Best Of MetaFilter

Nose candy, suitcases of cash, T-shirts under luxe European suits, ubiquitous pastels, shoes with no socks, speedboats, fast Ferraris, bikinis, boat life ... and ohhhh the music: There's something in the air tonight, and it's NotMyselfRightNow's most magnificently mega of mega posts on Miami Vice. 🕶

detail from Mahlathini & The Mahotella Queens album Music Inferno: The Indestructible Beat Tour 1988-89

Some great answers in dismas' Ask Metafilter post about Antecedents of the 'worldbeat' guitar sound: "What e.g., Afro-pop artists from the 1980s should I listen to if I really like that sound?"

Genesis - Live in London - 25th March 2022 - The Final Domino tour by kitmasterbloke (cc by)

Hippybear posted Weighty In The Eighties: When Prog Went Pop by Jim Allen for uDiscover, with all the mentioned songs/videos linked in the post.

Radio on. by Howdy, I'm HMK (cc by)

carrienation posted Bent by Nature, a podcast from LA's KCRW about the legendary DJ Deirdre O'Donoghue and her influential radio show SNAP, with available live music archives from the show (1982-1991). As eschatfische notes in the comments, "not only are the Bent by Nature archives great, they're also a labor of love of Metafilter's own mykescipark."

Desktop computer GALAKSIJA via Museum of Science and Technology Belgrade

The Galaksija computer was a craze in 1980s Yugoslavia, inspiring thousands of people to build versions in their own homes.

"I Dream - Ice Cream" [front] by Boston Public Library (cc by)

Who's the model on this sewing pattern?

Do you remember a poster with a towering stack of ice cream scoops from the 1980s?

What were the white long-handled wands used for museum audio tours in the 1980s?

Did you have one of those tape recordings of a barking dog that you could play for home security?

Nam June Paik - Megatron Matrix by Ryan Somma (cc by)

How did that bizarre avant garde show get broadcast, anyway? Mefi's own Dean 358 worked with pioneering video artist Nam June Paik, and explains how Paik's personal charm and enthusiasm got the art made and on the air. "...getting access to video equipment in the 1980s was a really big deal. Video edit suites took up lots of space and cost millions of dollars to build and operate. Getting access to a satellite...well, absolutely unthinkable."

Anna's Eighty-eight butterfly by Charlesjsharp (cc by)

Bop out, with your neon top out - for music Saturday, share your favorite 1980s pop song remixes

Stars by sudoaptgetupdate (cc by-nd)

Thank you, shiny MeFites, for all the great comments every day! Here are a few recent sparklers:

bonehead describes some of the challenges of search and rescue response to a large cruise ship going down in Arctic waters

citygirl on what it's like to work on a cargo ship

not that girl lays down some deep knowledge of the US men's Olympic gymnastics team

NotMyselfRightNow worked with Alvin Toffler: "He was probably the largest individual purchaser of filing cabinets in California"

What were new the hot bands in Vancouver in the 1980s? philip-random can help, because "I was doing radio there at the time. Still am."

flug bringing the amazing detective work in an AskMe about an old mystery play, David and Abigail

vinyl by suzy_yes (cc by-nc-nd)

Thanks to the work of everyone in this thread, I was able to make a positive identification of the song, order the vinyl, and have it professionally converted to digital.

The OP has updated an old thread about a 30-year-old mystery tune in Ask Me with a YouTube video of the song. Yay, team!

Looking for more musical mysteries to solve?

What's the Baby Elephant song I heard at Burning Man?

I'm trying to identify a sample from the first few minutes of this album

Loving you is . . . easy to forget? What was that song from 2008 - 2009?

Finding a song based on a music video: "a woman riding a horse and she had dramatically long hair that floated through the sky"

Delia Derbyshire

A polyphony of music past recently in the blue:

11+ documentaries on the history of electronic music; Larry Chung talks about and plays a 1934 Gibson L-5; A three-hour mixtape of Goth history, nearly 50 tracks of early-to-mid eighties Goth classics; Pitchfork's 200 Best Songs of the 1980s; Anton Karas plays the Theme from the Third Man, on zither; Using Spotify plays to quantify how old music has stood the test-of-time; "massive chords of intemperate savagery" – the strange story of Jón Leifs' Organ Concerto; great highlights from This is Tom Jones, a variety show that ran from 1969-1971; "Old Weird America", you say? I got some right here for ya