Teens of The 80's

July 11, 2005 12:18 AM

I have a question for those who were teenagers in the 1980's, I'm doing a presentation with a group and my part is generational persona of teens relating to safety (how safe did the avg teen feel?), reckless behavior (how did teens rebel, or get into trouble?) and individualism (Did teens clump themselves into cliques and groups, or did they feel the need to succumb to a particular 'look'was it accepted to be unique and individualistic?)

I have a few ideas already, under 'safety' I'm discussing the Aids scare and the threat of nuclear war. Under 'Recklessness' I'm discussing drug use and rising teen pregnancy and under 'induvidualism' I'm discussing the different 'groups' teens segregated themselves into (punks, preps, new wavers, ect) I just need more ideas to add under the headings then it will be easier for me to find info about it, I'm having a difficult time finding what I need at the moment, so any recommended sites or ideas would be much appreciated!

posted by bluehermit to society & culture (29 comments total)

I'm a little unclear as to what you actual question is. Are you asking, "what are good things to google for under these topics?"
posted by darkness at 1:48 AM on July 11, 2005

I would use some major Media happenings as girders to build your details around. On the nuclear fear. "The Day After" was a pretty defining shared cultural moment for most teens.

I don't remember AIDS really even being on the radar for me as a teenager who graduated in 1987.

If your looking for an idea of how teen groups were devided up - I recommend viewing the Breakfast Club. That had it all, the nerd, jock, metal head, prom princess, etc. All of the stereotypes.

As a final advice, I am always impressed with the depth of Wikipedia for these kind of cultural topics. I would hunt there. Typing in "New Wave" for instance, I'm sure (without even looking) would be informative.
posted by Dag Maggot at 3:21 AM on July 11, 2005

I would like to second (or third) the threat of nuclear war as prevalent in 80s culture. There are many pop culture movies to use as examples... The Mad Max series made the biggest impression on me, but Red Dawn was a decent example as was Rocky III and Red Heat. I think it's hard for teenagers now to conceive of how real it seemed that the Soviet Union was poised to decimate us. I described for one of my college students the 'doomsday clock' and they could hardly believe me (they also thought it was funny).

Also on safety, this was the beginning, it seemed, of widespread semi-panic about weirdos hurting children. The first in-store Halloween candy spiking happened in 83 and was reported in newspapers across the country. Adam Walsh, whose father does the America's Most Wanted TV show now, was kidnapped from a mall and killed in the eighties.

On the flip side, I think there was a groundswell of multicultural education coming from popular culture as well. Sesame Street began this trend in the 70s, but you couldn't watch an 80s cartoon without someone moralizing about how we're all the same inside.
posted by Slothrop at 5:09 AM on July 11, 2005

I'm also wondering if you are looking for pop culture references? Or something more research-oriented?

I'm also going to echo the sentiments about the threat of nuclear war and weirdos hurting kids. We actually had nuclear bomb drills in 1978-79 in our school and the memory of the pants being scared off of me stayed with me through high school (1980-84). I had a high school classmate who was murdered by a serial killer as well. She disappeared from a bus stop and that weighed heavily on everyone's minds after that.

Rebellion was pretty tame for all of us (suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA). Underage drinking, smoking clove cigarettes, skipping class, sneaking out of the house. There wasn't a lot to do in my town, however. (Sigh)
posted by jeanmari at 5:39 AM on July 11, 2005

It's important to note that, for the most part, teens in the eighties were the same as teens today. And the same as teens in the fifities. The concerns and issues are the same. The cliques are essentially the same (though their outward manifestation may change slowly with time). At its core, the adolescent experience is a universal thing. That said:

The threat of nuclear war during the eighties cannot be over-estimated. Whether or not the threat was real, it felt real. The tension was palpable. There were films about it (Wargames, The Day After, Red Dawn), songs about it (Alphaville's "Forever Young", Mike and the Mechanics' "Silent Runnning", Ultravox's "Dancing With Tears in My Eyes"). The news was filled with news about US/Soviet relations, and the unspoken subtext was always the risk of nuclear war.

