I bet HS in the 80s rocked.

[Drunken Irishman]

I'm one of the 00s kids, so my high school days kinda sucked for me.

But I can only imagine how awesome it was around 1988.

Music, big hair, tight pants on the girls.

Yum.

[Redstone]

1. I missed all the fun on the other end of the time scale...graduated in 1970.

Dress codes still in force, so no tight pants or other lecher-worthy clothes on the girls.

Redstone

[Celeborn Skywalker]

59. That's what my dad tells me.

He graduated in 71 and just missed the liberalization of the dress and hair code. When he graduated, hair was expected to be short on boys and girls still had to wear dresses. He said when he went back to the school a year later, all the boys had long hair and the girls were wearing pants, lol.

[HEyHEY]

2. Fuck that shit - the fashion was awful, lots of the music sucked

Fuck the 80s fuck the 90s too. Man I'd loved to have had the internets and shit when I was in Highschool... know how fucking hard it was to get good music?

[JVS]

12. The 90's were awesome!

[Sequoia]

49. You didn't have KROQ to listen to.

Alternative rock, all those Brits...excellent. That top 40s stuff...mostly crap music.

[sniffa]

3. ..

:rofl:

[RoyGBiv]

4. No. No it didn't ..

Every time I see blue eye shadow or bitch bangs, I have to fight the urge to run screaming from the attack of the Heathers.

[Drunken Irishman]

6. HOT!

You're just making me want it more. ;)

[RoyGBiv]

7. A bit of advice then ...

Avoid the multi-layers and flipped up collars.

Also, if she says to you, "Well fuck me gently with a chainsaw..."

Don't. :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-3rikUQ34

[lizerdbits]

11. ARG Blue eyeshadow

I had teal mascara too. :rofl:

[RoyGBiv]

26. Oh, that's evil ...

Just EEEEVILLLL.

:-)

[Ava]

5. in the south that still is in the highschools

hence my homeschooling :rofl:

i keed, i keed :P

[lizerdbits]

8. Well I started HS in 1988

I have thin hair making my 'bangs claw' look even sillier, since the rest of the hair was really flat. :rofl: Too bad I don't have a pic on hand for you, and it doesn't show those gigantic socks pulled up my rolled up jean legs.

[Drunken Irishman]

9. That just sounds yummy.

[DS1]

10. besides getting away with murder (figuratively)

it was okay

[mitchum]

13. Nothing like high school in the 70s: no dress code, no "moment of silence"...

no Pledge of Allegiance, no ROTC, smoking areas, all right to smoke weed as long as it was confined to a certain area of campus, lots of recreational sex...

Just think...all of that "wickedness" and still...no one ever brought a gun to school and killed people

[Patiod]

45. You forgot 18 year old drinking age

In a lot of areas - like New Jersey, where we vacationed, the drinking age was 18, which was nice. And on top of that, IDs didn't have pictures!!!!

Ugly clothes, but mitchum describes it perfectly. Think "Dazed and Confused" or "That 70s Show"

I smoked WAY too much dope back then, but missed the recreational sex (until college).

[tigereye]

54. there wasn't an official "weed" area of my 70s high school!

:rofl: I suppose the parking lot might have been the informal one or the bathrooms. I can still picture everyone smoking cigs in the bathroom and the courtyard, though.

That would never fly now....



Wow, things were sure a lot more relaxed back then. These days schools are like fortresses. It's kind of sad.

[mitchum]

62. The parking lot,bathrooms, and stadium were the places where one was in danger...

of getting in trouble for smoking weed. However,the grassy lawn in front of one of the campus building was the place where it was tacitly allowed. Although it was right in front of the school and on a fairly busy street, no administrator or teacher ever elected to come out there. Every day during the 90 minute period that covered all of the lunch shifts,there would be a couple of hundrd kids sitting in little circles. Friendly neighborhood dealers would come by every day, the pockets of their army jackets bulging with nickel and dime bags.
It was the greatest time in the history of man to be a teenager :)

[tigereye]

65. where was this? California?

that's pretty wild.

