A Music-Loving Time Traveller's To-Do List in the Eighties

If I had to choose music from one particular decade I would choose the eighties. To build off another fun ice-breaker question: if I had the capability to travel through time and space, I would definitely use it to “concert-hop” through most of classic rock's heyday, but I could definitely see myself either spending a lot of time or getting stuck in the eighties. The following is my to-do list for such adventures:

• tune into the earliest broadcasts of MTV back in 1981
• Reason: I want my (parents') MTV!

• see the rise of new wave and glam metal
• Reason: My favorites, Tears for Fears and Def Leppard, in their prime

• see the start of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation
• Reason: Working at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is my dream job

• see Kiss unmasked and/or Vinnie Vincent’s brief run with the band

• see Ace Frehley as a solo act
• Reason: My parents have been my biggest influence in my musical tastes and my dad grew up on Kiss

• be there when Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” album comes out
• Reason: Dad grew me up on some of The Boss too. The album had been around for seven years by the time I came along. So I want to see the responses and reactions of those hearing it for the first time.

• be a fly on the wall at the production of Band Aid’s “Do they Know its Christmas?” and the USA for Africa’s recording of “We are the World”

• attend Live Aid; drop in at both Wembley and JFK Stadium, if manageable. I can’t miss Queen there!
• Reason: Live Aid is my favorite pop culture events of the eighties! And Queen's presence there was the band's finest hour of their career.

• see INXS perform at Live Aid’s Australian “companion concert”, Oz for Africa
• witness their popularity that came from the “Kick” album
• Reasons: Oz for Africa is the lesser-known, Australian leg of Live Aid, which began twelve hours before the Wembley concert to account for time zone differences. Like with "Born in the U.S.A." I want to see people (especially in the U.S.) hearing Kick or even INXS for the first time. That album is one of my favorites! Plus I could see Michael Hutchence while he was still alive.

• drop in Billy Joel’s tours through the Soviet Union in 1987. I’d especially want to catch his “rockstar fit” where he flipped his electric piano and snapped his microphone in an aggravated response to the local security attempting to quelch the energy of his concert-goers.
• Reasons: The Piano Man is another of my strong favorites from my parents' era and I find his Russia tour a particularly fascinating part of his career. His was the first live rock radio broadcast in Soviet history. Even he's admitted it's his biggest highlight as a performer and even sees it as a contribution in the Cold War era.

The heart of my adventures would be the novelty eighties music has. Synthesizers and one-hit wonders are aplenty in this era because they stood out (and still do). MTV combined music and visuals to kill the radio star. More still, music merged with burgeoning technology and/or social, humanitarian causes. While this gives an awful lot of credit to one aspect of the eighties, the three altogether gave us Live Aid which even today still has cultural significance in the facts that: the concert celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary this summer, The Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, used it as a starting and finishing point of the film's storyline, and recent Fire Fight Australia was even billed as a "Live Aid-style" concert! A definition of classic is "serving as a standard, model, or guide", and the eighties music (and pop culture) does just that!