Annihilating Adulthood

Though no revolution took place in the 1980s, there were ominous signs that the adult grip was loosening. The advent of MTV widened the space in which youth could feel more in control of their cultural destiny. It made room, especially after David Bowie publicly shamed them, for cultural expressions that had been largely ignored outside the communities that created them. Hip-hop and more dissonant offshoots of rock found their way into households that would have otherwise restricted them. The advent of the cassette tape perpetuated them further creating, in effect, a grey market of aesthetics, just as VHS tapes did for cheap and prurient visual media.