
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, 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 had balls. And near everything related to punk, from zines to album covers to concert fliers and of course the music/lyrics itself, 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've forgotten 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 the 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.

Reagan Youth, which was formed in Queens, NY by
Dave "Insurgent" Rubinstein and
Paul "Cripple" Bakija, used to play bills with the likes of the
Dead Kennedys and
Bad Brains (both on the Jellybeans comp on
Jello Biafra's label).