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No you guys are just missing where the creativity is. Back in the 80's, all you had was the mainstream channels of the music industry and hollywood. With the rise of the internet they've lost their monopoly on cultural output and with their reduced market share and enormous overhead they can't afford to take any risks. That's why movies are worse, the studios can't take a risk on an interesting movie like reservoir dogs, so they just copy ideas that were successful in the past as it's the lowest risk option. Same for mainstream music, which has become so corporatized it's worse than it ever was. That doesn't mean creativity died, it's just in a different place than you're used to looking for it. The internet democratized culture and lead to the huge growth of "independent" film and "underground" music. These people are amazingly creative and different, but they appeal to niche segments and have small, loyal fanbases. The creative people just aren't household names like they were in the eighties, but there's many more of them and they're producing amazing quantities of fantastic art.
There was independent music and film back in the 1980s however. I'm someone who hasn't listened to any Top 40 music since the early 90s before I was a teenager. I was listening to indie rock and punk and electronic music as a 14-year-old in 1994. There's a lot more stuff out there in entire sphere of the music world today but there's little progression or very little new in music--even in the underground(if that word even applies in the internet era)--as far as what's being released. There's always someone putting good music out there--but as far as new genres or styles--things just get slightly revamped instead of some real new direction. But after the 90s--there wasn't much places for much music to go. Rock and electronic music went to extremes in that decade and after that you it was more interesting to go back another twenty years to the styles of the early 80s for influence--which is really what's dominated a lot of music in the last decade.
Although this could just be my perception as a someone in their early thirties---you get to a point where if you've listened to five decades of American music history, there doesn't seem to be much new going on and it sounds like you've heard everything before.
But my main point was that, in a lot of ways, you find rapid changes in technology or how process or access music or film, rather than huge changes in the styles of music and film these days. An album from 2000 might sound slightly dated in a lot of genres--however how we access the music could be completely different in terms of technology. In the 1980s, people might obsess about their stereo systems, but high tech stuff was often seen to be the providence of uber-geeks. Now days technology has completed swallowed the lives of most people under the age of thirty to a point where it's completely taken for granted with social media and YouTube and so on.
Greed is good mentality started getting popular in DC/Wall Street
Jobs actually paid a living wage
TV Shows had coherent themes and characters
Americans actually had freedoms
Most people still bought domestic brand cars
2010s
****ty Justin Beeber and his clones
Smart phones
Playstation 3, XBox 360 and Nintendo Wii are pretty popular
Wall Street and DC are still in bed with each other
Jobs are fewer, and you need a Masters Degree, 15 years of experience in some weird technical trade, and a lot of butt kissing to get a $10/hour job
TV is mostly the same Reality TV show consisting of overweight gaudy trailer trash fighting over baby supplies and money or overweight desperate housewives arguing how to **** their husbands' money down the drain
America threw away the scraps of freedom it had thanks to left wingers and right wingers so now it's a big comedy show now
Chrysler started the 90s American, ended them as German, was American for a couple years, and is now Italian. Ford is still Found on Road Dead (but getting better). General Motors was Government Motors and will be Gone Motors in a decade. The Asian car companies are competing with the Euros in the USA...how novel!
In short, you have a balance between the two decades.
If you go to the smaller towns in the Midwest, you will find many people that are still living in the '80s in terms of hair metal music, acid-washed jeans, teased hair, and possibly even the car they drive. It's hard to say from a personal standpoint because I grew up in the '80s and moved from my first home to a "nicer" neighborhood at the turn of the decade. A lot of it is what changed for me as I grew up.
What were the 80's like? Well it's individual to each person...must of it must be under the realization that people are talking from a perspective of "what was I like", particularly what age.
Taking those individual factors out of it, it wasn't much different from what it is today - there was some good music, lots of sucky music, there was some good TV, lots of sucky TV. Same with all media. It was different of course, but the good to suck ratio was about the same.
Their are two big changes between now and then. Every difference will lead to these two factors:
-The end of the cold war
-Semiconducters.
The end of the cold war brought peace and prosperity, at least for awhile, but it also lead to the current political instability and rise of fanatical groups and nations. It also changed our relations with other countries. It had local political effects.
Semiconducters are responsible for just about each piece of technology mentioned - cell phones, video games, laptops, etc., which in turn lead to cultural changes.
I haven't read this whole thread, but man I miss the 80's.
I liked the choice of stores such as Caldor, Ames, Bradlees, etc. Now we just what Wal Mart and Target?
I liked going into Sam Goody's or Strawberries and find a huge selection of music.
I loved wathcing Headbanger's Ball and the rock blocks (Top 20 Videos, etc.).
No cell phones - my mother made us scout out every call box on the side of the highway "just in case".
More card related stores - now you only have Target, etc. with a terrible selection of almost nonexistent "just because" cards. Except for Hallmark, though.
Remember when Casey Kasem did those requests where people wrote letters in?
Remember? I think he did that in one radio show or another until he retired a few years ago. He was on the air forever.
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