You don't know how good you've got it compared to us growing up in the 80's. Cute nostalgia aside, it kinda sucked. You'll never realize how much easier it is to do those time honored rites of don't-tell-your-parents or freak-them-out adolescence. Don't think because I'm mentioning this stuff, I'm encouraging kids to do these things, but I'm not to old to realize that there is no encouraging necessary for kids to do it, either.
In our day, our elders would regale us with tales like having to walk 5 mines in the snow to go to school, this is my version.
Alcohol- For every generation of underage drinkers, the key to enjoyment is for it to taste as little like alcohol as possible. In my day, this role was best filled by wine coolers. Now, you have stuff like the Smirnoff Twisted Vs that taste like you're drinking a Jolly Rancher; they make the 80's coolers taste like Johnnie Walker Black.
Porn- We had, if we were lucky, a dad that had a healthy stash (but not too many and none of the fetish ones that would make it hard for us to look them in the eye). With the vast pornographic possibilities of the internet coupled with clueless parents, it's never been so easy.
When I was a kid, I'd watch the Benny Hill Show praying to see a bare breast, only to be so surprised when it happened that I couldn't enjoy it. Now you have the "Girls Gone Wild" videos; the warning at the beginning that the videos aren't suitable for kids, when the fucking commercial isn't suitable for kids! It's easy to imagine what's going on behind the "Girls Gone Wild" explosions on the coed's breasts when there's whipped cream and tongues framing them.
Clothes- Oh, the days before Hot Topic brought the proper parent-concerning wardrobe within the grasp of alienated teens everywhere! When you had to actually go to a band's show to buy their T-shirts!
Music- Even though most modern music sucks like mad, it's exponentially easier to get than it was when I had to drive an hour to get to a decent record store, where purchasing was limited to what ever I had left after working an entire summer at $4 an hour. With all the ways to get free music, it's easy to get spoiled. Why in my day,we'd tape them off the radio that rare time that they'd play something decent. Audiophiles often complain about the lower fidelity of mp3s, but that's nothing compared to holding up a separate tape recorder to the radio speaker and staying quiet as it recorded, as I often had to do.
The one thing that'll remain true is that things will always change; today's timely is tomorrow's dated. Someday Fallout Boy will look as silly to their teenage fans as they do to us grown ups and Peppermint Patty hair and guyliner will be ironic affectations of the inevitable nostalgia of the '00s. At least I hope so.
But Vanilla Fudge used to think they were the shit, too!
I just wanted an excuse to use that video.
1 comment:
Holy shit, thanks for that vid. I'd never even heard of Vanilla Fudge until now. And their wiki page says they're still around!
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