Not only is 90% of everything crap, the super-popular stuff that they’re going to pick for something like this video is likely to be 100% crap. Or 100% awesome, depending on your perspective.
Interesting. They seem to be at a transition point between Mod and Punk. By the time it got filtered through the Sex Pistols and over the Atlantic, the fashion became much more uniform. Stuff that was outside that punk look was considered “new wave” where I grew up.
I’d argue that punk was never (and is not now) in a finalized form, it was instead always in a state of emergence and becoming. The term was in usage to describe music since at least 1970 or 71 by music critics, and by the mid-70s, local scenes began using the term to describe what they were doing (which was incredibly varied from band to band, or even person to person). It only really started to get codified at all by the early 80s, both by the mainstream culture trying to understand/profit from fear of it and by self-defined punks wanting to defend their scenes from perceived “outsiders” which far too often included women and people of color by that point, sadly (hence Jello’s missive, Nazi punks, fuck off).
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Yep. Then came the skinheads.
FWIW I’m coming from a Boston circa 1984 perspective.
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Um… skinheads have been around since the late 60s… it’s true that a wave of specifically racist skins emerged in the 80s (also globalized, but in the US, the biggest racist skinhead gang being the Hammer skins). But skinheads as a subculture in Britain, where they originated, pre-date punk by a few years at least.
Yeah, racist skins really started trying to infiltrate scenes by the early 80s (and tons of punks from that era have war stories about fighting racist skins and just racists in general), but racists certainly came out prior to that… I know that the Bad Brains had to deal with racists at their shows, and of course bands like Joy Division, which employed nazi imagery, often had people sieg heiling at their shows back in the late 70s…
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Sure. I was in Boston in the 80s. We had to distinguish between the red-laced skinheads and the white-laced skinheads. Red laced skins went back to Ska. White laced skins were aryan nation.
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That’s interesting… in more recent terminology, that’s been understood as relating to acts of violence by racist skins (or maybe just skins in general). I’m guessing there is probably lots of local and time-based variation on this!
Weirdly, it started out as a way to identify which team one supported! 
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Maybe for you. In the UK, the 1980s brought us, in no particular order:
- Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
- Inspector Morse
- Poirot
- Edge of Darkness
- The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
- Press Gang
- A Very British Coup
- The Gentle Touch
- The Day of the Triffids
- A Very Peculiar Practice
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [the Jeremy Brett version]
- Red Dwarf
- The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Robin of Sherwood
- Blackadder
- The Young Ones
- Yes Minister
- Threads
- Chocky
- Bergerac
- Only Fools and Horses
- The New Statesman
- Timewatch
- The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years
- Dispatches
- Blackeyes
- The Tripods
- Widows
- Taggart
- Danger Mouse
- etc.
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A good bit of those were also on in the US, too, mainly on PBS (although nickelodeon picked up Danger Mouse).
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Yep, I should have qualified that.
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As someone who lived through the '80s, all I can say about this “tribute” is:
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Valid points all, but even Downbeat would occasionally have articles on music outside jazz and still cater primarily to jazz fans. For all the good that MRR did it also helped promote a real cookie-cutter mentality in the hardcore scene of the 80’s. Whether that was good or bad is a matter of taste.
I was really just making a joke on the use of the word “puritanical”, taking it in a different direction than @G_r_ld_z_n_r maybe intended.
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same here. I’m always impressed with people who have the time and patience to edit these kinds of montage videos.
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This is so true, by the time My Chemichal romance popularized emo most of the original emo bands were gone, same with Nirvana and what came to be known as grunge, more recently (and anecdotally) I started to hear less reggaeton in my daily life right as it went mainstream globally.
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Not Golan and Globus, but this 80s tribute does have Pia Zadora:
Required watching for those of us working in British civic universities in the 80s.
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Honestly, if you look back at the 1980s, popular culture is one of the least sucky things about the entire decade. Sure, nostalgia filter and survivorship bias will skew our views positively, but against a backdrop of Economic misery, deindustrialisation, war, famine, the rise of fundamentalism and Thatcherism-Reganism, environmental degradation and the constant looming Lovecraftian horror of a cold war about to go hot at any moment- I think a little bit of over-the-top, cheesy, fun pop culture was the least of our worries. Even the bits of it we still don’t like.
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Seems pretty great to me. Matter of perspective perhaps?
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I blame disco.
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I was doing simple survival during much of the 80s, so it’s blurry, but I didn’t realize there was So Much Feathered Hair. Every other clip seemed to have it.
I may have had feathered hair in the 80s.
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I recently watched through some 80s movies about the punk scene, specifically Penelope Spheeris’ stuff and Another State of Mind. The theme in common that jumps out at me is one of that kind of moral clarity that only teenagers can manage grinding against and mostly being crushed by the real world and the compromises that life requires in moving from youth to adulthood.
So I think “puritanical” is accurate in the sense of being as pure as possible about one’s idealism.
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