What were the 1970s and 1982 like?

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I guess that people love to reminisce..

People also love to convey to younger people the lessons they learned through experiencing those times.

I remember now what was good about 1982
I lost my virginity.
After school I worked in a mans trade and never got to meet women, but Jan 82 I had a serious motorcycle accident so went into hospital.
Back then the NHS isnt what it is now where they patch you up and send you home the same day, back then they looked after you until you were better.
During that time in hospital one of the nurses would take me back to her room in the nurses home when she finished her shift.
Once I was discharged I started seeing one of the other nurses.

I was a child in the 70s and lived in Northern Ireland. My memories are that people seemed much poorer than they are now. Lots of people didn't have cars, and their houses were furnished very modestly. People couldn't access loans or credit easily. People's houses were more likely to have peeling paint, sash windows, and most didn't have central heating. People ate much more boring/simple food than they do now. It was all about meat, potatoes, vegetables. We didn't have McDonalds or takeaways. The most exciting thing was a 10p lucky bag. But people were also a lot thinner than now and didn't have debt. Kids played out on the streets all the time, so there were always kids outside kicking a football or running around. Also, there were bombs and soldiers on the streets, as it was during the time of the Troubles in Derry.

1982 was a great music year. I got my first radio and spent hours listening to chart music. I still listen to music from that year all the time. I was very worried about nuclear war. My father was very politically active so I heard a lot about Mrs Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan. There seemed to be a lot of unemployment. I lived in northern England at this time, which was a huge change for me, from a warzone where everyone was either Protestant or Catholic, but uniformly white, to a place where most people were recent immigrants or children of immigrants, from India, Pakistan and the Carribean. It was quite exciting to me, as there was a lot of diversity in food and smells and music and religion. The area we lived in though was very rough and poor, and quite violent for kids.

I remember 1982 as the year a whole lot of cracking movies came out: there was Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing, Tron, Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, The Dark Crystal and ET. Sci Fi and Fantasy movies were my love then and they kept me going through some rotten times - that year was about the worst of the period when I was bullied at school.

It was also about this time that video games arrived in my life in the form of an Atari VCS with Asteroids and Space Invaders. VCRs were gaining popularity and our town had several tape rental stores. One in particular traded openly in pirate copies of movies not yet released in the UK. They didn't care what you rented even if you were under 18. Many happy hours catching up on the back catalogues of George Romero, David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci etc followed...

I was still pretty young in the 1970s so what I remember is a bit limited.Both my grandmas were still alive and the were family holidays in Devon and Wales. Also lots of Lego, Cresta soft drinks, Dinky toys, Gerry Anderson TV shows, Hanna Barbera cartoons and Boney M. So, all-round pretty damned awesome!

Oops. Double post.

Never mind. I'll make use of it. "The Young Ones" and "Not The Nine O'Clock News" on the telly in 1982. Here is one of my favourite ever sketches:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beCYGm1vMJ0[/youtube]

Madonna became famous in '82. And in late 82 early 83 Micheal Jackson released the "Thriller" album. So in pop music it was a landmark year.

The 70's I was a teen and as you can tell by my signature it was mostly as we used to say a ?bummer?. We were baby boomers, I was born in 1957 the height of post war birth explosion but when they speak of boomer culture it is the culture for those born between 1946 and 1954. We were born just a few years to late. By the time we were teens the promise of the 60's gave way to the alienation of cynicism of Watergate and then apathy and directionless. After all of the talk of a new just way of doing things the 60's kids were becoming conformists just as there parents always said they would. We were left with wreckage of the failed experiments of 60's. The sexual revolution gave way to divorce, confusion , vanerial disease. And you could listen to it on Fleetwoods Mac's Rumours album because the band members were going through same wreckage as their audience. Looking back I realize the schools that were the targets of a lot of protests were still in a state of shock by the time we got to high school. There was weird experimental programs, dumbing down of standards and just generally doing what they thought the kids wanted. The bathrooms were for marijuana smoking which started before home room and went on in between classes, the kids could go off campus for more drugs at lunch. In rock music the belief that after Woodstock we are the future gave way to the reality of stupidly of Altamont, the deaths of Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison circa 1969-1971. Doing what you want gave way to marketing and loads of money and endless touring with drugs and groupies provided. In the first half of the 70?s their was plenty of excellent ?Classic Rock? to be had but by the end of the decade the music was shell of it?s 60?s self. Just enough Hard Rock guitar for the teenage boys and ballads for the girls, Foreigner, Styx, Boston, Journey nice but boring. And then their was disco. Nowadays it is looked at correctly a watershed in pop music history whose inventions are just essential to how music is made today. And it started by outsiders on independent labels as did punk. That is not what it felt like at the time. The endless repetition of the 4/4 beat from not only the hit records but in commercials etc drove some of us nuts. It was associated with elitism, aimless hedonism, horrible fashion, basically a symbol of everything that was wrong with the ?70?s.
As for being an Aspie of course there was no such thing. The most severely affected Autistics were institutionalized and often misdiagnosed as deaf or if the family could not afford an institution thrown in the street or locked up in an upstairs room. After investigative reporting revealed nightmare conditions in the institutions they were closed and residents thrown into the street. You were bullied which was considered a right of passage, a normal part of growing up, It was just boys being boys. If you did not fight back it was because you were weak, not really a man. You?re were a nerd, painfully shy, loner, oddball etc. Because you had average to high intelligence but poor results everybody and yourself drew the obvious conclusion, you were lazy and weak. While beginning to change there was still a large stigma attach to seeing a professional.

