I like how even with Nintendo setting per-publisher quotas they would just localize whatever they had on hand on the NES era. “Does anyone in America know who Golgo 13 is? No? Great, here’s a Golgo 13 game.”
Weird thing is the early-2000s renaissance seems to include a renaissance of the VH1-ass, played-it-on-‘90s-alternative-radio '80s stuff we actually grew up with, not just the stuff we were showing off as an influence at the time
I think that’s partly because the most famous grunge stuff started getting played on the Classic Rock stations, which means everybody now thinks of it as Music Dads Listen To.
I’m kinda more talking about the '80s stuff they counted as “alternative” and played on an alternative radio format that was birthed after their release, I hadn’t really been hearing that much since the 90s
Since turning bi I realized that a lot of what I had never really “got” about gay culture honestly really makes sense in terms of relating to men and masculinity from within a queer masculinity yourself…
…which made me realize how much of the rest of it was legacy of a particularly ‘80s counterculture. Which is kind of cool, you’re like “oh this was a way to process while taking distance from the midcentury mainstream culture really distinct from and prior to 90s irony, huh”, but on the other hand yeah of course it was tedious seeing gays flog their Eighties shit into the 21st century
In the 1980s, did you have a folder, or perhaps a Trapper Keeper, that had a painting of dolphins in beautiful jewel like waters, or alternatively, flying through outer space? Who did all those paintings, anyway?
The answer is Christian Riese Lassen, an avid surfer who loves all things oceanic, spiritual, and cosmic.
I think my only direct memories of the ‘80s might be kindergarten and the Ad Wars (in which television advertising campaigns began to directly go negative on competing products).
Which is absolutely something you would have your kontextmaschine parody say.
Fraggle Rock – like, “Jim Henson makes Sesame Street for ‘creative class’ yuppie kids so instead of learning the alphabet in a functioning, multicultural inner city it’s personal exploration bullshit on an escapist commune and instead of public broadcasting it’s on premium cable” was such a good synecdoche of the 1980s
Stranger Things was really not an accurate depiction of the 1980s in that of the adult characters who took the teenaged protagonists and their world seriously such a high proportion would try to help them and not just fuck them
To people younger than mid-30s: I really cannot emphasize enough that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City played a huge shaping effect on later ‘80s retro and those weird Scottish Ameriboos at Rockstar left the legacy that they have now set some of the actual America’s actual sense of cultural history
Lightly drizzling, which I suspect comes from the wildfire-sourced particulates in the air.
I used to remember daytime thunderstorms all the time in 80s suburban Philly elementary school but not after, I had been chalking that to unevenly retained and romantic childhood memory but now I wonder if I wasn’t seeing the Clean Air Act reduce air pollution in the industrial northeast.
Short for ‘Geometric-Glamorous’, this is the mid 1970s - mid 1980s “luxurious materials + geometric forms” design aesthetic, sometimes referred to as “cocaine decor”.
…Is it? Is that a common enough alternative name? You see that in the architecture coffee table books?
When I see interior design with that many untextured surfaces I unironically do think of cocaine.
Because otherwise you have mirrors sitting on countertops everywhere. I’d see that with thirtysomething LA.
If you were not around at the time it is easy to miss how much of our sense of “canonical” 80s music and look dates to the 2002 Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, prior to which the era was seen as an aesthetic embarrassment and elided
I remember seeing all these old Smith Barney “we make money the old fashioned way: we earn it” ads as my dad watched Moneyline (with Lou Dobbs!) on CNN in the 1980s but found them confusing cause I hadn’t distinguished them from Crayola makers Binney & Smith.
Now appreciating that the ‘80s Florida thing wasn’t from Miami Vice, that and “yacht rock” were responding to a real period vogue, like the late '70s Colorado thing or maybe '90s Seattle. Like, this:
was from 1982 (Miami Vice debuted '84), released as a single with the duh-its-about-cocaine White Line Fever on the B-side