[mitchum]

68. Amazingly enough, this was in the freakin' deep south...

Greenville, South Carolina. Yes. South. Carolina. And all of the high schools in town were like that.
There was about an 8 year window when the bible thumpers had little influence.

[tigereye]

81. it bothers me that people don't encourage serious independence in kids

anymore, but almost a form of infantilism - protected from every imagined contingency, but not really prepared to make real decisions.



Or maybe they grow up in spite of parental and adult fears. It's a very strange state of affairs. :shrug:



amazing that it was SC!

[lost-in-nj]

70. I was so there!!!!!!

graduated 1976!!!!!



:hi:



lost

[mitchum]

74. Wan't it an absolutely great time to be a teenager?

Teens in the 60s had to go through all of that societal upheavel (and worry about being sent off to die)
Teens in the 80s had to deal with all of the burdens of the Reagan revolution and consumerism above all
But the 70s were sublime :)

[Art_from_Ark]

78. The 70s may have been sublime

but the music sucked!

Disco! Disco Duck!
Muskrat love!
And they called it puppy looooooove...
I wanna rock-n-roll all night, and party every day!
I'm a little bit country, and I'm a little bit rock-n-roll
:puke:

[Art_from_Ark]

77. OK to smoke weed on campus? Where were you? Boulder?

My high school, 1970s--
Moment of science/scripture reading (they sometimes read from the Koran or Torah, and no one knew)
Somewhat relaxed dress code (almost all the boys had long hair, girls could wear jeans, no shorts or "offensive" T-shirts allowed)
Pledge of Allegiance (although it sounded like everyone was reciting it in tongues)
No ROTC
Smoking areas, but just for tobacco
Lots of recreational sex (?-- or maybe, everyone was just bragging about their "escapades" because they didn't want to feel left out of the conversation?)

[TZ]

14. Meh. I graduated in 1987

I don't remember anything particularly exciting except big hair and lots of loud ugly fashions oh and the whole valley girl/JAP thing was kinda annoying.

[AlCzervik]

15. i graduated in 85 and i disagree, the 80's sucked and not in a good way.

[Throd]

30. Gotta disagree with you there. '85 was punk and disorderly

[Rhythm]

73. Also an '85 grad... I'd still be living in my Doc Martin's if

I could find somewhere in 100 miles that sells them.
(don't tell me to order online... i have weird, wide flat feet, and can never get a good fit unless i can try them on.)

[JVS]

16. If you want to act like it's still the 1980's, go to Pittsburgh

None of those things went out of fashion there. When the 80's retro-wave hit, people found themselves already in style

[Patiod]

46. I remember blue eye shadow

Girls from IUP (Indian University of Pennsylvania, in Western PA) visited our sorority at Penn State back in the very early 80s.

I remember someone at the cafeteria asking what I though about them, and I said "they wear blue eye shadow" and everyone at the table looked shocked.

(Yes, we were that shallow! We were 19 yo sorority girls!)

[tigereye]

55. scary, isn't it?

although I have to admit I haven't seen any spandex here is a while.... :scared:

[mcctatas]

17. I started at the end of the '80's and I kinda loved school...

but shhhhhh, don't tell anyone!

[flvegan]

18. I graduated HS in 1989.

I had a good time. The girls did try pretty hard to look good, yes.

[mwooldri]

19. Not in the UK.

Two words: School Uniforms.

Enough said, Mark.

[muriel_volestrangler]

63. And now they're killing Grange Hill

Is nothing sacred????

[malta blue]

20. not really...

I graduated in 1986.

I found most "pop" music to be horrible.

I wore the "uniform" of our group which primarly consisted of a black turtleneck (even in July in NYC) with pegged pants (very loose on the bum) and doc maartens.

[RiffRandell]

21. It did for me.

We had a smoking section in our HS (don't smoke anymore) and although I was in the punk crowd we hung around the heads and hippies because we had umm...a few things in common.

[cwydro]

22. Shoulda seen the 70's.

You could get a big bag of pot for $15...there was a drug called quaalude (though I never got into the pills).

You could smoke pot at rock concerts. And smuggle beer in.

School violence was a fight at lunchtime. Cutting class was a big deal. We actually liked some of our teachers.

