Why do the 80's get such a hard time?

What people seem to not take into account is that as a decade, the 80's were all about excess, in every way...so of course they are going to sing about that stuff and have the most outlandish, ridiculous personas/stage productions. the 90's were the backlash, so it was all moody and mopey and flannel and unkempt.

I started playing in the 80's and still love that music....but I also love all the metal core and death core that people hate on so much today. i just love music, if it's done well, i dig it.

and some of the best players ever...point blank period, came out of the 80's. (and one of them DID play for Poison, Richie Kotzen). Kotzen, Gilbert, Bratta, Lynch, Malmsteen, VH, Beach, Timmons, Vai, Satch, Nuno....the list could go on forever...
 
80s ruled; way better than 90s. All has been already said. Most classic metal albums came out then, later 80s had more hair metal, but also Shrapnel shredders. Even the hair metal bands had many great guitar players, and riffs; Sure the structures of songs were lame overly catchy and simple, but Demartini, Bratta, Lynch , Reb Beach, not to mention Randy Rhoads, Jake e LEe etc.
 
The 80's catch hell largely because of what was "main stream" then. IMO mainstream pop and rock.

The cool aspect of the 80's imo was VH, Vai, Malmsteen, Satch, SRV, and the list goes on and on. That's not to slight any of the previous generation of great players or bands. Some of which flourished even more in the 80's. Floyd for example with The Wall. Along with the bad was a lot of awesome.

So when I hear people laughing at the 80's I have to stop and remember the "Mainstream" aspect of it which is pretty damned funny. Luckily there was no such thing as social media or the Internet for the main stream. There wasn't camera's all over the place and those of us who participated won't have that to haunt us forever. :)

This was some time in the late 80's.... I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSSxMgajq7o
 
This is, of course, all true. As much as I find a lot of what came out in the 80s ridiculous, cheesy, and asinine, I am aware that that is just my personal view. I can not like something and still also not feel the need to act like it's objectively the worst thing to ever happen to the universe. I think we'd all be better off if people could just do that (of course, there would still be a ton of people hating on the 80s... because they did suck :lol )

jlynnb1 said:
What people seem to not take into account is that as a decade, the 80's were all about excess, in every way...so of course they are going to sing about that stuff and have the most outlandish, ridiculous personas/stage productions. the 90's were the backlash, so it was all moody and mopey and flannel and unkempt.

I started playing in the 80's and still love that music....but I also love all the metal core and death core that people hate on so much today. i just love music, if it's done well, i dig it.

and some of the best players ever...point blank period, came out of the 80's. (and one of them DID play for Poison, Richie Kotzen). Kotzen, Gilbert, Bratta, Lynch, Malmsteen, VH, Beach, Timmons, Vai, Satch, Nuno....the list could go on forever...
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Laugh if you will, but I was not into metal and I still am not. But I did love music that had a bit more to it than 4 bars--repeat ad infinitum. Huge fan of Supertramp, ELO, Toto, Dire straits' love over gold album, stuff like that. Stuff that took a bit of composing. A bit of craftsmanship to write and perform. I kind of like some of Pink Floyd, but it's often too gloomy for me. I haven't got a clue where to go look for stuff like that nowadays. It's all so simplistic.

I tried explaining it to my stepson that's building dub step and house songs. He doesn't get that it's the same chords in 4 bars repeated over and over. He thinks varying the synth sound and shifting it an octave here bad there is making it diverse... He's making those with a LEGO-app called fruity loops... It sounds pro, but it bores the hell out of me. Then he hears a song I like and shouts that that sounds the same too... It's bloody well got more chords to it! He's listening superficially. Adding a certain beat to the rhythm and then dropping it again is diversity. Having the synth move up an octave is diversity. No it's not.


Many great bands started late 70s but bloomed over the 80s. Dire straits, U2, Police, VH, Toto, etc.

I know. Mainstream. But craftsmen!
 
Dutch said:
I tried explaining it to my stepson that's building dub step and house songs. He doesn't get that it's the same chords in 4 bars repeated over and over. He thinks varying the synth sound and shifting it an octave here bad there is making it diverse... He's making those with a LEGO-app called fruity loops... It sounds pro, but it bores the hell out of me. Then he hears a song I like and shouts that that sounds the same too... It's bloody well got more chords to it! He's listening superficially. Adding a certain beat to the rhythm and then dropping it again is diversity. Having the synth move up an octave is diversity. No it's not.
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Yes, it is, actually. You can say it's not diversity, but that's an arbitrary judgment. Any movement is diversity. It may not be chordal diversity, but that's entirely different.

Keep in mind, there were plenty of people from the previous generations that reacted exactly like you are to those bands that you love. "Oh, it's just noise!" "That's not music!" Etc. If we could just break the cycle where every generation thinks that the music of the next has less merit that would be kind of awesome.
 
Dutch said:
He's listening superficially.
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No, he is just listening for different things. Maybe you are listening to his music superficially. Did you tell him to get off your lawn ;)

FWIW the whole "four bars looped" with elements dropping in and out is pretty boring to me, but as a producer I try and see how this stuff ticks, and as a musical form it has its own conventions and musical vocabulary. And hey, if you think about it the blues is just the same three chords on a twelve bar loop.

