Man!  I miss the eighties. I miss the 1980's mainly for the music and the vibe surrounding it. Yes in-fuckin-deed!

Perhaps even  more than the hip-hop of that decade (which I love to death) I miss the American  punk rock of the 1980's even more.

I miss 80's US punk because the music was still fresh and vibrant and hard(core).  It was when punk itself was still an ideal that hadn't been fully exploited yet: IE not some fuckin pre-packaged commodity hawked as a fashion accessory at the Hot Topic outlet down at the local strip mall USA. 

Back then punk zines from MRR all the way down to every small but passionately put together two-page Xeroxed, circulation of ten, zine had balls.  And near everything related to punk, from zines to album covers to concert fliers and of course the music/lyrics themselves,  had a strong scent of political  activism. And  the one thing that seemed to cement  everything together?  The president at the time: Ronald Reagan. 

If you forgot who Reagan was, let me refresh your memory. He  was a former governor of California who made some bad decisions but still became president of the USA.  Reagan was (like  George W. Bush) a Republican and (also like Bush) someone that folks liked to mock and imitate and disdain.  He liked jellybeans. He asked "where's the beef?" and (like Bush) was a puppet of corrupt big business powers behind the scenes. 

And at that time it seemed every punk rock group had a song or album or show flier about Reagan.  I thought of this when I went crate-digging in my punk section this morning and dug up my copy of the great Alternative Tentacles compilation "Let Them Eat Jellybeans" and also an album by the great former band Reagan Youth - just two examples of punk releases fueled by their contempt towards the then president of the USA.

I drove to Granada Hills today to buy a rug. To get there I used the Ronald Reagan freeway named after an actor from Illinois who made some films which are widely regarded as being universally unmemorable.



The ex-actor, after retiring from Hollywood went on to sell weapons to the Iranian dictatorship using the profits to arm death squads in central America. He also used funds designated for cleaning up toxic waste to fund instead the campaigns of sympathetic politicians and he closed institutions for the mentally ill which flooded the street with hundreds of thousands of crazy new homeless people that now fill our jails.

     

In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States with two requests which revealed the Hollywood movie-lover in the famous shoe-banger:
1. To go to Disneyland
2. Meet John Wayne.

The United States had a better idea; show him a modern suburb on Sophia Drive in Granada Hills. Instead of inspecting an aerospace plant, he was taken behind the scenes of 20 Century Fox's "Can-Can"