Dude, who even knows.
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On the occasion of Eddie’s death, reviewing Van Halen stuff and
1) I had missed how revolutionary this was at the time. I’d noticed that I couldn’t really appreciate Hendrix because my sense of what rock *was* came from stuff after him, I’m realizing same for Eddie. By the time I was paying attention in the early 90s, “interrupt the song for a showoffy guitar solo” was a tired trope
2) I used to think the 80s big hair/spandex thing was a parodic dead end but honestly David Lee Roth brings more Jagger/Bowie genderweirdness to his manic masculinity than I remember
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Tired: The Cosby Show made a black family widely relatable by making them yuppies, invested in bourgeois norms and practices
Wired: The Cosby Show made a yuppie family widely relatable by making them Black, concerned with passing on a respected moral tradition
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“Sketchy arcade operator” as 80s-culture type
Blip (You Can’t Do That On Television)
Centauri (The Last Starfighter)
Noah Vanderhoff (Wayne’s World)
Question with 19 notes
Anonymous asked: Fair, it was more about the visual look and the particular type of streamlined/cleanliness than the self-awareness, but thanks
I mean it wasn’t a lark, it was a professionally shot and printed promotional item as part of a really high-profile campaign supporting 9 Lives cat food
Actually that’s an American cultural history point - this was in the context of the “ad wars” of the ‘80s. For a bunch of reasons, local and regional brands in consumer staple products had been consolidated into a few rival multiproduct comglomerates with no place to grow further but at each others’ expense; meanwhile the mass audience was still largely corralled into the big 3 TV networks.
So there were a lot of really intense ad campaigns for really trivial everyday products, often going negative on rival lines. The most famous example is Coke v. Pepsi, but there’s things still stuck in my head like the chunkiness of Prego spaghetti sauce vs. Ragu Old World Style, and the vidya “console wars” really came out of this background
Photoset reblogged from BLOOD AND HEDONISM with 2,400 notes
This X-man character (Warlock) is drawn so fun and wacky it doesn’t even fit with the kind of comics he appears in
Oh I remember when this guy was part of a pair with another mutant that was collectively basically C-3PO: a machine intelligence that could speak any language and was subtextually really gay
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Dim brain: the 1974 Death Wish was part of a “vigilantes clean up the city” genre popular at the time
Christmas lights brain: Marvel’s “Punisher” was part of a “vigilantes clean up the city” genre popular at the time
Alit brain: the Tim Burton Batman movie was part of a “vigilantes clean up the city” genre popular at the time
Radiant brain: Ghostbusters was part of a “vigilantes clean up the city” genre popular at the time
Galaxy brain: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was part of a “vigilantes clean up the city” genre popular at the time
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 115 notes
Watching Aliens, the part where they all wake up from cryo together and all the ritualized griping is absolutely masking this ‘Nam vet “we’re only good for war” cameraderie, the whole Soldier of Fortune vibe, I only just get that
Of the franchises that reacted to Reagan, Rambo: First Blood II was “what if we refought ‘Nam but seriously and won”, Aliens was “what if we refought 'Nam with all our new toys and still lost”
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