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The MoviesWas the 80s the golden age of movies? It might be hard to argue with that. It gave us some of the biggest movies and trilogies of all time and gave rise to the blockbuster. Star Wars would get the ball rolling when it was released in 1977, but the momentum and the fandom really took shape in the 80s with the Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. We could also call this the “Spielberg era” as you've got the classics like ET (which was actually the highest moneymaker of the 80s) The Goonies, and the monumental Indiana Jones movies. You also have my favorite of all time; Back to the Future and the epic sequel that combined all the best elements of time travel. We can go on and on about all these glorious movies, but some other notables that round out the decade are:
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The MusicThe 80s brought us so much new variety when it came to music along with some brand new genres. Until then, everything had been pretty much rock-based. Heavy metal was becoming more prominent in the 70s, and pop music has always been in the mix, but the 80s brought us some new categories and variations we hadn’t heard before. It’s impossible to cover this gigantic topic in a few paragraphs, but when you think of the 80s, you think of Michael Jackson who ruled over it all. You think of Madonna and U2, and it was the era where we were introduced to an unknown art form called Hip-Hop — which I’ll cover more in a second. It gave us New Wave music and Devo; we started seeing more house music and the growth of punk rock. Death Metal and Metallica also emerged in the 80s. Disco was thankfully long dead, but we were hearing more synthesizer-based music and more electronic production. The 80s still featured some classic bands like the Rolling Stones and Queen who found a whole new generation of fans. MTV would launch in 1981 and would forever change the way we consumed music. Bands and artists had to learn this new way to present themselves in this new visual medium. Unlike today, album sales meant everything and it’s where the real money was made.
Here were the top-selling albums by year:
Also, here were the year-end Billboard # 1 songs of the 80s:
The 80s is also the decade where you would sit with your tape deck listening to the radio, ready to jump on the song you were waiting to record. Which leads us to… |
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The Mix TapeIf you want to put the 80s in a nutshell — it may be the mixtape. There was no such thing as MP3, Apple Music, or Spotify. If you wanted to capture music, you would have to sit diligently by your tape deck just waiting for whatever song you wanted to hear. You would call up radio stations to request it and just hope you had a good trigger finger. This was also the era of the dual cassette tape deck, which meant you could copy tapes and put together your own mixes. If someone you knew had a tape you wanted, you could copy it over on to a blank one and it was magically yours! Now with your collection of cassettes, you could make your own compilations, and the mixtape was born. This was the 80s version of a love letter, as you could put together all the meaningful songs to give to the person you liked. Spotify has allowed us to do that today, but that’s just a matter of a few quick taps. The mix tap took WORK and commitment.>/p> That was half of what made a mixtape so special — the effort. So now you’ve got a killer mixtape that you painstakingly put together, what were you going to listen to it on? |