Dag Maggot makes some good points, including the fact that AIDS wasn't really even on the radar for most people. It was a "gay disease", and ony toward the end of the decade (by which time I was in college), was much known about it. And even in college, where people were much more sexually promiscuous than in high school, AIDS was never a concern.

Along with The Breakfast Club, I'd say that Sixteen Candles does a pretty good job of representing a variety of average teenagers. I always identified (in a painful way) with the Anthony Michael Hall character in the latter.

Again, I think rebellion took the same form in the eighties as it does now, and as it did fifty years ago: drinking, smoking, fucking, and driving cars really, really fast.

One thing that has changed with time (though I'm not sure how relevant it is to your research) is the way kids dress. Now that I'm middle-aged, I find the way kids dress today mind-boggling. (I'm sure my parents felt the same way about my wardrobe.)
posted by jdroth at 6:02 AM on July 11, 2005

Nuclear war was a big one for me too. I really thought the world could end at any moment (thanks, President Reagan!).
posted by matildaben at 6:18 AM on July 11, 2005

I don't think AIDS was a big scare for the average teen back then. I graduated in 1987 and AIDS was still "the thing that kills gays." Watch some old Eddie Murphy or Sam Kinnison comedy routines to see the general attitude.

The 1980s was when the anti-drunk driving thing really caught on, I think. Just about every month somebody would talk at our school about their dead son, or a cop would describe the scene of an accident.

Nuclear war was the real big one. Everyone really thought it was going to happen in our lifetime. I tuned into the TV news halfway through a report of Reagan's famous "we begin bombing in five minutes" thing and I thought we were actaully at war.

Rent "The Day After", "Threads", or "Testiment" to see what we all thought we'd experience.
posted by bondcliff at 6:19 AM on July 11, 2005

I think rebellion took the same form in the eighties as it does now, and as it did fifty years ago: drinking, smoking, fucking, and driving cars really, really fast.

Except that far, far fewer people smoked tobacco in the 80s. When I was in high school (grad 88, Gainesville FL), smoking cigarettes was mostly a redneck thing, lumped in with chewing tobacco.

jdroth: You think kids dress funny, and you grew up in the era of parachute pants fer cryin' out loud?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:32 AM on July 11, 2005

UScentrism again, sigh.

I was in high school in London and IRA bombs were going off all the time and we just dealt with it. We were much more afraid of Reagan and nukes. I do remember this constant low grade fear that it could all end tomorrow. I never knew how strong and prevalent that was until my reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I cried and cried and it felt like a giant weight had lifted, a weight I wasn't even really aware of.


Also, Adam Ant, pirate shirts and appalling Human League style hair.
posted by CunningLinguist at 6:36 AM on July 11, 2005

i had nightmares about nuclear war - especially after watchign "The Day After" - as corny as it may have been.
posted by chr1sb0y at 6:49 AM on July 11, 2005

I was a teen through the 80s, and I remember the specter of nuclear war as always hanging there as an omnipresent threat. But, I've talked to people who came of age during the Cuban missile crisis, and for them, that period was all about the fear of nuclear war at any minute. They say that by the time the 80s came around, they were pretty much over it.

So, I'd be hesitant to say that the fear of nuclear war was precisely rooted in that particular decade. It may well be that teenage years are always characterized by the fear that the crazy adults are going to fuck it up before you've had your chance.

For this generation, that's probably running out of gas and a war with the Middle East. But, I think it would always be something.
posted by willnot at 6:57 AM on July 11, 2005

I think you might have to break it up further tho, or pick a kid who was 15-18 around 85-87, and look at the top stories, what was being said about teens then, etc. Bondcliff and some others seem to have had the typical mid-80s experience as a "Reagan Youth", which was very different from the early 80s experience and previous. Society got more conservative during the decade, and it affected the messages teens absorbed.

