@Defiance it's funny how much I love pop culture and stuff, my answer wouldn't be music or movies. I say the 80s started with Reagan getting elected. Just like unfortunately the 2000s really started with Bush and all the causes and effects of that (for instance, Iran hostage crisis, Supreme Court ruling for Bush)
@SpaceAce Yeah, there are a lot of indicators we could use. It's kind of a silly debate. It reminds me of the GOAT debates people have in sports. It's fun, but not scientific 🤷♂️
But I like this topic because A) it's nostalgic and B) it's impossible to truly define lol
I'd offer a mix of things like politics, pop music, movies, and clothing / hair styles for sure.
I tend to generally see "the 80s" aesthetic starting in 83 and ending in 89
I think of “the 80s” aesthetic starting around 1978 and ending around 1990. But it has to include punk, hardcore, rap, metal, and club music. Those pop acts were reacting to the underground very directly in the 80s.
@Defiance@SpaceAce I also had a very non mainstream 80s experience as a counterculture kid. Folks were leftists/peace freaks, I was a punk and metal kid that was also into early rap and late E-funk (Rick James etc) and hated everything about the "Reagan Eighties" except some of the pop music - always liked Prince, Madonna, INXS, lots of others. Plus I grew up near the Chapel Hill indie music scene, which was second only to Athens for awhile (and drew a lot of Athens talent for shows)
@Defiance@SpaceAce here's a funny example of how quirky it was growing up like that. I listened to the local indie college radio station as much as anything else, and it wasn't until years later that I realized that this song (a constant in their playlists for awhile) wasn't in fact a nationwide hit as big as anything REM put out, but in fact a relatively deep obscurity. Song kicks ass tho
In SoCal Oingo Boingo was HUGE early on like starting in ‘81. I realized they weren’t very popular on a trip to Chicago in 83.
BTW when did you start listening to college radio? Were there any cool commercial stations? We had KROQ and 91X and they’d play all sorts of cool stuff (plus Rodney’s show). I also was lucky to have a few college stations that were a major source of new music
@Defiance@SpaceAce probably started listening to WXYC in around 1981, initially for bands like Talking Heads.
We got a little Oingo on that station but I had no idea they were a huge socal phenom until much later. I've seen some of that early video, it's amazing
We did have decent commercial radio when combined with the indie station. There was one "classic rock" that mixed boomer bands with current things like Van Halen, a straight Top Forty station and one that played mostly pop R&B.
@Defiance@SpaceAce
Yeah I want to read that for sure. I moved west in the early nineties but it's still sure to be interesting. There's a lot of overlap
@Defiance assuming you mean "the eighties" in a charting popular music context (leaving out punk, metal, proto electronic music, the nascent jam band scene etc) the two things I see missing there are the phases of MTV influence (which imo is the defining axis of the decade in that pop culture sense) and the major early stages of rap development (everything up to The Message, then Run-DMC, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy all being major signposts, etc)
@mrcompletely It’s definitely based on pop music, hence the omission of those underground scenes and genres. I agree that MTV is a good representation of the vaguely defined “the 80’s”
Also not considered here is fashion and entertainment as well as politics that define the era.
It what I like about this question. It’s quite subjective
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