The '80s were like any other decade for music, a lot of good stuff and a lot of mediocre, formulaic crap. But it's interesting to think back to the time. If I may reminisce...
Music accessibility was so different from how it is now. Radio had become fairly boring and playlist-programmed. Everybody had top 40, metal and classic rock stations, but unless you lived near a "modern music" format or college station there was a lot of stuff that was hard to hear. And tastes were regional. Where I lived they played the English Beat but never the Specials, the Style Council but nothing from the Jam. Oingo Boingo was huge but I found they were almost unknown back east. I thought that we would be well behind the times in Utah, but I found out when I visited my cousins in California that we were actually as current or a little ahead of them on "cutting edge" music. It was a lot of fun trying to get "in the know" on obscure acts.
Then there was the tribalism. Where I went to school it was pretty much like The Breakfast Club (those kids were supposed to be the same age as me), you didn't like music outside of your own group. I would have been a lot more open to metal (some of it, anyway) if the metal crowd wasn't so fond of calling my friends and me "fags" and threatening to kick our asses.
Music could be considered "dangerous" to a degree that seems silly now. Besides all that "backward masking" nonsense, there was just a general mainstream resistance to anything perceived as threatening, non-conformist, anti-authority or too risque. One time when I was 10 or 11 I saw Public Image Limited on American Bandstand. The music seemed bizarre and John Lydon's performance was like a crazy person. It blew my mind. I was thinking "Dick Clark has lost control of the show! Can this be happening? Am I seeing something I'm not supposed to see?!" I also remember a friend and I playing "Bodies" from the Sex Pistols album at his house when his sister had a bunch of girls from church there. You could see that they were actually scared by what they were hearing. The same friend's father made him get rid of his Clash records because they were anti-authority.
We didn't have cable so I caught MTV at friends' houses when I could. The video I always think of as quintessential '80s, for some reason, is "The Look of Love" by ABC.
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=lg6J5VT5VRM[/yt]
I saw a brief segment of this video on a TV promo for a local concert, probably '84 or '85 (before Top Gun). I thought Terri Nunn looked super cute. It was years before I saw the whole video.
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=oIb9QUGjdIc[/yt]
