I find it rather funny that the 80s are suddenly popular again.  I now know why things come back into fashion.

Some of the music and close in the 80s truly sucked.  In fact most of the music and clothing in the 80s sucked!

However when Perez come back around and fashion people don't focus on the stuff that sucked even though at the time those things were so predominant that that's all you can see or hear most of the time.

The music is popularized today as been great 80s music, often times was very good back then but you were hard-pressed actually hear that music back in the 80s.

I say this as I'm listening to an old 12 inch mix from a band called Yaz.  It's a great example of 80s music that would have been considered new wave or underground were postponed for what everyone call it.  It's also a great example of music out would never been heard on the radio.  There's a lot of good music in the 80s but none of those on the radio.  Instead of hearing good music you would hear endless loops of karate kid theme songs.

So I guess it's important that we realize that there may have been some great things in the 80s, and there really were but that doesn't mean that the 80s as a period was a great time.  Most of us had to suffer through the 80s swamped in the mediocrity that the media forced upon us.  We had to work pretty damn hard to find the actual good stuff.

I had to walk 10 miles uphill both ways through 10 feet of snow to find a good album back then.  These days if you want to find good music you can find it online or download pretty damn fast with little effort, and that's probably why I'll album sales suck for the music industry these days.  It's not because Apple is cool, it's because the record industry doesn't have a captive audience anymore.  (That same reason will probably spell out Bulls demise as music provider as they to attempt to hold capitve audiences with their music store.)

If there's anything that were learning in the technological revolution, it's that people can be held captive any longer by an industry.  The dying monopoly of Microsoft is probably a great example of this problem.  It's just too easy to pass information and software around these days for anyone to get a hold on things in that manner.  Yes we still have some vestiges of monopolies like Microsoft and Google and Apple for that matter, but I think their days are numbered.

If we don't blow ourselves up in the next 10 years my kids might actually be a list say that they lived through an era that was truly great and not because the greatness was hidden beneath the surface but because the greatness was over dominating in the culture of the society.

That's a bunch of lofty language to basically say that in the modern age everybody can be cool!  :)