(There was no "Safe Sex" "Evil Empire" or "Just Say No" or MADD stuff when i was a teen and there was still an open, leftover from the seventies, experimenting vibe for those of us who were teens in the early 80s compared to later. And no "Greed is Good", or Alex P. Keaton stuff. We had sex earlier than people even 3 years younger, and it was ok. We called those younger, more conservative kids "Reagan Youth", and saw them as much more conservative and obedient than we were. Watch Freaks and Geeks for my age group--I turned 16 at the end of 80).
posted by amberglow at 6:57 AM on July 11, 2005

I concur with what other people have said: I was worried about nuclear war, and I didn't think about AIDS, though I did worry about pregnancy and driving drunk and, of course, my own reputation. While it was always hard to be individualistic, this was also [somewhat] before rebelliousness was totally commodified and you could select what rebel track you wanted to belong to, and purchase accessories for. I remember it being a big us vs them situation in my high school [Jocks vs Everyone Else] but that may have just been because my high school was big into athletics.

A big thing to remember is that there wasn't really an Internet when we were in high school, so we all talked on the phone an awful lot which lent itself to a lot of one-on-one communication. Almost no one had computers [this changerd towards the late 80's but not terribly much] and so moreso than now we all listened to the same radio stations and watched the same television shows on the same three networks.

One thing that I notice about today's teens as compared to when I went to high school is there wasn't really a large crowd of Just Say No people with regards to drugs. There were always churchy kids who didn't do them and could be judgmental, but the average kid either did drugs or didn't care about drugs. You didn't have as many kids who truly thought drugs were evil and who would turn in their parents or form their own in-school narc squads; drug use was seen as more of a choice and less of a failing.
posted by jessamyn at 6:58 AM on July 11, 2005

Far, far fewer people smoked tobacco in the 80s. When I was in high school (grad 88, Gainesville FL), smoking cigarettes was mostly a redneck thing, lumped in with chewing tobacco.

Hm. Smoking and chewing tobacco were very prevalent when I was in high school (grad 87, Canby OR), but then most people would have considered ours a redneck town.

jdroth: You think kids dress funny, and you grew up in the era of parachute pants fer cryin' out loud?

Ha! I wore parachute pants for a few weeks one summer between my 8th grade and 9th grade years. (Or maybe it was the year after.) Yes, yes, we had parachute pants, but they were a fad that passed quickly. Greater sins were the gaudy colors and big hair that lingered for years in the middle of the decade.

Amberglow and Jessamyn have some good points. My cousin, who is five years older than I am, had a very different eighties experience than I did. (True, part of his high school years were in the seventies.) And computers just weren't prevalent. Me and my friends had them, but not because of wealth; we had them because we were geeky and our parents tried to encourage any possible social thread we could hold onto. None of us had a modem, but we did not about BBS. The most common form of networking and primitive file sharing was the once-a-month computer club meetings at the high school. That's where we learned to crack our Apple II and C64 games.
posted by jdroth at 7:16 AM on July 11, 2005

This might help a little, too (or google up "cultural history" for the decade)

I think you saw more than just rebelliousness commodified--charity and caring about society and others was too, with Live Aid and "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and "I Won't Play Sun City" etc, where before it had been NORML and no-Nuke marches and protests...and MTV commodified music in a way it hadn't been before. Everything became a commodity in the 80s.
posted by amberglow at 7:16 AM on July 11, 2005

yeah - as others have said - it was the bomb, cnd, thatcher.
the big political thing was thatcher versus the unions. the miner's strike was in mid 80s. but i doubt most teenagers cared about that, unless it involved someone in your family.
the richer kids had "micro"computers. my school (13-18 year olds) had one computer, then later got 4 micros.
cb radio was moderately popular.
tv included not the 9 o'clock news and the kenny everett video show - "alternative comedy" was in full swing (maybe that is very late 70s).
the only drugs i knew about were cigarettes and booze, and maybe a bit of pot if you were very very cool. and valium for the mothers. this was before the decent anti-depressants.
porn came in magazines - no internet - music was on lps or cassette. i dreamt of owning a stereo casette/radio player.
people hung out at the bus station.
(this is in the uk, small town).
posted by andrew cooke at 7:19 AM on July 11, 2005

This too
posted by amberglow at 7:21 AM on July 11, 2005

I graduated in 1984 and had the experience of going to high school in 2 different parts of the country (Florida and Tennessee), In Florida, we dressed differently than in Tennessee and we listened to vastly different types of music as well as our social groups being different.

