You know, the eighties are more popular now than they were in the eighties.  How the hell did that happen?

Here’s a newsflash for you kids; they weren’t all that great.  I know because I was there.  But there were a few high points mixed in amongst all the lows.

First the lows:

Let’s start with popular culture during the eighties.  Well, actually there really wasn’t much culture, per se.  Let’s see if this sums it up for you: If you thought the seventies were a cultural abyss, the eighties were enough to make you want to claw out your own eyes with a garden weasel. 

Then there was the hair.  And I’m talking big hair on the chicks, not just on the hair-band boys.  I saw women with their hair jacked all the way up to the baby Jesus and I’m still emotionally traumatized by the experience.  It was scary – Freddy Krueger scary.

You don’t know what big hair is until the girl you’re currently keeping time with gets a letter from the EPA asking her to please cut back on her hair spray use because the hole in the ozone layer is situated directly above her bathroom window.

THAT’S big hair, kids.  

And what the hell was up with the mini-skirts and jelly shoes?  Can somebody explain this to me, please?  Somebody, anybody…Bueller?  

And was there enough freakin’ eyeliner?  (The sad thing is it was mostly on the guys.)  

Ever smelled a bar at 4:00 am?  Let me paint you a mental scratch-n-sniff picture: Imagine, if you will, the combination of sweat, desperation and cigarette smoke mixed with Polo by Ralph Lauren and you pretty much got the scene.

Eech.

And what were the girls wearing?  They were wearing a lot of make-up.  (Referred to in theater circles as a “full beat”, if you must know.)  Picture Paul Stanley in the old days (or the reunion tour, for that matter) and you pretty much got the concept.

Put it to you this way: If you took a girl home with you, the next morning your pillowcase looked like the Shroud of Turin.

Perfume?  That would be Obsession, Fendi and Avon…in that order.

But I still miss the eighties.  You wanna know why?  Simple – we were having a freakin’ blast.

Let me continue to jog trot you down memory lane for a moment as we cover the scattered highs in the flurry of lows:

There was no terrorism, at least none on American soil.  The Cold War was in full swing and the line separating good and evil was pretty clearly drawn.  We were the good guys and the Russians were the bad guys.  As a result, the world, believe it or not, was a much safer place because we both held each other in check.

On the home front, AIDS wasn’t quite in full swing yet, so it was pretty much still a “gay” disease.  Now I know it was narrow-minded thinking to be sure, but I’m just filling in the blanks here – please hold all your complaint calls.

The economy was doing pretty good, so we were all making money – hand-over-fist, if you must know.  The reason we were broke is because we were on a perpetual spending spree.  (Imagine Paris Hilton let loose on Rodeo Drive with Donald Trump’s American Express® card after a venti caramel macchiato, a handful of chocolate-covered espresso beans and a slap on the ass.)  It was a glorious time to have credit.

And music was anything but depressing in the eighties.  It wasn’t the self-absorbed, I-hate-my-mommy, my-self-esteem-is-in-the-toilet, misery-mongering drivel that it is today.  (Unless you count The Cure.)

Guys in bands could actually play their own instruments and there was no such thing as “auto-tune” on vocals.  If you couldn’t hit the notes, you didn’t get the job.  And seeing a rock concert was actually fun – hell, it was practically a freakin’ block party.  

There was no internet at this point.  Think about that for a moment – that digital wave which you surf daily and can’t imagine your life without has only really been around for a few years.  It’s still in its infancy.  So in the eighties, people actually had to meet face to face to get anything done.  And no one had cell phones.  (I miss that – an electronic leash gets to be a real pain in the ass after a while.)

Like I said, it was a simpler time.  Probably not better, but definitely simpler.  

So, why do we always look back?  Why do we yearn for those simpler times?  That’s an easy one: It’s called marketing, kids.  The people with the spending money right now are the people who were wearing all that eyeliner and Polo in the eighties, even though we never thought we were ever going to grow up.  

But even though we had no intention of growing up (Who Does?), we all thought it would be a great idea to plan ahead so we’d know exactly whose house we were going to meet at on December 31st, 1999.  (That way we could play “1999” by Prince over and over again and usher in the year 2000 in style.)  

The millennium seemed so far away back then.  My God, I’d be (gasp) in my thirties!  It’s hard to believe that the year 2000 came and went already.  (And that I had to return my portable generator, too.)  

But we made it and here we are with mortgages and minivans.  All of a sudden we’re respectable?  Eech – gag me with a spoon.

Anyway, now they’re catering to our sense of nostalgia.  That’s why the eighties are making a comeback, just like the seventies did in the nineties, the sixties did in the eighties and the fifties did in the seventies.

I now know exactly how my mom and dad felt watching Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days.  Probably the same way I do watching The Wedding Singer.  (And listening to The Darkness.)

But it’s all relative, you know.  It all goes in twenty-year cycles, and your time is coming. 

Trust me, in a few years you’ll be seeing a television show called “Those Wacky Nineties” featuring a big brother wearing flannel who wants to be Kurt Cobain, a middle sister wearing Birkenstocks who thinks she’s a lesbian, a mom and dad trying to start a dot-com who don’t have a clue and a baby brother who’s an eighties throwback wearing a power suit and spouting off about how greed is good.  

Hopefully Michael J. Fox will still be available.

Anyway, even with all its rather glaring faults, I still miss that time.  Not so much for the culture, because let’s face it, we were pretty short on that.  No, it’s because that was our youth.  That was when we thought the world was a world full of possibilities.  That was when we thought we were going to change everything.  

And that was when we fell in love for the very first time.

I can still remember her.  I have a picture of the two of us smiling in a bar on New Year’s Eve, 1989.  (She and I never quite made it to the millennium, though we both looked deliriously happy in this picture.)  Looking back, it was probably the last time that I smiled and meant it.

Just one of the many things I miss about the eighties.

Somewhere in that decade, a bunch of children tottered towards adulthood.  Somewhere in that decade, the seeds of all our dreams were sown.  And somewhere in that decade is the innocence I wish that I still had.

I’ll tell you this much: If I had a time machine, if the Doc pulled up in that DeLorean and handed me the keys, I don’t know exactly what year I’d punch into the dashboard, but I can tell you that it would definitely start with one-nine-eight.

That’s my two cents – this time you can keep the change. 
 
 

Chuck DiMaria is Los Angeles based musician and antiMUSIC columnist. Check out his website ChuckDiMaria.com for more of his writings, MP3s and more (be sure to read about his adventures in online dating!!)

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