It was in ?79 that it started to change for some of us. The still controversial(see below) Disco Demolition Night riot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night was the symbolic moment of change. Disco went out and the aforementioned New Wave stated to come in. New Wave and the Punk Rock it came from was an assault on the sell out hippies Groups like The Talking Heads, Devo, Elvis Costello, and Gary Numan( has come out Aspergers) looked acted, and made music that was even more jumpy, quirky and nerdy then me. A lot of it was cynical, which was just like I felt after all the years of bullying. 1979 was the summer first B-52?s record dropped, it showed me you can unobliterated fun in your own weird way and still be popular. .That lesson was still helping me when I got diagnosed last year. 1982 was the year New Wave became mainstream in the States with the Second British Invasion. We got MTV, the video?s made the bands seem more accessible. We had a New Wave radio station WLIR whose slogan was ?Dare to be Different?. Perfect. It was not unlike getting diagnosed in that I found out there are other weirdo?s out there. Unlike the diagnosis some of these people were fundamentally different then me but I still identified with them. I got into computer programing and did get along with my workmates. While the 80?s were the best of times for me as a 20 something the Autistic teens still had it bad. B Being different in any way still got you beat up.


Stave Dahl was the Chicago DJ who organized "Disco Demolition Night" did a parody of "Do You Think I'm Sexy" a disco song made by a rock star "Rod Stewart" who had "sold out" to disco. It reflected the popular negative images associated with disco at the time.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LAApU-QHfI[/youtube]
What I wrote above reflects how I felt about Disco Demolition night at the time. The week of the Disco Demolition there were 6 of the Top10 were disco songs. Two months later there were no disco songs the genre was dead for a long before reemerging as dance and house music. Obviously Disco Demolition night struck a nerve as an anti disco backlash had been building for some time. Because disco music was born out of black and gay subculture modern analysts have ascribed racism and homophobia to the backlash. Others have said the record companies were behind it because they were losing money on disco.

Joe Jackson's "Happy Loving Couples" s a new wave song that could have been written by me at time
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RntN9EfGUvI[/youtube]

To my mind, the 1970s were the most interesting decade for people in the US, on or off the spectrum. I would say the US experience of the 1970s was unique in certain ways.

When the 1970s began, the US was still involved in the Vietnam War. At that time, young men were conscripted to fight and over 58,000 died (not to mention wounded etc.). By the middle of the decade, the war had ended as a defeat for the US (first ever) and the President had resigned from office (also first ever).

The US spent the remainder of the decade essentially recovering from events at the beginning. During this time, the following was true, at least as I see it:

- Conscription ended and has never been reinstated.
- For a brief period, Capital Punishment was abolished (and then reinstated)
- For a few years, US citizens were allowed completely unrestricted travel to any country that would let them in.
- The military in general fell out of favor and was routinely shown disrespect by the popular media, more or less with impunity.
- Nudity was tolerated on broadcast TV and especially on PBS.
- Although marijuana was never legalized, laws against using it were scarcely enforced in some places. I clearly recall walking up 6th Avenue in Manhattan, past Grant Park, and seeing office workers there buying and smoking joints on their lunch break, in broad daylight. I think a few jurisdictions did decriminalize it.
- Young women generally only wore bras if they really needed them. It was often quite obvious when they didn't.
- Meanwhile the Soviet Union reached a high-water mark of its global influence, even making significant inroads in Western Europe (I believe Portugal had a pro-Soviet government for a short time and the government that succeeded the Papadopoulos regime in Greece was very Moscow-friendly at least unofficially).

This was a very unusual period in US history which ended quite abruptly in 1981, with Reagan's inauguration, or possibly the unsuccessful assassination attempt against him a short time later.