The previous two decades of soft but penetrating rock was dipped in acid in the 80s as the kids abandoned the Beach Boys, Elton John, Carol King, the Osmonds, the Fifth Dimension and the Jackson Five and looked to punk to override the horror of two hundred dead marines. Nevertheless, Springsteen hung in there and the movies created beautiful music.
Gorbachev eradicated the fearful image of Big Brother and became "Man of the Year." Reagan grabbed credit for ending the "evil empire" while ignoring the stiff resistance to communism for the past forty years.
Eight years had passed since Bush accused Reagan of "voodoo economics"; now it was his time to pin-cushion the people as they misread his lips and observed more of the same that would tie a bow in the gleaming plasticity of the Reagan years whose stage had been set in 1980 by the question who shot J.R. of “Dallas” as more paramount than the attempted assassination of our president and the murder of John Lennon.