Went out to 80’s night at Shine last night. Funky little club. Well-stocked and almost reasonably priced premium liquors. The DJs were decidedly unenthusiastic and seemed to have a lot of trouble matching beats and keeping the playlist flowing – but I don’t usually expect a lot from DJs in this city anyway.
My major beef however: if you did not dress that way the first time around, and cared more about Strawberry Shortcake than Duran Duran, you are not allowed to show up in 80’s garb, and you are most certainly not allowed to act like a fool during the songs and holler “I haven’t heard this in forever!” – as if the music holds some sort of special meaning for you.
One other thing – I’m not sure what you saw on MTV when you were younger, but hopping from foot to foot and kicking your legs out in front of you like some sort of bastardized version of a Russian Trepak in leg-warmers has NEVER been cool.
Granted, I’m pushing the envelope myself in terms of being able to claim some sort of stake to really appreciating 80’s culture, but at least I was alive through the entire decade.
And a special note to the semi-creepy mid-to-late 30’s latino guy with the shirt that looked like a radioactive kelp field threw up on you: Watching you dance with ridiculous abandon all night long totally made my evening.
Lol!!!!
I like 80’s night at Shine, and make a point to go at least once a decade! What shocks me most is how so many girls strikingly similar to friends I had in High School.
It does freak me out a bit… and unless the music is dark… I can only do it once in a while. I hit Brit Night frequently at Plaza on Thursdays.
Rog — heck, sometimes you don’t even need to have been there. I was in the 70s for a whopping 3 months, but that’s my favorite era of music.
of course, half of the styles today are based on 70s clothes, so it’s not very special to dress that way. I visited my mom the other day, and she told me that she had an outfit identical to mine when she was even younger than me.
well, there it is: I really am turning into my mother.
The thing is, people feel a bit of ownership to a particular era if they were there, no matter how old they were. For instance, I relate to the 70s as well as the 80s and I did wear the bell-bottom cord pants and listened to Cool & The Gang as well as Queen and Led Zepplin.
I can tell you right now, in my high school we had a grand total of 2 goths and absolutely no one dressed like Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Boy George, Wham or the Flock of Seagulls. I graduated in 1986.
Little children in elementary school may have dressed and danced like that, because they thought it was cool. We did not.
Guys would occasionally wear the dinner jacket over t-shirt ala Jon Cryer, Matthew Broderick or John Cusack, but then would get laughed at for not being any of those three.
I wish I’d been cool enough to dress like Duran Duran, but like most teenagers of the era my style consisted of the black&white trend (if you don’t know, you weren’t there) and mack jackets & high tops. I don’t see much of those at 80’s nights but they were far more common than what you do see.
One point of contention: the kicky dance thing, if I’m picturing it correctly, was TERRIBLY cool, if you were a raver from Vancouver, pre-Y2K.
Yah, I liken going to 80’s night to visiting a foreign country. If you go to France, you are welcome and free to enjoy the culture. But if you put on a beret and adopt an affected French accent, you’re just going to look like le jackass. If you’re going to 80’s night, go – dance, enjoy. But don’t pretend like you just stepped straight out of 1986 when you barely existed then.
I dressed like an 80s child in the 80s. Because well, I was a child.
I owned neon suspenders. I kid you not.
Oh yeah, and I should add this: I can dance if I want to.
Hear, hear.
The scary thing about 80s nights is that anyone who was actually old enough during the 80s to wear the 80s fashions and like the 80s music, is now far too old to look good in the revival of said fashions, and looks downright scary when dancing to said music.
I’m 28 – that means I was only 4 when the decade began, and 14 when it ended. I really didn’t have much interest in pop music in the early 80s and in the late 80s I was certainly not permitted to wear those fashions to school. MOST people of my acquaintance are too young to have truly lived in the 80s. But of course, that doesn’t stop us from liking the music NOW, does it? 😀