on this) that people focusing on the emergence of genre specific labels and the release of sound recordings miss the longer story of social and cultural development that is far more interesting and historical important (especially with genres like hip hop and punk, which really transformed our relationships with popular music in new ways).
Yep. And those people are wrong! 
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Totally agreed.
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I thought that was a very well-edited video: even though most clips are barely more than 1s, every scene was well-chosen to be recognizable and iconic enough that I was able to identify the vast majority of them, and I was never particularly prolific in my media consumption.
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Ok, Boomer.
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There is certainly a cultural effect where, over time, the collective memory of society actively purges the bad from the body of art and entertainment with the initial method achieved by degrees of repetition cementing awareness of the song, movie, or TV show.
If you’re not repeated, you’re forgotten. Discarded.
There is also a reinforcing mechanism whereby things which were great but not mainstream successful are preserved by the genre nerds, to be reintroduced much later on and enhancing the view that things were indeed better in the past.
You most often see it in music where bad to simply mediocre songs will be forgotten because they’re not repeated much in common media, giving the impression that music was much better than the dross in the present because we haven’t had a chance to forget the bad yet. You can test this out by picking any date at random and look at what is in the top 10… there’ll be maybe 2 or 3 truly great songs and the rest you’ll struggle to even remember.
In film it’s also quite common but suffers more than music does from a number of issues such as with tech, making it difficult for some to see past old effects or modern concepts and societal attitudes. I remember refusing to watch black and white films in the 80s as a small child because they were old and had a strange, forced acting style. I know some still do refuse to watch black and white films, robbing them of incredible films produced today such as The Lighthouse and Bait, or 70s films such as Young Frankenstein, or from pre-code Hollywood.
In every decade there are phenomenal creations of entertainment, anyone who claims otherwise are just suffering from a sort of cultural amnesia that allows the bad to drift into unmemory, only ever dug up to satisfy some voyeuristic “check out these horrors, what were we thinking” nostalgia burst.
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I’m sure that whatever @frauenfelder likes sucks, too.
Hence, BoingBoing? 
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Here is the billboard singles for the 80s:
It’s a mixed bag, as you can see. Plenty of one hit wonders, but also plenty of solid artists with real talent, too, who were celebrated at the time and today. Queen, MJ, Dolly Parton, Prince, etc, etc.
And of course what is good and what is crap is largely a matter of opinion, as much as we try and give it a veneer of “authority” via music criticism and album sales. 
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I was thinking recently of how Punk was a Puritan movement. Not in the religious sense but it represented a move away from the overproduced disco and pink gloss lipstick pop music. Black leather versus pink pastel. Being “true” and not a “poser”. Stoicism verus optimism. It was a kind of stripping off of the ritual and fluff. Of course it was quickly co-opted but still. Same thing happened all over, actually, in all forms of art.
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