How You Found Out About Stuff Before There Was Internet

“[F]or those of us who lived in flyover country in the mid-1980s — far from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, or anywhere else that was happening at the time — associating with a scene required a fair amount of copycatting. Because it was hard to find reliable information about what was really going on out there, we’d pass around records, quote from whatever magazine articles we could find, rent movies like Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline Of Western Civilization and Suburbia, and keep looking for a version of punk that was more authentic than the bandana-clad, purple-haired street toughs in Hollywood action movies.”
— Soon you will have to explain to kids that this really once was a thing, like only having three channels of television and having to watch a show when it was scheduled or missing it completely.