BTW if you are looking for well composed and crafted music that is less gloomy than Floyd, you might want to loop at the modern Prog Rock (as opposed to Metal) scene. Spock's Beard, Flying Colours, Frost*, recent It Bites (The Tall Ships and Map Of The Past are both great).



 
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Ben.Last said:
Yes, it is, actually. You can say it's not diversity, but that's an arbitrary judgment. Any movement is diversity. It may not be chordal diversity, but that's entirely different.

Keep in mind, there were plenty of people from the previous generations that reacted exactly like you are to those bands that you love. "Oh, it's just noise!" "That's not music!" Etc. If we could just break the cycle where every generation thinks that the music of the next has less merit that would be kind of awesome.
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Yeh. I'm an old geezer. Perfectly aware of the generation gap and that I'm on the old side now saying stuff was better in the old days...

:D

I'm allowed because this thread is about the 80s and I miss them.

Of course dance music has some diversity. (Actually, some doesn't, nothing much changes over the course of the "track", fortunately even my stepson thinks those are boring) But to me it's superficial diversity. It's only skin deep. And after a minute or so I find myself thinking "when is that bloody sequence going to stop...". I get to longing for a bridge...

And now we find ourselves in a place where the big events are house parties where tens of thousands of people go and hop up an down watching some guy behind a desk waving a hand in the air like he just don't... With a huge set and lightshow to give them something to look at... So, it's popular alright. Well, they can have it, more power to them. As long as I don't have to.

In the mean while actual people playing instruments are relegated to bars where much of the audiences don't even listen.


Progress.
They've been studying diversity in music lately and found there was actually less harmonic diversity in today's music then there was earlier... Don't know the details.

The better songs from the likes of Supertramp that I'm talking about take you on a journey. Almost like classical pieces do. Like Vivaldi and Stravinsky. There not much of that around any more. I miss it.

I hated when grunge killed rock and dance killed pop. I wasn't even that old then.
 
Rook said:
No, he is just listening for different things. Maybe you are listening to his music superficially. Did you tell him to get off your lawn ;)

FWIW the whole "four bars looped" with elements dropping in and out is pretty boring to me, but as a producer I try and see how this stuff ticks, and as a musical form it has its own conventions and musical vocabulary. And hey, if you think about it the blues is just the same three chords on a twelve bar loop.

BTW if you are looking for well composed and crafted music that is less gloomy than Floyd, you might want to loop at the modern Prog Rock (as opposed to Metal) scene. Spock's Beard, Flying Colours, Frost*, recent It Bites (The Tall Ships and Map Of The Past are both great).



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I told him to mow the lawn. He couldn't get the mower to move.
I'm not a big fan of the blues either.
Funny enough classical shred doesn't appeal much to me either.

I'll take a gander over yonder prog stuff sometime. Because of Guthrie's involvement I listened to some Steve Wilson songs, but the ones I found were pretty gloomy too.
 
Dutch said:
I hated when grunge killed rock and dance killed pop. I wasn't even that old then.
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Grunge didn't kill rock; that 80s rock that some of you remember so fondly did that. Grunge brought back rock from the brink of death.

For the record, I'm old enough now that I'm not really fully on board with a lot of the rock/metal out there right now. I enjoy some of it, but I find myself listening to stuff from the 90s much more. That has nothing to do with musicianship though; it's purely because of stylistic preferences.
 
The same thing happens with every genre, in every decade :

First some innovators come along and create new and inspired music.
Then less innovative musicians jump on the bandwagon and do their best to ape the same sound/style, they didn't invent the genre, but they (and their record companies) want a piece of the action.
This leads to the genre getting watered down and over time the reduction in quality and over saturation means interest in the genre from the general public wanes.
This results in the genre feeling played-out and a hunger is there for something new.

So another innovator comes along with something fresh and the whole cycle starts over again.

This happened with prog rock in the '70s, 'hair metal' in the '80s, grunge in the '90s and it's happening again with the djent stuff right now.
 
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cragginshred said:
There will never be another era that produces all the guitarists named in this thread. Of course if you were not into it, you will not get it.
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And I can say that about any "era" since the beginning of guitar based rock, because, as Horganovski astutely pointed out right above you, every era has its innovators mixed in with a bunch of crap.
 
man i love the 80s (as i remembered it anyway)!
i went into the decade as a teenager and the only things on this hormone-loaded brain of mind were music and girls (the order depends on time of day)
the mtv, the aerobics, the sitcoms, the movies, the tv series, man, it was all i could to to keep my mind from exploding..
of course somewhere along that timeline i started playing the guitar (to impress the girls of course) and the rest, as they say, is history.
 
Ben.Last said:
Nostalgia is not a viable defense. :lol
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Ha, it's the only one I have... in all seriousness I realize that there were some really bad acts in the 80's and not just limited to rock and metal, new wave was a really big ofender as well.
 
Sixstring said:
Ha, it's the only one I have... in all seriousness I realize that there were some really bad acts in the 80's and not just limited to rock and metal, new wave was a really big ofender as well.
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There was some awesome stuff that got thrown into that genre too though.

Look, the thing is, the 80s don't get "such a hard time," every "generation" of music eventually wears out its welcome with the unwashed masses, at which point they turn on it and talk about it like it's the worst piece of shit to ever be shitted. Then, about 10 years later, people start saying to themselves, "Hmmm X band from that period was pretty decent." Lather, rinse, repeat. It's kind of depressing how predictable people are, but... well... they are.
 
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