’80s scene more than crack, AIDS

Thirty eight-year-old TDs CDs and LPs owner Michael Anderson experienced the ’80s by virtue of his own musical exploration.

Anderson said he grew up in “a very non-musical house” in working-class Boston and thought none of his parents cared about music, even though he always “heard things.”  He said he played piano and Dungeons and Dragons.

For Anderson, the ’80s saw a series of phases in music, and he recalls being on the cutting-edge when it came to rocking the latest jams.

“Around 1980, I started hearing early New York hip-hop,” he said, reminiscing on a particular time he was in a Washington, D.C., airport. 

He was listening to tapes by LL Cool J and Run-DMC.

“The black kids back then were listening to funk and soul and so this music had yet to really make a mark,” Anderson said. “These black kids came up to me in the airport and were like ‘What are you listening to?’ because they’d never heard anything like it.”
Anderson credits his current love of new wave and electronic dance music to weekends he spent at New York break dancing competitions with his brother from 1982 to 1983.

He said he had no idea how important music would be until around this time. His mother signified a change in the times as a “divorcee hitting up discos” and bringing home Grandmaster Flash.

“I was the weirdo who listened to Frankie Goes to Hollywood and The Cure,” he said. “It was nice to not really have a frame of reference.”

This lack of a frame of reference led Anderson to enjoy many facets of the music scene, including the meteoric rise of Madonna, who he said was “this weirdly sexy, kinda ugly chick with great pop tunes.”

Bands such as The Cure, he said brought him “straight to goth” in 1986 and ushered in a shift to alternative radio where it was acceptable for “nerdy white guys” to create avant-garde dance music.

It wasn’t until the ’90s during the DIY period, where artists were seeking to authenticate themselves that Anderson said he realized he liked to actually play music.

“When the ’90s came around, I was old enough to travel,” he said. “So I went around and took with me a sense of history from how I grew up musically in the ’80s.”

As owner of TDs, Anderson gets to share that sense of history with customers who lived through the ’80s and those who didn’t.

“Music is such a huge part of my life now, and it really guided me through different phases of life to how I live these days,” he said. “The ’80s wasn’t just crack and AIDS, it was musical as well, and a variety of music, too.”