Word: 80s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Charlie Ergen made his first run on the satellite-television market in the '80s, and he did it by truck. Ergen, with his future wife Candy and a poker buddy, Jim DeFranco, drove one of their two satellite dishes to Colorado, hoping his fledgling service would score big in a land of tall mountains and bad TV reception. A stiff wind blew their trailer into a ditch, ruining the dish and leaving them with only one. As it turned out, one dish was enough. Ergen used it to build EchoStar, now the nation's second largest satellite-TV company...
...were different. We were cooler. We were better. Those of us who were alternative-rock fans in the '80s would tell you we listened to the music because we cared about songwriting and authenticity, were turned off by the staleness of overblown arena rock--true enough, but let's fess up. When you bought a Housemartins single or a Husker Du album in the '80s, you bought entry into a club. Our music was hard to find: you had to know the right radio stations, the right clubs, the right record stores. It did not make Casey Kasem's countdown...
...80s changed rock music by changing rock audiences. The generations before us listened to rock 'n' roll to show that they were better--freer, wilder--than their parents. We listened to our music to show that we were better--worldlier, smarter--than our peers. Sure, the '60s had cult bands like the Velvet Underground, but G.I.s in the Mekong Delta and grad students with deferments all listened to the Doors. When Madison Avenue later tried to reach them, it did so with songs like the Beatles' Revolution that were part of everybody's pop-culture patrimony. Only by the '80s...
...football game. That was in 1982, and for us big-city sophisticates in Cochin, Calicut was a one-horse town in the middle of nowhere. Even I, who had never been there, knew the place was a crushing bore: no ice-cream parlors (the preferred hangouts of early-80s Indian teens), no good record stores and - this was the killer - no girls' schools famous for beauteous babes. We moaned about it the entire five-hour bus ride to Calicut and spent much of the return trip making derisive comments about the place. I have no recollection of the match itself...
...Look at the teen flicks of the '80s. In their vision of high school, "crowd" is everything. In 1983's "Valley Girl," Nicolas Cage plays a semi-mohawked Hollywood surf-punk with a crush on the suburban aristocrat of the title. When he sings along to a new wave tune on the radio, her cheerleaderish friend reacts as is he's reciting from "Mein Kampf." When he and his buddy decide to sneak into a party at her house where jocks in polo shirts cavort to bubbly synth pop, it's not social awkwardness they're worried about; should things...