No internet and no cell phones. 3 channels on TV, but damn, we had us some fun!

[pokerfan]

32. Dime bags, great music

Disco sucked but it really was short-lived. Rap didn't exist yet. SNL was actually funny. Gas was fifty cents and if you didn't have a muscle car you knew someone who did.

The girls all wore hip-huggers and peasant blouses. STD's could be cured with penicillin. The beginnings of big hair but without the stupid mall bangs of the eighties.

I now have this urge to watch Dazed and Confused. Again.

[Sequoia]

50. I liked the early 1970s music.

"Smiling Faces, Sometimes" by Human Urban League and Admiral Hausley, or Hand's Across the Water by Paul of the Beatles, come to mind right off the bat.

[tigereye]

56. I still remember someone in my advanced lit class pulling a GIANT bag of

pot out of her purse. I was shocked since I wasn't much of a "head." And concerts at the city arena were a cloud of pot smoke...


Those times do seem rather innocent, though, don't they? We had a lot of fun.

[Ava]

23. the mall was the place to be in the 80's

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gdD0j6wmMNc

[Texasgal]

24. It did.

From what I can remember! :crazy:

[NewJeffCT]

25. AIDS started making headlines in the mid 80s

so, the sexual revolution from the 70s slowed down quite a bit by the mid 80s, which is when I graduated high school.

[PeaceNikki]

27. I liked it.

It was fun. :)

[Blue_Tires]

28. ugh..

the good times are never as good as you think...HS in the 90s sucked -- HARD (at least for me)...And one of the ideas my friends and i kicked around sometimes was how much more fun things would have been if we were living in the 70s (this was back when ANYTHING related to the 70s was ultra-cool)...

I would sometimes ask my dad (who went to HS in the late 50s) how cool it was to live in the 70s, and he would look at me with this hard "you-truly-are-an-ignorant-motherfucker" type of look

[Drunken Irishman]

29. I think everyone "hates" the decade they grew up in.

And a lot of it is because the decades before us, as the 1990s are going to be to the next generation, were glamorized beyond reality. What we see from the 80s is only what entertainment shows us. When I think of the 1980s, I think of the movies from that era, like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and what not and it looks fun. My view of the 70s has been completely made up of stoner movies, especially Dazed and Confused.

The 90s, I was a kid. I wasn't even a teen yet, so I have a good view of the 90s. But the 00s have been terrible for me.

[tigereye]

57. my high school was more like that 70s Show than Dazed and Confused...

[Connonym]

31. I graduated in 1984

they were some unenlightened times.

[GreenPartyVoter]

33. I was there, hon. Personally I think '68 would have been way more interesting, but

if you are really so into the 80s thing watch Freaks and Geeks over and over. Judd Apatow totally got it right, at least from my POV. :thumbsup:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

48. I DID graduate from high school in 1968

Granted, I was in a suburb of Minneapolis, and not Berkeley, but we had no hippies in class. Not one. No drugs. A fair amount of drinking. The sexual revolution had begun to influence us, but the Pill was not widely available to unmarried girls and abortion was illegal, so a lot of couples "had to" get married.

We had a strict dress code, so strict that girls had to wear skirts or dresses, even when it was 20 below zero outside. We coped by wearing pants under our dresses, coming in the back entrance, and ducking into the bathroom nearest the back entrance to remove the offending garments. Even boys weren't allowed to wear jeans or T-shirts. Their shirts had to have collars and buttons. No athletic shoes or sandals or going without stockings.

We had to wear "gym suits" for gym class in grades 7 to 9. Imagine a onesie with short sleeves and short legs in sea green. Fortunately, in senior high school, they changed the gym uniform to red shorts and white tops, not knit tops, woven tops that looked awful if you didn't wash and iron them.

One day around 1965, some of the male teachers, coaches mostly, decided they had to do something about the increasing tendency of boys to wear long hair. During lunch period, they grabbed some of the boys with the longest hair and gave them forced hair cuts.

We did have great music, from the Beatles to the heyday of Motown to the beginnings of the psychedelic sounds.

