Pop music, and especially the launch of music videos into
the mainstream, turned out to be a futile battleground for messages about
gender, sexuality, and race. Revisit iconic 80s music and music videos to
discover a constantly-swinging pendulum between the transgressive and the
conservative. We trace genres of music through the 1980s to the collapse of the
Berlin Wall and the dawn of global music genre fueled by American artists,
nightlife, and subcultures.
Daniel Gifford, Ph.D. is a public historian who focuses on
American popular and visual culture, as well as museums in American culture. He
received his PhD from George Mason University in 2011. He currently serves on
the Board of Directors of the Filson Historical Society, and his career spans
both academia and public history, including several years with the Smithsonian
Institution. He is the author of American Holiday Postcards 1905-1915:
Imagery and Context (2013) and The Last Voyage of the Whaling Bark Progress:
New Bedford, Chicago and the Twilight of an Industry (2020). He is
currently working on his third book, which explores the founding era of the
Filson Historical Society, 1884-1899.