Music Monday: The Strangest Rockumentary Ever Made

Bryan O'Nolan

Bryan O'Nolan is the the most highly paid investigative reporter at Ordinary Times. He lives in New Hampshire. He is available for effusive praise on Twitter. He can be contacted with thoughtfully couched criticism via email. His short story collection Mike Pence & Me is currently available from Amazon.

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4 Responses

  1. LeeEsq
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    says:

    20 year old guy with 13 year old girlfriend? Even during the 1980s this was very illegal but their seemed to be a very much a non-enforcement of it for some reason. Most of these people, if still alive, would be in their 50s or even above 60 today. Wonder whether they became suburbanites.Report

  2. LeeEsq
    Ignored
    says:

    Some additional thoughts. Obviously most of the people in the parking lot are very white but there was one African-American young man partying with his friends and that was interesting to see. The young people in the 1980s seem, well to be blunt about it, wilder and a bit dimmer than teens and twenty somethings during the 1990s to the present. I was probably in the last cohort where these sorts of concerts were part of the teen and twentysomething experience and it seemed a bit less ruckus when I attended big concerts at the Nassau Coliseum or Madison Square Garden. The tickets were probably comparitively cheaper in the 1980s though.Report

  3. John Puccio
    Ignored
    says:

    Having attended High School in the Northeast in the late 80s, there is really nothing strange here. Every suburban high school had a large click of “Bangers” who would usually be found outside the cafeteria between classes sucking down marlboros wearing denim jackets with all the usual band patches.

    As for the style, I will take cinema verite over the majority of today’s narrative driven pseudo documentaries that we are constantly bombarded with nowadays.Report

  4. LeeEsq
    Ignored
    says:

    There are race and class elements to this. I doubt that a bunch of Black teenagers would be treated so leniently. Parents of upper middle class teenagers would probably keep their kids on a tighter leash because of their futures. So it was white working class to lower middle class kids that probably had the most freedom to engage in this sort of youthful misadventure. That being said, there does seem to have been a greater tolerance for kids to sow their wild oats from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. It started to change by the time I reached my teens during the mid to late 1990s. Now it’s gone.Report

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