I went through high school before the days of "innovative" scheduling and curricula. Two girls who signed up for drafting class were treated as exciting pioneers of feminism. Otherwise, we had a pretty decent curriculum, with good exposure to literature and grammar in English class, two years of American history, 3 years each of German and Spanish, a complete array of shop and home ec. courses, band, choir, two theater productions each year, and visual arts, and get this, a thorough unit on EVOLUTION in biology class. That's right, evolution was non-controversial, except for the one Jehovah's Witness in the class, even though nearly everyone attended a church of some sort. The kids who took physics and trigonometry in twelfth grade (I wasn't one of them) walked around with slide rules all day.

Our school didn't have a single computer, not even in the office. Record keeping was done by hand.

It seems like yesterday, but as I recall these details, I realize that it really was a different world.

[GreenPartyVoter]

53. My folks graduated HS in '64. By senior year of college mom seriously thought about

taking off for Haight-Ashbury because she was an artist, but in the end didn't because she was engaged to my dad. They also almost went to Woodstock, but didn't because they just gotten a brand new puppy and didn't think the trip would be good for him. Mom told me about having to kneel on the floor and have her skirt length checked, though, back in HS. I bet that was fun. *shaking head*

It's cool you remember so much about high school that is of interest. I don't really remember a whole lot worth noting except for when the Army guy came in to talk about recruitment. I was really belligerent and kept asking things like, "Why can't women serve on the front lines?" He blustered and blustered and I kept pressing the question. No way he was going to actually come out and say they could be raped, though. My then bf (now hubby) kept kicking my chair to get me to stop. He was so mad and so were all my friends. :rofl:

[Shine]

34. OMG, you must be kidding.

the music basically sucked.

Of course I graduated HS in '82.


College, however, in the 80's was AWESOME! :party:

[baldguy]

35. High school always sucks. Doesn't matter what decade you're in.

If you're pushing 30 or 40 and high school was the best time of your life, you have serious problems.

[MrSlayer]

36. The 80's did indeed rule.

As a rule, chicks with big hair and spandex ruled and guys with big hair and spandex sucked. Heavy Metal was in its golden age, real Metal I mean, not that poser glam shit. You could do a lot more back then without the PC police around, plus no electronic leashes (cell phones), teens could easily get served in bars and much more. I had a ball in those days. My son is lamenting the fact that he missed all the fun back then and that the music of today sucks.

[Sebastian Doyle]

37. You want to know what High School was like in the 80's?

Just get a DVD of "The Breakfast Club" or "Fast Times at Ridgemont High". Or old episodes of "Degrassi High" if you're Canadian.

"people on ludes should not drive!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKGCjS1zxgc

[Art_from_Ark]

80. I thought that was Degrassi Junior High

:shrug:

[JCMach1]

38. Class of 1985... sorry, but HS sucks at all times.

[alphafemale]

39. I graduated in 82 so I can relate a bit to both "Detroit Rock City" and the "Breakfast Club"

Oh and "Footloose"

My friends and I had a pretty good time. Some of the 80's fashions were gaudy awful.

I grew up in a small mid-western town, so we were probably more like "Footloose" than the others.

Remember that scene in where the kids are moving from one moving car to another? We actually DID that and other highly risky, daredevil behavior. And it wasn't imitative, either. I didn't see Footloose until I was 19 and had been living on my own for a few months.

[noonwitch]

43. So did I-the 80s were a great time to be in college!

No rules, they weren't enforcing the drinking age at 21 fully, yet, and most of the music was good.

[LanternWaste]

40. '84 was a pretty good year to be a HS senior...

'84 was a pretty good year to be a HS senior... slackers, hipsters, grunge, and goth were nowhere to be seen; rock and roll didn't have a brazillion different sub-genres; there was no such thing as a "Star Wars movie that sucked", and American culture was a LOT less uptight about kids getting into trouble.

