More Fads: The 1980's

No decade since the 1950's has so boldly established itself as a fad juggernaut as did the 1980's. In comparison, the 1990's were a sad decade for fads indeed, making one wonder where the will for conspicuous time wasting had gone. Probably the best explanation can be found in looking at each decade's drug of choice, and the resultant effect this had on American culture.

In the 1960's, Americans were dropping acid and grooving to the beautiful swirling colors of the traffic accident they'd just caused. The fads of the 60's were accordingly colorful and bizarre. The 70's were all about stinking up your jeans jacket with reefer smoke in the back of some sociopath's panel van, leading to fads as ugly and alienating as the decade itself. In the 80's, the hip and squares alike were pulling lines of expensive coke and joking about the five or six dead South Americans who had made their high possible. Ambitious and overeager, if not megalomaniacal, were the keywords in 80's faddom as well. America spent the 90's slouched over between the sofa and the bathroom door with a heroin needle dangling from its arm, and as a result not a whole lot of fadding, nor much else, got done in that decade.

The 80's, however, were another story entirely. The story of neon-colored spandex encrusted with hair gel, and the story of a nation kissing its own ass. In keeping with the 80's own hyper-incongruent vibe, the most fun fad from the decade didn't even originate in the 80's. Exploiting the poor had been around for eons, but not since pirate times had it been as cool to openly flaunt this practice or write songs about it. If the pendulum had swung any further in the opposite direction from the 60's, it might have knocked America's dick right out of the anus of the disenfranchised.

This isn't to say that all of the 80's fads were mean-spirited. Sure, Cabbage Patch Kids were pretty disgusting, but there was a certain poetic justice in watching deranged materialist parents fighting each other tooth and nail for the right to give their kids some shitty cloth doll.

On the contrary, many of the 80's best fads were quite fun. Well, not the Smurfs, those little communist bastards were pretty creepy. Nobody ever really explained if they were supposed to be aliens or some kind of apocalyptic cult or what. Personally, I've always leaned in the "cult" direction, since questions of "What's a Smurf?" and "Why do they all wear the same color pants?" were always answered with the cultish doublespeak "They're Smurfs" from the bigwigs at Hanna Barbera.

But surely, not every aspect of the 80's was overrun by creepy materialistic crap. Who could forget the Rubik's Cube? Inventor and Belgian weirdo Erno Rubik created his famous cube in 1974 as a way to drive his dog insane. Though the toy failed in its intended use (the dog just tried to eat the cube), it eventually found millions of fans among Americans who thought solving some kind of chintzy plastic puzzle proved they were smart. The truly smart soon learned that you could just "solve" the puzzle by peeling all the colored stickers off the squares and putting them back on in the right order. Less-inventive children soon developed a pastime known as "Rubik's Baseball," a one-time game where the cube was hit with a bat and exploded into a million plastic pieces that went everywhere.

So maybe the Rubik's Cube was a piece of shit, too. But no one could muster such harsh words for the most expressive of 80's fads, breakdancing. Originating as a way for especially cowardly street gangs to mediate their differences through dance battles rather than actual fighting, breakdancing first came to national attention in 1975 when two Harlem street gangs, the Soft Touches and the Big Pussies, danced the shit out of each other in a bloodless gangland melee that left dozens thoroughly exhausted. By the early 80's, breakin' had become a national obsession, with white kids everywhere flopping around on the floor like they had any idea what they were doing. Despite an utter lack of coordination or soul whatsoever, Caucasian interest in breakdancing kept the fad alive for several years, eventually cementing it as the most fun source of self-inflicted spinal injuries since the invention of the skateboard.

Concerned parents who didn't want kids hurting themselves breakdancing did their children no favors by sending them to school to play tetherball instead, perhaps one of the cruelest 80's fads since it was condoned by the school board. Like dodge ball without the principle of safety in numbers, tetherball involved chaining a rock-hard leather "ball" to a pole and mandating that children use it to pummel each other into submission. Tetherball was eventually banned in 1989 after President Bush attempted the game for a photo op at a Washington elementary school, which ended in the president being escorted away by the Secret Service after a shameful episode of crying and broken glasses.

Perhaps the true salvation of 80's fads was the rise of video games, which rarely resulted in injury or public humiliation. Though as a metaphor for the 80's themselves, early videogames could hardly be more apt: gobbling up quarters while presenting basically the same rip-off level over and over again, only more hopelessly difficult each time. Perhaps video games did more to prepare children for the real world than parents realized at the time, filling kids with nervous dread while cleaning out their allowances. Personally I wouldn't know, since I never had any money and just had to stand there pretending I was controlling the little guy in the demo.

On second thought, maybe the 80's did suck a big nut.

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