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The music and general media like movies and books were definitely good and I'm too young to really remember personally. However the 80s are overglamorized generally. There was a lot more crime in some areas, especially urban areas and a lot more blight. Today a lot of cities have cleaned up this mess but some still haven't.
A lot of people thought the 80s were "all that" because this was the decade a lot of the Boomers started going to work and establishing families.
I also think a lot of people think today is a terrible decade by comparison.
The reality is more nuanced.
Today, terrorism is in full retreat. Al Qaeda has been utterly crushed and where not crushed they've been marginalized as devout Muslims realized they've killed more Muslims than "heathen Westerner Christian crusader pig-dogs" or "immoral Zionists."
Unemployment is probably around the same level if you counted the same way as we did back then. The reality is people are finding work, we are just not wanting to do a lot of the work that used to be considered honest trade or hard work, and we're not getting educated fast enough to enter the high-tech workforce that even laborers must know nowadays. Today's employment picture is much more equal now for women than it was back in the 80s. It just seems like it was better than today because that's when women really started picking up power.
Technology seemed more amazing because we were first really climbing the exponential ladder of it. We've become so used to technological advance that we've become numb to it and expect it now.
Music seemed all that because electronics started going mainstream and sounded good (very few bands in the mid-late 70s could make electronic music sound good). Today electronic music is so vastly superior and nuanced, it isn't funny. On the flip side, it appears any teeny bopper blonde girl with straight teeth and a fake personality can become a star, back then singers had to SING, they didn't have the crutch of real-time music synthesizers and lip synching.
Back then the threat of nuclear holocaust was at the highest since the 60s. Today there isn't a country that really poses a threat.
Violent crime rate was much much higher.
Racism was VERY VERY much more apparent then. Do you honestly think for a nanosecond that a black man (actually a half-black half-white) could even have a REMOTE chance of becoming president back then? Nope.
The younger generation today know so much more about society, "grown-up" issues, and learning how to operate in this electronic frontier. Gen Y is having kids now too, and we're the frugal generation out of necessity. The swing has swung in the opposite direction.
We're vastly more conscious of the environment today.
Cities are cool again. Thank goodness. Used to be the burbs were THE place to be in the 80s.
To truly understand the '80s, you have to understand what the '70s were like, especially the mid and late '70s.
By the late '70s, it was a very dark period, similar to today. All we heard about was economic and military decline, high inflation, and the future looked very dismal. We discovered our vulnerabilty on energy during the Arab oil embargo, when we faced long gas lines and skyrocketing prices. Then came the loss of Vietnam, and at the end of the decade, the final blow was the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. At home, we face simultaneous recession and high inflation, something that heretofore had been thought impossible by economists.
While the '80s were a mixed bag, it was a time when things turned out a lot better than what was predicted. We faced a severe recession in the early '80s as the Fed tried successfully to break the back of inflation. After that, there was an economic boom and people began to feel a lot better about the future. The better feeling about the future was probably the defining characteric of the '80s, after the dark times of the late '70s. As the '80s end, the Cold War, which we thought we were losing in 1980, ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
To be sure, there were a lot of unresolved problems from that decade. Many of our current economic travails were first showing up in the '80s, and there was a terrible drug scourge. Crime then was higher than it is today, though people today are more risk averse about it.
I know now that my mom was paying 11%+ interest on an adjustable mortgage in the early 80's. So when I hear people bitching and moaning about the buyer's market I think they are pretty dang lucky. Yes, she paid 20K but at that time it was expensive...it's all relative.
I'm 37 and grew up in Madison WI with divorced parents. We lived in a nice neighborhood and while I did not fully know my parents financial struggles we had food and clothes..and as a kid that really matters. I do remember being scared of nuclear war (having drills), AIDS, bombs, and tornadoes. I really lived in fear of those things. At the same time I was a kid and had a lot of freedom to listen to music (on my record player) and play outside for hours on end. So it did balance out. Music was a serious outlet and I spent so much time riding bikes, swimming at the beach, skating, sledding, and hanging out with friends.
We collected stickers for sticker albums, GPK, charms, plastered our walls with bands and cute boys/girls, called boys on the phone, got so excited to walk home after school because it always meant excitement and snowball fights or flirting, wrote notes, waited for hours on end to tape our favorite songs on the music countdown, waited forever for albums to come out. It was a time of patience...things weren't so fast. I remember ordering moonboots and a snowsuit from JCPenney Catalog and nearly dying in anticipation of coming home to the package..but back then it was 6-8 weeks for delivery. By the time it came you had almost forgot about it.
My memories are varied and tainted as they always are as you age. Of course to me it was the best time. I remember playing Scotland Yard, listening to Whitney Houston's first album, and having a lot of time with friends...it was good times. but I remember fear, watching the Ollie North interviews at my Grandma's, worrying about war (even watching Back to the Future scared me because of the terrorists in it), and thinking I had AIDS because I kissed a girl.
The music and general media like movies and books were definitely good and I'm too young to really remember personally. However the 80s are overglamorized generally. There was a lot more crime in some areas, especially urban areas and a lot more blight. Today a lot of cities have cleaned up this mess but some still haven't.
That is true in some cases, but I think the overall outlook was MUCH more positive overall in the 80s and people thought that the future looked quite a bit brigher. Lots of optimism. I don't sense much of that at all in the year 2013. Most people are moving through life in a zombie like state presently. Very sad
The 1980s were simpler times, but I'm biased, I was a kid back then. I remember music was great and fashion was cool and different and Guess bags and Vans or Converse were all that I wanted in life! Rolling your socks was the popular thing to do, everything was either radical or bogus, cocaine made people dance and made people lots of money on Wall Street and crack made people crazy, Nancy Reagan said to 'Say no to drugs' and I remember waving to Reagan as he drove by my house, Back to the Future and ET were great movies, Garbage Pail kids and Saturday cartoons and playing outside all day, and Happy Meals sometimes came in plastic boats that you could float in water, and things still had a low cost...
But remember, I was just a kid and I'm kinda biased.
being born in '81 one memory that sticks out more than any other is my dad driving me to daycare in the mid 80s every morning and it may have been '84 i think we'd hear the song by matthew wilder "break my stride" haha. like clockwork every morning. always kinda reminded me of the 80s as being this fast paced decade full of change and progress and everyone out trying to make a buck. as evidenced by the movie Wall Street.
I think by the end of the decade and into the early 90s i had like 5 or 6 "just say no" folders from school LOL. that was an enormous campaign. never seen anything like it since in school. i think we had a just say no school assembly once a month it seemed haha.
rolling your socks was big time i do remember that.
I remember McDonalds use to serve burgers in styrofoam containers. that was classic.
I remember our old Packard Bell Computer. Had some great games installed on that thing. Terrible graphics obviously haha but still fun.
The 80's definitely felt more peaceful. There were events in the world that proved less than peaceful. Yet overall the 80's was nothing like it is now. The violence, the hatred and constant killings all over the world and in this country.
The homicide rate in the United States in the 80s was nearly twice as high as it is now. The biggest thing that has changed is the 24/7 sensationalist media and the internet.
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