And yeah, the girls wearing Gloria Vanderbilt jeans brought my GPA down a point or two-- factor in the pink, fuzzy sweaters they wore and I'm surprised I graduated :)

[Beer Snob-50]

41. graduated in 1977...

and yes, i am nostagic (sp) for all the things mentioned- tight jeans on the girls, cheap pot, decent sex, and great music>

[MorningGlow]

42. I won't be cynical, DI--I LOVED the '80s

Graduated HS in '83, college in '87. Didn't like high school, though--Catholic girls school with prison-issue polyester uniforms! :scared:

What I did love was the pop culture--kickass movies, TV to a lesser extent, and music (IF you knew where to find it--and it WASN'T on the pop stations). I was a New Wave kid when I wasn't trapped in a navy blue uniform, and I reveled in the second British Invasion (especially loved it because I'm an anglophile), the newfound freedom of being able to go to a lot of small concerts--musicians no-one had ever heard of, like U2, REM, Billy Idol, Adam Ant...!--actual music videos on MTV, and FINALLY some daring style, after years and years of pastels and corduroys.

So I don't care what the cynics say. The '80s ruled! :headbang: :headbang: :headbang:

[Iggo]

44. High school is high school.

Either you rock or you do not rock.

Although I gotta tell ya, it sure was easy to rock from '75 to '79.

[SoxFan]

47. Oh, think again!

I went to an all-boys Catholic high school, which pretty much eliminated the big hair/tight pants/Sarah Palin back in the day thing.

And most people listened to synthesized dance twaddle, hair metal, or nonsense like Loverboy. Those of us who were actually listening to Echo & the Bunnymen, Let's Active, and the English Beat were few and far between!

[crispini]

51. I graduated in 1986.

I saw Culture Club live, (won tickets on the radio) and all the girls in band were into Duran Duran. I mean, I'm talking, carrying around scrapbooks they'd made themselves obsessed.

But the big hair was too high maintenance for me. Actually I was a proto-punk. I saw Siouxsie and the Banshees live.

It was pretty "Breakfast Club," at least we thought so at the time. But there was the usual teen angst, of course.

[Taverner]

52. Um, it didn't

Born in 1970

Graduated from HS in 1988

The music sucked unless it was underground or European. We were stuck with Lionel Richie and Richard Marx when the Brits got The New Romantic Scene and Roxy Music.

You guys get to have sex all the time - most kids didn't know about sex until they turned 12. And this was with sex ed (many parents pulled their kids out.)

Coke was the drug of choice, it was seen as 'healthier' than smoking pot. HA!


The tight pants are back, but I miss the hip-huggers of the 70's and 90's.

Tight pants are no fun to try to take off in a nonchalant manner. Trust me on that.


I liked the 90's myself

ON EDIT: Did I mention AIDS?????

No one really knew how you got it. You had the CDC telling you it was spread by blood and sexual membrane contact, yet you had fundie religious groups capitalizing on the ignorance and fear telling people they could get it through the air, mosquitos or toilet seats.

[Celeborn Skywalker]

60. I liked the 90's for the most part.

The only downside was that there was, at least in our little town, a huge gang problem that arose. It's better now, but gangs really seemed to blossom in the 90's.

[Rob H.]

58. Rocked?

Clearly you've never seen parachute pants. :P

[Drunken Irishman]

72. Yeah, those were bad.

BUT THIS MADE UP FOR IT!

[unpossibles]

61. other than the tight pants and music, no it kinda sucked for us too

I don't like big hair (other than the alternative Big Hair, a la Robert Smith), and frankly kids were generally mean spirited to anyone who did not fit into the "societal norm" where I went to school.

I was quite happy to get out and go to college in another city. If nothing else, it gives you something to look forward to.

[Wapsie B]

64. For some of us high school sucked no matter when you were there.

Those who can make it fun for themselves could do that whether it was 2005 or 1965. Others like myself were so confused about a lot of stuff in life at that time that we didn't take the time to partake in actually living.

[Deja Q]

66. You'd lose that bet.

Freaks with long hair, trashy t-shirts reading "Metal up your ass tour '88" with a dagger-wielding fist coming out of a toilet with nobody giving a crap (no pun intended)... probably because the vermin would beat the snot out of anyone who would speak up about rudimentary civility.

I still groan every time I see the pictures devoted to the offspring of the "cool" kids who got knocked up or knocked someone up. I wonder what they are doing today. Or their offspring for that matter.