Florida: Very new wave and valley girl, we wore surfer clothes (Ocean Pacific, Vans skater shoes etc), listened to Human League, Adam Ant, Kajagoogoo, etc. The cliques in school were the jocks, art kids, surfers and geeks.

Tennessee: Almost no new wave music, the geeks/art/drama kids were one clique and they tended to listen to REM, The Cure and wear weird shit like nuclear waste cleanup suits to school. Everyone else listened to country music, even the jocks, and wore jeans, hiking boots and jean jackets (or FFA jackets if you were an "ag"). The cliques were the frats (preps), geeks, gearheads and ags.

We hadn't even heard of AIDS at that point, if we did it was just a passing mention about a "gay disease", but we did worry a lot about pregnancy. The only venereal disease we really knew about was herpes, but nobody worried about that either. Nobody had computers, and very few people had call waiting or anything more than an answering machine. No cordless phones either, you had to have your phone conversations in the room the phone was in. We also got one of the first VCRs, with the "remote" on a cord that stretched across the room. Our microwave was enormous and really expensive. We had cassette players in our cars. I still have LPs of the Thompson Twins and Huey Lewis and the News.

Michael Jackson was still black.

David Letterman was on during the day and had lots of brown curly hair.

Our car had T-tops!

thanks for letting me go down memory lane for a bit.
posted by hollygoheavy at 7:44 AM on July 11, 2005

I was born in 1977 and never feared nuclear war. I wasn't allowed to watch TV and never saw scary movies, so maybe I was too oblivious or too young (technically, I was never a teenage in the 80s). It's interesting to hear so many people talk about how that fear was a major part of their experience.

Most of my worries were deeply personal, like whether my mom would yell at me or whether kids would beat me up or whether my sister would be ok. There were definitely cliques, and I usually felt excluded. TV seemed to be a big cultural reference that everyone else shared, especially MTV. As for rebellion, I hung out with a kid who shoplifted and teepeed people's houses, and I gave it a try myself for a few minutes before deciding that it sucked. My main rebellions came later, in high school in the 90s.
posted by equipoise at 8:15 AM on July 11, 2005

I was a teenager till 1985 and was always conscious of the nuclear threat; not just nuclear war, but after the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 nuclear power as well. My Mom came and picked me up from school in NYC in the middle of the day and sent me and my sister to relatives in Tennessee to get out of fallout range. Remember, China Syndrome came out in '79 too - we really were thinking about a meltdown as a world-ender.

Younger people won't remember that at least in what we now call "the blue states" anti-nuclear activism was culturally very broad, and there and elsewhere a certain survivalist psychology was quite common. My mom's best friend wrote a Day-After-type novel; one of my friends' dads led a anti-nuke group called Physicians for Social Responsibility; I carried around a copy of the Department of Energy's book The Effects of Nuclear War which came with a neat-o round plastic calculator wheel that let you dial in megatonnage and distance and find out max temperature and overpressure.

So we all thought we might be moments away from death. And unlike some of the other commenters here I did fear AIDS in the '80s. In high school (class of '83) we had Sex Ed which focused on the threat of syphilis and gonorrhea; I don't remember herpes being mentioned; and AIDS wasn't being discussed yet. But I grew up in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC and in Provincetown, MA - two of the three gayest places in the world - and knew about "gay cancer" from the start of the epidemic; friends and neighbors were dying; and the message promulgated during the '80s was "anyone can catch AIDS; there is no safe sex". People now have internalized the fact that if you aren't having anal sex or shooting up then pregnancy and non-fatal diseases are a more imminent concern than AIDS, but for most of the '80s at least in the popular imagination sex and death were concomitant.

And, crime! By today's standards, the streets of the '80s were downright dangerous. Today there's about a murder a day in NYC; throughout the '80s it averaged about six a day. Crime in all categories peaked in the '80s, and the sense of hazard was palpable. I remember in '89 or so being pushed off the sidewalk by a pack of tough kids in the nicest part of Greenwich Village; today, I know sweet twin twenty-something blondes from Indianapolis living comfortably and safely in what was back then a heroin bazaar on the Lower East Side.

