MISCmedia for 8/28/00
They Love the Decade We Hated

LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the re-emergence of interest in early-'80s skate punks.

But that's just part of a growing '80s nostalgia fetishism.

Just about every place you look, the music, the clothes, the video games, and even the polarized politics of what some of us used to call "Reagan's AmeriKKKa" are back.

With one difference.

A good number of us who were around the first time HATED the '80s.

We couldn't wait to get beyond all the doo-doo that was going down then, which we're still not fully beyond.

Herewith, an itemized explanation of how '80s nostalgia differs from the real time:

• Music (hardcore): They were often louts and crusters who trashed clubs and rental halls (making promotion of any indie-rock shows nearly impossible), fought one another, and/or debilitated themselves with drugs and booze. Now, those who lived through hardcore punk and survived it all will wistfully look back on it as a magic time, an Age of Miracles now passed away from the earth. They're getting worse at it than hippies.

• Music (power pop and noise pop): Movies like The Wedding Singer and radio formats like KNDD's "Resurrection Jukebox" imagine the whole country was joyfully bopping to the Jam and the Psychedelic Furs.

  Actually, at least around here, this stuff was almost totally blacked out from local radio and clubs. There were seldom more than two tiny bars where you could hear anything more innovative than white blues bands.

  This gave its fans a sense of shared martyrdom, then a sense of community, then a sense of DIY movement-building which got a little sidetracked during those 1992 gold-rush days (when everybody in town felt they had to insist loudly that they were Not Grunge Dammit.)

• Music (hiphop): OK, one aspect of the decade to be wistful about. The hiphop Real Thing, back when it championed black intelligence instead of white stupidity.

• Video Games: Another now-lost art form. In the days of Pac-Man and Crazy Climber, gaming was about pace and play-quality and fun; not hyper-realistic, first-person-viewpoint slaughtering.

• Comics: The opening of specialty comics stores, and the nonreturnable distribution system supplying them, spawned a lot of second-string superhero crap, naked babes in outer space, and Ninja Turtle knockoffs.

  But there was also a blossoming of innovative, artistic, and really weird stuff: Love and Rockets, Eightball, Tales of the Beanworld, Dirty Plotte, RAW, etc. etc. etc.

• Movies: The promising '70s art-film boom crashed to a thud with the arrival of that "rugged individualist" icon of global mass merchandising, the Action Hero. But the likes of Remo Williams were just the tip of the agent-driven, formulaic iceberg, which culminated years later with a real (computer generated) iceberg.

  Still, there were some true classics, and several more entries that weren't really all that great but struck a chord with audiences who still recall them as coming-O-age keystones.

• TV: The first break in the three-networks oligopoly, and the slow dawning of the twelve-cable-channel-owners oligopoly.

  Some of those early cable shows were real hoots of blooper-filled, low-budget cheese (Loves Me Loves Me Not, A New Day In Eden, New Wave Theater, Financial News Network). Few predicted these hokey attempts would ever pose a real threat to the status quo of Blossom and Knots Landing.

  (In the crevices and interstices of all this, meanwhile, came such deservedly-remembered novelties as Max Headroom, The New Twilight Zone, Remote Control,The Tracey Ullman Show, and David Letterman's wild, pre-celeb-fawning era.)

TOMORROW: The last of this for now.

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