Just two examples of an era that should be long buried. Not dug up for some nostalgia wank marketing mush.

[Drunken Irishman]

71. It sounds like a wonderful dream!

GIVE IT TO ME BABY!

[Vektor]

82. Ok, I have to comment here. You just described me and all my friends.

I have to defend my metal brethren.

I actually had the "Metal Up Your Ass" shirt, and wouldn't have entertained the thought of dating a guy who DIDN'T have long hair. I was also civil, intelligent, and excelled academically, as did the very vast majority of my metal loving peer group. The only time I ever "beat the snot" out of someone was when my friend Rachel and I witnessed two redneck boys call a younger African American boy a horrible racial epithet and push him on the ground.

We may have been two girls weighing barely 98 pounds a piece, but we kicked some racist redneck ass that day, but it wasn't because we were into metal, it was because we were into justice.

And we knew how to throw down.

That aside, did you ever take the opportunity to get to know any of these "freaks" you speak of? Or did you just write them off? You might have been surprised if you had given them the time of day. We were cool to everyone. Except racist assholes.

I'm not sure how having long hair or liking metal makes one a freak. Long hair was more or less the norm in the 80's anyway. The only people who had a problem with it when I was growing up were uber-right wing conformist freaks with hair envy, and their militant parents.

Even now, as a professional, educated, adult woman, I still listen to Slayer, Cannibal Corpse, old Metallica, etc...
My fiancee, (an amazing drummer with a still enviable head of hair who now has a "corporate occupation" but still rocks out) went to high school with the late, and very talented Cliff Burton of Metallica; e.g. the "Metal up your Ass" band. His band opened for Metallica on a few occasions as they rose to stardom in the San Francisco area. He and Cliff were friends, and his death in 1986 hit him pretty hard.

While I never knew anyone in high school who got "knocked up", we were not considered the "cool kids". We were blissfully unapologetic non-conformists, the same as most members of DU. We were way outside of the cool clique, but hardly gave a shit. Those kids who grew their hair long and wore Metallica t-shirts were not a whole lot different than the liberals on this message board. We marched to our own beat, and refused to let the establishment tell us how to look, how to act, what music to listen to.

While I may look like a "normal person" nowadays, I am always a "metal freak" deep down. The facial piercings and combat boots have been put away, and traded in for a stethoscope and an advanced degree, but there will always be death metal on my iPod.


And FWIW, "Metal Up Your Ass" was recorded in 1982. ;-)

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

67. Oh, it totally did.

I went to the museum on this date with a rich girl who felt sorry for me, and then we went to this party but the girl's boyfriend was about to beat me up when Vin Diesel, my friend from detention class, showed up to beat up the bad guy, but they didn't show that part, then me and Mary Stuart Masterson held hands as we danced down the road.

[lost-in-nj]

69. screw the 80's

the 70's ROCKED!!!!!


HUGH!!1111 bell bottoms
halter tops.. YES we wore them in shool
Wedge heeled shoes
Disco and drinking at 18 in SENIOR year
coming in hung over
yeah


WE ROCKED!!!!!!!!!!


:rofl:



lost

:hi:

[Pithlet]

75. Class of '90. I was going to post earlier in this thread and say

that it probably sucked just as much back then, because I hate that "everything was so much better in the good old days" mentality. But I just got back from reading about how they're banning purses and backpacks and book bags at a lot schools now. I can't imagine having to deal with that crap.

[Left Is Write]

76. I graduated from high school in 1984. Those of us who came of age in the 80s

probably did not view the decade as a bigger deal than anyone else views the time of their own youth.

I've noticed that younger generations tend to glamorize the 80s (much the way some of us kids of the 80s glamorized previous decades).

[MrSlayer]

79. It's a 20 year thing.

Everyone wanted to live in the 60's when I was a teen in the 80's, the 70's were popular again in the 90's and the 80's are popular now in the 00's. The 60's are still popular though and probably always will be.

[Mad_Dem_X]

83. Umm, no.

I graduated in '85. It was awful. Big hair (requiring a ton of hairspray), neon clothes, lots of bad music.