----

So that's fear. Regarding individualism and rebellion, I can say that at least in NYC punk and New Wave were driving great inventiveness in styles and lifestyles. My little sister (high school class of '85) was a "club kid" from the age of 14, back when NYC had no effective drinking age; she was a favorite of the doormen at Danceteria and Limelight which were pretty much the hottest nightclubs in the world and were one and two blocks from our apartment. Her hair changed color weekly and she dressed in wild New-Wave style. (People were not yet so copiously pierced. And teenage girls did not yet commonly get tattoos.)

Remember, we were rebelling against rock and roll. The radio was playing Led Zep and Skynyrd and Boston and Chicago; we hated those and loved Black Flag and Hüsker Dü and Blondie. When I left high school rap was just starting to spread outside NYC but we'd been hearing Run-D.M.C. and Grandmaster Flash the Sugar Hill Gang for a couple of years; but rap had no outlaw component then and was not as interesting as punk to rebellious white kids.

(I of course was a nerdy non-rebellious little D&D-playing, Apple-II+-programming goon and dressed, well, just like jonmc does today: tee-shirt, flannel shirt, and jeans. Except that I used to wear a second flannel shirt over the first, with the sleeves cut off. Don't ask me why.)
posted by nicwolff at 9:49 AM on July 11, 2005

Jessamyn makes a really great point about how much less media there was, and how narrow were the avenues for communication and self-expression in an even modestly-sized small city like the one I grew up in.

Regardless of clique, pop culture was a one-way road (them to us) with maybe four lanes instead of 10,000. You communicated with the friends you happened to make in your town, in person or over the phone, period.

Don't underestimate the importance of the local record store. It was the only way to get music which didn't make it on MTV or the commercial radio stations around. (And don't forget how monolithic commercial radio was -- the now-almost-dead Top 40 format was dominant, and there were only a few nascent alternative radio station.) If I were trying to depict a gathering place of any dissident or marginal clique, it would always be the sidewalk outside the local record store.
posted by MattD at 9:54 AM on July 11, 2005

individualism (Did teens clump themselves into cliques and groups, or did they feel the need to succumb to a particular 'look'was it accepted to be unique and individualistic?)

I think (but can't be sure) that teens from twenty years ago were more cliquish than they are today. I think part of this is due to the fact that coolness is agressively marketed towards kids nowadays, whereas 20 years ago it was much less aggressive. "18-35" used to be the key demographic, but it feels that over 20 years, that range has shifted downwards. Teens nowadays have craploads of stores in their malls selling clothes solely to them, they have shows on television with entire teen casts showing them how to act and behave, and they have entire throngs of teenage celebrities showing them how they should look. I think kids tended to be more cliquish back then, because pre-internet, the world wasn't being beamed into your backyard, and you just didn't know that there were so many more ways of behaving than the smattering of options available in whatever town you grew up in.
posted by 23skidoo at 10:10 AM on July 11, 2005

I turned 13 in 1985, grew up in rural PA.

Even if you had computers they were not what we think of now.

Media and communications were so very different. The only way to find things out was by viewing TV, reading magazines or from friends. Aside from the library (which was a place that I went to pretty frequently) there was no way to learn based on your personal whim like you can with the internet now. This made everything very different. For instance I used to drive five hours round trip to go to a record store that had the kind of music that I liked just to browse. There was no other way. I remember being 15 years old and wanting to see Dr Strangelove *very* badly but not being able to. It was never on TV (which was 25 channels only) never revived in theaters and not in my local video rental places. Now you can decide that you want to see or hear something and within a day or two max you can see or hear it.

I lived in the area around Camp David and Site R (the underground Pentagon) and my town was about half military. It was well known that in the event of a nuclear attack that we would be the among first to be hit and we would be hit directly. I actually preferred it this way. I thought about it all the time, though.... ALL the time.

I think that the world was far less depressing then. I didn't drink until senior year of high school, didn't do any drugs as a teenager, etc, graduated a virgin. In that I think that I was typical of the 'smart' kids in my school. My dangerous activity was driving like a crazy person. Looking back I have no idea what I was thinking. I think that there were a lot of people taking risks driving.

