Sunday, April 26, 2009

Dammit. The '80s were NOT cool!

Why oh why do the singers, bands, actors & actresses from my childhood want to whore out my memories? It started with "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey, featured on Laguna Beach (WTF is Laguna Beach?! A "Scripted Reality" show? When I was a kid, we called that just plain old TV.) When I heard my 16 year old niece singing it, I found out that Steve Banana Crotch Perry sold out to The Man and boy, that pissed my cranky ol' ass off.

Now I hear rumblings of movie remakes. Footloose, Predator, Karate Kid, The Neverending Story, Ghostbusters. The list goes on and on, and the longer it goes, the worse it gets.

There seems to be a misconception in Hollywood that the 80s were good. The 80s were NOT good. The 80s were a fashion, music, and pop culture black hole. As a decade, the 80s are totally disposable. Literally nothing happened until 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Up until then, the decade had only been a long series of terrible, no good, very bad, teased & stonewashed years which just BEG to be forgotten. Music. Movies. TV shows. Clothes. All of it. Painfully tacky, horribly mediocre, terribly over-saturated. Mall bangs, for God's sake? Do we REALLY want to relive that action?

I was a teenager in the 80s. I remember how much it sucked. I remember wearing shirts that changed colors when your body temperature rose...which says alot about the time period. It was a time when we wore clothes to ACCENTUATE OUR SWEAT.

How low did our standards have to be back then that Suzie Q's "Two of Hearts" was a huge hit? Suzie Q looked like Olive Oyl on crank and she sounded like somebody taking a helium enema. I saw her on a recent One Hit Wonders marathon on VH1. She has NOT improved with age.

It just makes me wonder that kids today look back on the 80s as some kind of golden age. My teenage nieces LOVE the John Hughes movies. I think they think we all lived in huge brick houses with white columns, and had quirky best friends with cute little nicknames like Ducky, and changing the color of our eye shadow was all the makeover it took to land our dream guy. I think they think we all knew how to apply lipstick with our cleavage and detention was one long party with a few joints, some groping, and also dancing. Mostly dancing.

I wouldn't go back to the 80s for anything in the world. The entire decade was like biting tin foil. It was bright and tacky and sticky and sharp and loud. It smelled like hot duct tape & Aqua Net.

I am a product of the 80s. Need I say more?

2 comments:

Mrs Pretzel said...

I love you. The end.

Michelle said...

hysterical girl i love it!!Aqua net, Pretty in Pink,Sweet 16 wig wom socks oh i so remember those days!!