Buggles: Video Killed The Radio Star

August 1st, 1981... before CDs overheated the market, before digital downloads took the socks off the business model once and for all, the Buggles created this taunting, haunting foreshadowing of the end of music as we knew it.

And the strangest thing was this: as opposed to other tectonic shifts in pop-culture, where it took years of hindsight to fully comprehend what had happened, we were completely aware of what was going on at the time. We had created a new forum that had pulled off the Reeses Peanut Butter Cups trick of what had previously been considered to be an unwieldy marriage -- in this case, film and sound, much in the same way our grandparents had done with "talkies" (which initially, were every bit as reviled as music videos).

A new youth revolution was under way, but this one was different. We didn't need James Dean to galvanize us against conformist parents. We didn't need to burn draft cards to protest an unpopular war. Because we weren't rebelling; we were celebrating. Our youth. Ourselves. Our strange hair that, along with our pants, appeared to have its own built-in air pump. This was the first time youth was speaking out -- taunting, en masse and through its own adopted medium -- without a cause of any sort save for the most pertinent, timeless of messages: life is short, have fun... and do whatever the hell you want to with your hair while you're at it.

The bottom line is this: at no other time did youth so completely co-opt all areas of pop culture. Sure, there was rock and roll in the '50's, and the late '60's and mid-'70's were probably the best time in history to be a young director in Hollywood. But television and all other mediums of mass-consumption remained in the hands of the establishment... for the establishment.

Until the music video came along. And with it, pop-culture became all about teenagers. And its legacy still stands; could there possibly be a more annoying bit of anthemic fluff than "Kids In America?" I've counted at least eight remakes of this song since then... not to mention the dozens of Eighties classics covered by Disney Channel-knockoff 'tweenyboppers. And "The Breakfast Club?" Decade-specific for sure, but it's become a far more timeless teen classic film than anything else of its ilk.

So sure; we're embarrassed by how badly we dressed back then. And if you take out the works of John Hughes, those ten years weren't exactly a high point of cinematic achievement. But did it spawn a legacy of obsession-worthy pop-culture? As Moon Unit Zappa would say, "fer sher."