In general I think that being a teen in the 80s was less about the way it was portrayed in the movies and more about who your friends were. I felt a real disconnect with the John Hughes concept of the age then and I do now.
posted by n9 at 10:26 AM on July 11, 2005

We thought of the 1980s as the age of greed: The rich did very well, the middle class not so well. Culture wise: In the mid 80s there was the return of preppy clothing and prep-worship/ whoreship. The media was completely obsessed with rich people-- Dallas and a few other completely derrivative soap-operas dominated prime time-- Ordinary people, convinced us that most of America was rich at a time when many of our parents were afraid of losing their jobs.

Nuclear war weighed very heavily on my mind, but I know a lot of people just didn't worry. My formative worries were about Nuclear war, U.S. supported terror in Iran, Afghanistan (I was already interested in Russian and the Soviet Union), Latin America and the Philippines. But I was a repressed gay teen, so I was preoccupied by worrying in general.

But there were 1970s throw backs, pseudo hippies, New wavers, and punks who were a little creative. Some of the music was really good, and there were alternatives to mainstream culture.

AIDS was a late development in the 1980s, but society was a lot less open, and homosexuality was not generally mentioned in the fly-over. Reagan refused to say the word, and many Americans thought that was just great. I'd read Angels in America if you are interested in this.

Note-- we remember the 1980s as prosperous. The rich did well, but many others just worried about losing jobs, and high inflation. American car manufacture was atrocious, and businesses were more interested in junk bonds than investment.

It really wasn't an era worthy of a revival.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 10:32 AM on July 11, 2005

To further serve as an example of the nuclear war fears (which I too shared), see Songs about Nuclear War from the Eighties. (Warning: sloppy organization, some of the entries may be questionable, but you get the idea.) And don't forget 99 Luftballons, perhaps the archetype of such songs.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 11:23 AM on July 11, 2005

It was well known that in the event of a nuclear attack that we would be the among first to be hit and we would be hit directly.

I think everyone thought this about their town. It may have actually have been the case where you lived, but back then just about everyone claimed it. I even read something a while back about the phenomena.
posted by bondcliff at 12:05 PM on July 11, 2005

I think the points regarding the omnipresence of media are great. This is a Key Difference between now and twenty years ago.

Yes, there was plenty of media twenty years ago. There were billboards and magazines and television and radio. And there was plenty of advertising, too. But none of it had reached the hypersaturated state we experience today. It was easy to shut it out.

Radio was a big thing for me twenty years ago. I listened to it several hours a day. I never listen to it today. (Maybe an hour or two a month, tops.) Where I lived in rural Oregon, cable television wasn't available. We got five over-the-air stations. That was it. The magazine market wasn't as supersaturated with niche publications as it is today. (There were specialized magazines, just not as many of them.) There was no advertising before movies or before videos. (And remember: videos were new still. They were almost a novelty.) There was no advertising on shopping carts. No advertising on benches. No corporate branding of sports stadiums and college Bowl games.

And, most of all, there was no internet.

If you wanted to research something, you went to the library. You learned how to use the card catalog and that guide for magazines, the name of which I cannot even remember (Periodic Guide?). If you wanted information on Star Wars, as I did during my freshman year of college, you might be lucky to come up with a dozen solid articles from your library. There was no google.

Just thinking out loud here...
posted by jdroth at 1:23 PM on July 11, 2005

nic, i bet i knew your sister from Danceteria (I was in college already tho--first went there the night after HS graduation in 82--and ask her if she remembers Zsa-Zsa from there (she worked the elevators--such a sweetheart). : >
posted by amberglow at 1:23 PM on July 11, 2005

(Periodic Guide?)

Close! The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.

One more factoid, when I was in high school in Massachusetts, the drinking age was 21 here and 18 in nearby New Hampshire. Kids would get into trouble by getting someone's older brother to drive across the border to one of the border liquor stores and drive back to Massachusetts with a carload of beer.
posted by jessamyn at 6:59 PM on July 11, 2005